Canada Committed Genocide
By Jesse Staniforth
June 13, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Toronto
Star" -
Perhaps the most controversial issue to follow the
conclusion of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been the affirmation
that the government of Canada had committed “cultural
genocide” against Indigenous people through the Indian Residential
Schools (IRS) system.
The word “cultural” seems to
suggest that the IRS system was designed to destroy cultures but not
people, a fact far from the reality of Residential Schools. “Cultural”
is a civilizing adjective: it says that our policies were not truly
evil, just deeply misguided.
Already this strangely
diplomatic term has been a flashpoint among people unwilling to admit
that our country committed any kind of genocide, even one eased by a
reductive adjective. Our history must make these critics uneasy. The IRS
system, though its mandate did not include deliberately killing members
of Canada’s Indigenous populations, was active in the following crimes,
each of which constitutes genocide under the UN’s convention on Genocide
(1948):
(c) Deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; and
(e) Forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group.
Canada did not pack Indigenous
people onto train cars and send them to be gassed, or march them into
fields and execute them with machine-gun fire. However, our country
committed not “cultural” genocide, but just regular genocide.
We forcibly took children from
families — sometimes at gunpoint — and flew them to remote locations
they could not escape — sometimes in tiny handcuffs — where they were
submitted to a program of forced labour and “education” designed to
destroy their cultures and civilizations. This desire to destroy
cultures seems to be the reasoning for various public figures’ use of
the adjective “cultural” before genocide. The other reason, I presume,
is that some cling tightly — and childishly — to the idea that Canada
has always been on the side of goodness and justice, and they find it
very hard to accept, admit, and announce that we are a country that
committed a program of genocide that lasted for many decades.
Yet Residential Schools were
predicated on the notion that Indigenous children were less human than
other children, so they were worked like animals in the slave labour
many schools mandated. For the same assumption of their lesser humanity,
children in the IRS system were often deliberately malnourished and kept
in cramped, filthy quarters. When they subsequently fell sick as a
result of this racially motivated neglect and mistreatment, they were
not provided adequate medical treatment and died by the thousands.
The Canadian government was
happy to leave these children to die because they were Indigenous. In
the early part of the century we stopped keeping track of how many
children died: the commission concluded this was because it made us look
bad as a country. We did not change any of the conditions — we just
changed the habit of keeping track of the children our system killed.
And when Indigenous children died, we often did not consider them human
enough to inform their families, to record their genders or their ages
or the causes of their deaths, or to mark their graves.
Which part of this sounds
civilized enough that it deserves to be mitigated by the adjective
“cultural”? I’m not talking about the sexual violence. That was closely
connected but it wasn’t part of our state policy. The rest was, and it
constituted a policy of genocide.
As a Canadian journalist
working in Indigenous media, I have faced the fact that the history of
this country is difficult and tragic. My great-grandfather was decorated
for valour at Vimy Ridge at the same time as Aboriginal children were
being taken at gunpoint to have their culture beaten and starved out of
them. National histories are too big and complex to love simply.
I’m not so attached to my
country to contort myself into defending our history of genocide — and
I’d like to ask those who are: how would admitting that our country was
guilty of this crime against humanity change your relation to this
nation, to yourself, and to Indigenous people?
As of the closing of the TRC,
the facts of the Canadian genocide of Indigenous peoples are now a part
of the official record of this country’s history, both for those who
wish to face it, and those who wish to pretend it isn’t there. These
facts stand and will not change, because they are in the past. In the
present day, it is only Canadians who can change — and will have to
change — in order to acknowledge the disgraceful but fixed facts of our
history.
Jesse Staniforth is a
Montreal-based freelance journalist and a regular contributor to the
Nation magazine, serving the Cree Nation of Eeyou Istchee and the
communities around James Bay.
See also -
The schools that had cemeteries instead of
playgrounds: Judge Sinclair
blamed the residential school system for the dysfunction, chaos and
poverty in aboriginal communities today. They face high crime,
addiction and unemployment rates and poorer-than-average prospects
in health and education.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
report: The actual document from
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that culminates a six-year
examination of residential schools and lays bare the horrors of
Canada’s aboriginal children for more than a century.