Structures of Indifference by Adele Perry

Author:Adele Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
Published: 2018-09-02T13:11:59+00:00

Figure 20. A powwow held on the front lawn of the Health Sciences Centre, 5 September 1997. Racism in hospitals exists not in the absence of Indigenous people and culture, but in their presence.

BRIAN SINCLAIR

THIS IS A STORY OF a city and a hospital, but more than that it is the story of a person, Brian Sinclair. In this chapter, we turn our focus to him. In particular, we explore how Sinclair’s history illustrates some of the critical themes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indigenous history in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Canada. We also show how the repeated misidentification of Sinclair in his final thirty-four hours waiting in the emergency room (ER) of Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre hospital, and in the aftermath of his death reveals how structures of indifference born of colonialism and racism affect Indigenous people in the most fundamental and consequential of ways.

It is a truism that ordinary people’s lives are not often recorded in the written archives upon which historians usually rely. This is certainly true for Indigenous people in North America, who historically have relied more on oral, material, and non-alphabetic means of recording information, and whose relationship to the colonial archive created from the sixteenth century onwards has been complicated, partial, and often contested. Our analysis here depends on twenty-first century colonial records available in libraries and online, namely newspapers and the records associated with the inquest into Brian Sinclair’s death. The first phase of the inquest began in August 2013, lasted thirty-two days, and heard evidence from seventy-four witnesses. The judge decided that the second phase would be narrower in scope, against the urging of the Sinclair family and organizations who hoped that the inquest would document complex and deeply intersectional histories of racism, poverty, and unequal access to health care. While the scope of the inquest was initially broadly defined, and considered racism, poverty, health, and economic status as all relevant to the case, Judge Timothy Preston ruled that the scope of Phase II would focus on best practices for the ongoing training for frontline staff and that social determinants of health, such as race, poverty, and disability were not within the scope of the inquest.

Conducted in 2014, Phase II was completed in thirteen days; seven witnesses were staff of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, and of the seven, six would be called to testify about triage and how patients moved through the HSC ER. Only two witnesses addressed issues of stereotyping and racism.1 As a result, almost all of the focus of Phase II was on sightlines within the ER, the triage process, delays in the ER, and staffing levels, even though these issues had posed no problems for the 150 people who received attention at the HSC ER on the same weekend Brian Sinclair died. The issues of stereotyping, false assumptions, and racism within the health care setting were reduced to just two witnesses whose evidence took less than one day. Because of the new, narrower focus on ER procedures, many of

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