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THE INESCAPABLE REALITY OF THE CANADIAN GENOCIDE by Bill Lee



We have made it past Canada Day with the existential angst about the calls for and against the cancelation of celebrations. Whatever people did, or didn’t do, to acknowledge the competing desires for the “holiday” however, we need to come to grips with the meaning of the term genocide. I keep stumbling over posts, or letters to editors, complaining of its use because there was no huge slaughter of Indigenous people (though we don’t really know yet the total numbers of the lives lost to neglect and abuse in residential “schools”. And we often fail to take into account the numbers who died thanks to the hunger/starvation due to John A. MacDonald’s policy of “clearing the plains”). Because of the way we have been taught our history, up until recently, we tend to believe that genocide must involve the outright killing of a people; like the herding of six million European Jews, as well as Gays and Roma, into gas chambers in Nazi Germany; or the murder of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish state in 1915; or the re-“education” death camps in Laos by Pol Pot where 1.5 to 2 million people, from 1975 to 1979, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's 1975 population, met their deaths; the Bosnian Serb forces initiated a program of “ethnic cleansing resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 Bozniaks or Bosnian Muslims (with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army). Hitory.com Editors. (2019). But genocide can look very different under different circumstances.

We need to really come to grips with the fact that genocide can involve cultural as well as physical extermination. It doesn’t matter whether the aim is to “kill the Indian in the child” or more directly, to ‘kill the Indian”. This is understood, in the UN Genocide Prevention declaration, to be a strategy of genocide. The Canadian residential school system of the forced assimilation of thousands of Indigenous children (where they lost language, community and their families) that was aimed at ridding Canada of Indigenous culture was, de-facto, an effort to purge Canada of Indigenous people. Of course, the practitioners of the strategy, the men who conceived, funded, monitored and regulated the policy, like Prime Minister John A. MacDonald
and the loathsome Duncan Campbell Scott, didn’t blink an eye at the evidence that many people, including children, would perish as a result of their policies and actions. And we know that people did die, in the thousands. So, the Canadian actions are more than covered by the definition.

Also, we cannot try to take refuge in the notion that the evil of systemic colonial oppression is behind us. In the 1930’s we now know of the cruel experiments about malnutrition that were undertaken on residential school students. Not surprisingly, there were deaths. And it was only in the 1940’s that the vile practice of the philosophy of eugenics - the sterilization of Indigenous women - was discontinued. We are aware, or should be, of the “60’s scoop” replacing residential schools in the effort of assimilation. Similarly, there has been more than sufficient media coverage of the deliberate systemic underfunding of on reserve Indigenous health services, education, water safety, housing, etc. Further, as of January 2021, only 10 of the 94 Calls to Action of The Truth and reconciliation Commission, made in 2015, had been completely implemented. So, we have by no means extricated ourselves from the fetid sewer of colonialism. Any talk of reconciliation is meaningless until we have done that.

But to return to the subject of facing up to our history, it is frustrating and saddening to see some individuals popping up on fb to deny Canadian genocidal intentions and practices. It is a ludicrous denial of historical facts and contemporary reality. But worse, it is needlessly insensitive and downright hurtful to our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

We are facing what has been years, decades of silence and denial. A country, like an individual, reaps what it sows, and ours has sown colonial brutality and lies about it. Canadian Colonialism apparently has an expensive side.

My Globe and Mail the other morning had the headline that it may take as much as a billion dollars to find all the residential school graves. Looks like our country is no longer going to be able to live off the avails of colonial crimes, we’re actually going to have to start paying for them. We are seeing that now and we have to deal honestly with it.

Resources:

For those who may feel uninformed, and to be fair, until recently, our education system was abysmally, even criminally inadequate, below I am providing a few resources, some of which have been referred to in the article, from a plethora of sources, that I hope people will read and from which they can benefit.
Bosnian Genocide. https://www.history.com/topics/1990s/bosnian-genocide

Canada’s shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children: The need for strong medical ethics in Aboriginal health research. Paediatrics Child Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3941673/

Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Indigenous Life. James Daschuk (2014). University of Regina Press
The Charge of Genocide. https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/historical-background/charge-genocide

Cultural Genocide in Canada? It Did Happen Here. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/aps/index.php/aps/article/download/28804/pdf/77632
DEFINITIONS. Genocide. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml.

Discovery of Indigenous children's remains evidence of Canada's genocide: experts. https://www.cp24.com/news/discovery-of-indigenous-children-s-remains-evidence-of-canada-s-genocide-experts-1.5451613?cache=%3FclipId%3D104066
FORCED STERILIZATION OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN IN CANADA. https://ijrcenter.org/forced-sterilization-of-indigenous-women-in-canada/

The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256047027_The_Genocide_Question_and_Indian_Residential_Schools_in_Canada

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