The Word 'Genocide' in Canada

    Language matters more than anything other than bodily experience in how we understand the world. As someone a little too grammarian at times, I have to admit that language changes, even for the better, and along with it our understanding. We’re starting to accept, after years of seeing the term “climate crisis” in environmental literature, that it’s a more accurate term than the more neutral “climate change.” And we might even be on the verge of a change of political climate too, where recognizing the climate crisis is happening at the same time as recognizing the ongoing crisis of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
    A couple of weeks ago, the historic report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls started to generate story after story in the news, mainly in response to the report’s claim that Canada is responsible for genocide against Indigenous peoples. It’s this language, “genocide,” that I’ve been thinking about as a professor of English lately. But I’ll avoid the usual etymology of “geno” and “cide” and skip right to the debate.
    Some argue that genocide is unique—uniquely the worst human behaviour, the murder of great numbers in a short time—and so the use of the term needs to be carefully controlled. Former general Romeo Dallaire, who served the United Nations during the genocide in Rwanda, and the respected Liberal politician Irwin Cotler, who has in mind the Holocaust, are both reluctant to expand the use of the word. After all, Indigenous peoples in Canada were not systematically and rapidly murdered in the millions. Conservative leader Andrew Sheer agreed, calling the situation of Indigenous peoples in Canada “its own thing.” 
    I agree too that the genocides of Rwanda and the Holocaust are special—absolutely horrific and desperately to be avoided and stopped whenever possible. But genocide is related to murder, and, on a smaller scale, we already seem comfortable in using the word “murder” to describe various acts. Although Wikipedia informs me that manslaughter is not technically murder, it is a willingness to harm someone that unintentionally becomes fatal, so it is a homicide. More strictly, Canada separates murder into second-degree murder (where the intent was to kill and developed rapidly in the heat of the moment) and first-degree murder (where the murder was planned in cold blood). We also regularly use the term “mass murder” to describe first-degree murders of many people at once. So, why can’t we use the word “genocide” with the same nuance as with “murder,” simply by qualifying it by degree?
    In the case of the Indigenous peoples in North America, the colonists and their imperial governments have enacted genocide all along the spectrum. The Indian Wars in the United States were at times wars of eradication, and various massacres and other deadly tactics were perpetrated to kill large numbers of people. 
    Newfoundland’s Beothuk people were driven to starvation and were sometimes murdered by colonists, its last surviving person, Shawnadithit, dying in 1829 in St. John’s—though Mi’kmaq oral tradition and some scientific studies suggest that the Beothuk might have integrated into other Indigenous societies from the mainland. But the fact is that there is no self-identifying Beothuk community left anywhere, as a direct result of two centuries of colonization (at the time) and the attendant desire for land and resources. That seems to be genocide.
    Sometimes, the idea of “killing” was symbolic, but it was hardly any better. The doctrine of “killing the Indian in the child,” which is sometimes attributed to Canadian residential-school planner Duncan Campbell Scott but may have started as a phrase from an American military officer, is a doctrine of destroying a cultural identity. And, in fact, some criteria of genocide according to the United Nations are dependent not only on one’s body but also on one’s cultural identity.
    According to the UN’s definition, Canada did cause genocide. Although the first two are so general that they need more details of intention and scope, here are the UN’s criteria as reported recently, with examples from Canadian history: 

• Killing members of the group: Anyone remotely familiar with narratives of colonization and western expansion will know that this happened, especially in the United States; in Canada the North-West Mounted Police were formed as a paramilitary force that killed many Indigenous people during the battles in the 1870s and 1880s. More on topic, remember the Beothuk.
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: This too is so obvious and could apply beyond situations of genocide, but in terms of “serious bodily harm” we have the example of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, who was publicly advocating a starvation-until-submission policy toward Indigenous people. The clearest example of the “mental harm” of colonization, the trauma, is the intergenerational problems including the epidemic of suicide in some Indigenous communities. The Guardian reports that “Across the country, suicide and self-inflicted injury is the leading cause of death for First Nations people below the age of 44. Studies show young indigenous males are 10 times more likely to kill themselves than their non-indigenous male counterparts, while young indigenous females are 21 times more likely than young non-indigenous females.” 
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Although there are many examples, the one closest to me as someone from the West who is studying the genre of the Western is the near extermination of the buffalo in and around the 1870s. The buffalo were the major resource of the Indigenous peoples of the plains, and colonists shot buffalo to dispossess the people. The buffalo are also a major cultural symbol of these people. Destroying them would be, as a crude analogy, like destroying flags and crucifixes. 
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Different provinces of Canada forcibly sterilized Indigenous women, especially from the eugenics era in the 1920s and 1930s to the 1970s.
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Canada’s residential school system and the Sixties Scoop both accomplished these transfers, which were intended to protect Indigenous people by the "logic" of assimilating them and thereby destroying their cultural identity. (It's not like the 20th century lacked imagination; there are better ideas such as community-based justice, as seen in sentencing circles, which can be more ethical and effective.) 

But the effects were more than symbolic. In residential schools, at least 7,000 children, and probably many more, died prematurely. And then there was the Sixties Scoop, a related policy of using social workers to separate Indigenous children from their parents or guardians because of the harm being done to the children. However well-intentioned you think these social workers and schoolteachers were, these policies were a huge blind spot, because they masked the colonial ideology of killing the Indian in the child—of destroying a cultural identity. 
    If the end result of such a system is such despair that Indigenous youth don’t even want to live, as suggested by the disproportionately high rate of suicide in Indigenous communities, then the UN’s definition applies yet again. At the very least, it can be qualified as a cultural genocide, with the effects of a “real” genocide.
    What we have to understand here is that, for many people, culture is life.
    And we have a lot to learn from them about this fact—and, maybe not coincidentally, about stopping the climate crisis too.

Works Cited

• Barrera, Jorge. “Canada aimed to 'destroy Indigenous people': The MMIWG inquiry's case for genocide.” CBC News, 3 June 2019. 
• Breen, Kerri. “Andrew Scheer rejects use of ‘genocide’ in reference to Indigenous women, girls.” Global News, 9 June 2019.
• Dyer, Evan. “What does it mean to call Canada's treatment of Indigenous women a 'genocide'?” CBC News, 5 June 2019.
• Gill, Jordan. “'This is genocide': N.B. Mi'kmaq scholar says Canada failed to act on MMIWG.” CBC News, 3 June 2019.
• Hopper, Tristin. “Here is what Sir John A. Macdonald did to Indigenous people.” The National Post, 28 August 2018.
• Kennedy, Mark. “'Simply a savage': How the residential schools came to be.” The Ottawa Citizen, 22 May 2015.
• Labby, Bryan. “Is climate change actually a 'climate crisis'? Some think so.” CBC News, 10 June 2019.
• “Murder (Canadian law).” Wikipedia, 29 May 2019.
• Phippen, J. Weston. “'Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone'.” The Atlantic, 13 May 2016.
• Randhawa, Selena. “'Our society is broken': what can stop Canada's First Nations suicide epidemic?.” The Guardian, 30 August 2017.
• Reclaiming Power and Place. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls: Supplementary Report: Genocide. 3 June 2019.
• Sniderman, Andrew Stobo. “The man wrongly attributed with uttering ‘kill the Indian in the child’.” Maclean’s, 8 November 2013.
• Story, George M. “Shawnadithit.” 7 February 2006. The Canadian Encyclopedia, 23 January 2019.
• Stote, Karen. “Sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 17 April 2019.
• Tuck, James A. “Beothuk.” 6 February 2006. The Canadian Encyclopedia, 22 January 2019. 

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. "The Word 'Genocide' in Canada." Publicly Interested, 18 June 2019, www.publiclyinterested.weebly.com.