chapter two

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Pluralists, Indigenous Peoples, and Colonial Genocide

Let us understand that what happened at the residential schools was the use of education for cultural genocide, and that the fact of the matter is – yes, it was. Call a spade a spade.

– Former prime minister Paul Martin, Quebec National Event (2013)

On a cold April day in Montreal, Paul Martin announced to rousing applause that it was time to recognize the IRS system as cultural genocide. It was a landmark occasion, that day in 2013, but I was curious. Had Mr. Martin gone as far as he was willing to go with this conclusion? At a dinner in Toronto some time later, I saw Mr. Martin and plucked up the courage to chat with him. He is a thoughtful man, so I pushed him a little and asked whether he would go so far as to say that UN-defined genocide had been committed in Canada, and I inserted the issue of forcible transfer into the discussion. This for him appeared to be a stretch, and he intimated an understanding of genocide as primarily about mass killing, a legalist view that predominates in this country.

At another conference the year before, I met in Winnipeg with a number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists to discuss genocide in settler colonial contexts and how we could best interpret these experiences. While most participants argued that forcible transfer and cultural genocide should be seen as genocide, there was a notable detractor. Clinical psychologist Joseph Gone, of the Gros Ventre tribal nation of Montana, volubly advanced a legalist position, stressing that genocide should be reserved only for cases in which a group had suffered mass murder. While Gone readily acknowledged genocidal episodes during the colonization of the Americas, he took exception to activists, historians, and others seeking to cast the entire history of colonization as a larger genocidal project.1

Gone later wrote that since genocide’s appeal “is based on the fact that it occupies the extreme end of a continuum of moral evaluation relative to group-based violence,” we needed to safeguard our use of it since it risked being “undermined by expanding its descriptive function to instances beyond mass murder proper.”² This is a view long promoted by legalists, and indeed, distilling genocide to mass killing has been an academic preoccupation since at least 1959, when Dutch theorist Pieter Drost explicitly argued for a narrow understanding of it as “group murder.”³

This chapter picks up from the previous one, critically examining problems with the “common sense” understanding of genocide as mass killing, with forcible transfer as a loophole or technicality in the Genocide Convention. And if there is debate about applying the black-letter legal elements of the convention, it becomes even more problematic for some to interpret the decimation of the buffalo, the theft of Indigenous lands, and the Sixties Scoop as genocide. Many highly destructive aspects of colonization fall outside the convention, or at least outside how Western courts and legal theorists have chosen to interpret them.

In this book, I articulate the case that the IRS system and the Sixties Scoop violated the UNGC, but I also make the additional claim that the convention is itself too narrow, and that to better understand Indigenous experiences of colonization, we need to broaden the academic understanding of genocide. How might we do this?

In this chapter, I lay out four possible ways to better understand Indigenous experiences of colonialism, building on the work of many thoughtful people, with the important caveat that the list is hardly exhaustive. The first way is to critically situate Lemkin, to employ his work to cast theoretical light on colonialization and Indigenous experiences, while also carefully positioning him as a product of his time. We must understand that there were two distinct Lemkins: Lemkin the thinker/idealist and Lemkin the pragmatist/lobbyist. A second avenue for better reflecting Indigenous experiences is to problematize specific intent as embodying only one type of genocidal motivation, and to turn our focus to relations of destruction. We might see genocide as a broad-based phenomenon that extends beyond governments, ruling ideologies, bureaucracies, and/or the military. Genocidal intent can be rooted in the evolving norms, patterns of thought, and behaviours in a settler society as much as they are found among policy planners and political and military leadership.

Third, we can move beyond Eurocentric understandings of what constitutes group identity. European forms of identity, promoted by Lemkin’s work and underwritten by the UNGC’s ratifying states, exclude many aspects of Indigenous identities. Finally, we can increase the importance of cultural genocide to better understand Indigenous genocides. Given the many and sometimes incommensurable differences between Indigenous and European ways of governance, spirituality, and holistic relationality, a focus on the differences might alert us to ways in which those of us who are settlers have destroyed Indigenous groups without having the legal or conceptual lenses to fully comprehend what we have done.

Raphael Lemkin’s Mixed Messages

Embedded within the UNGC from the beginning were double standards, which seemed to privilege settler states. This situation arose not just from the self-interest of the countries involved but also from Lemkin’s own work. On the positive side, Lemkin the thinker/idealist was attuned to colonial genocides, and his analysis of Nazi occupation was refracted, in part, through the lens of his studies of European colonialism in Africa, Australasia, and the Americas. His unfinished book on genocide included a number of chapters on Indigenous and colonial cases. They were to include Germany’s actions in its African colonies, including massacres of the Herero; genocide by the Belgians in the Congo; and genocides against Indigenous peoples in Australia (with a separate chapter on Tasmania), Latin America (including chapters on the Aztecs, the Yucatan, and the Incas), New Zealand, and the United States. However, his final draft excised most of these case studies, and the manuscript was never published, leaving us with a mishmash of typed and handwritten notes on letter paper and index cards.4

On the negative side, Lemkin poorly served the study of Indigenous genocide by his overt gratitude to Western settler states. Indebted to several countries for saving his life, and cognizant of the fact that champions were needed to prevent future genocides, he failed to dig too deeply into the politics of European colonial and Western settler states. For Lemkin, the United States represented a haven for European Jews and a guarantor of a better international order. He begins Axis Rule by extending a not-so-subtle olive branch to the Western allies, laying out the violence of the Nazi crimes for his “Anglo-Saxon reader,” who, “with his innate respect for human rights and human personality, may be inclined to believe that the Axis regime could not possibly be as cruel and ruthless as it has been hitherto described.”⁵

This gratitude resulted in myopia – an inability to see the United States through the eyes of its poorest and most marginalized peoples, and Lemkin remained deeply uncritical of his adoptive country. Of that country he was clear: “Genocide does not happen here and is not likely to happen. But this country has always been and still is on the receiving line at this evil because it has to provide leadership and means for rehabilitation of millions of victims of genocide abroad.”⁶ In search of champions, Lemkin also befriended members of the Canadian delegation to the Genocide Convention, whom he viewed as straight shooters who were honest and reliable. In 1949, Lemkin met with and was favourably impressed by then foreign minister Pearson and observed, “One could also recognize what is so appealing about all Canadians: they basically reject the theory that international feeling must necessarily be devious. ‘Let us first try it straight,’ they seem to imply by all their behavior, and they remain at that point.”⁷

Lemkin’s gratitude resulted in a singular inability to denounce racism in the United States, especially with regard to African Americans. In 1951, prominent African American activists, including the singer Paul Robeson, advanced a petition denouncing their treatment as genocide “as the result of consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.”8 Lemkin condemned the petition in the New York Times as “un-American,” claiming that African Americans, while victims of discrimination, had certainly escaped “destruction, death, annihilation.”⁹ In a general sense, Lemkin helped legitimate the racial inequality and white supremacism of much of the United States, and was retrograde in his perceptions of the civil rights movement.¹⁰

Second World War–era enemies were also quickly rehabilitated in the service of the convention. Lemkin courted Japan by highlighting the abuse of its prisoners of war in China and the Soviet Union, and he sought West German support, alleging that Germans expelled from Eastern and Central Europe might also be victims of genocide.¹¹ When persuading Italy to sign on to the convention, Lemkin lobbied the Order Sons of Italy in America, a fraternal organization, raising the spectre of genocide against Italians in Italy’s former colonies. He stoked fears among Italian Americans that their 200,000 compatriots left in Eritrea after the departure of the British would be in danger, and thus “the necessity of international law protecting the Italian minorities from the natives will become very urgent.”¹²

Weiss-Wendt observes that, in the end, Lemkin was pushed into a vicious circle by the political realities of the Cold War: “He had a noble idea, which he wanted to see implemented. But he had to fight for his idea. As the fight dragged on, more and more compromises had to be made.”¹³ Irvin-Erickson has similarly documented the frustration among Lemkin’s supporters, “believing he was too willing to allow the United States, UK, USSR, and France to dictate the contents of the law.” There was good reason for this frustration since these states were consequently “able to write their own genocides out of the law, narrowly defining the acts that constitute genocide.”¹⁴

Given that Lemkin has been dead for six decades, there is an obvious “So what?” question that arises here. My reply is that Lemkin’s studied aversion to probing into the practices of Western settler states gave countries like the United States, Australia, and Canada a free pass and allowed them to continue their ongoing forms of genocide and other crimes against humanity. Rather than take a principled stand in favour of all victims of genocide, Lemkin picked his battles, and he sided with the victors of the Second World War. These countries, in his view, would constitute the international champions of the convention in preventing genocide abroad, but not at home.

This myopic view of history created several problems. First, in helping to draft the convention, Western settler states actively excluded elements that could be compromising in their own domestic contexts. Second, in supporting the convention during its evolution, they gained rhetorical assurances from Lemkin that their adversaries were genocidal while they were not. Third, in promoting a high level of respect for the sovereignty of states, states could effectively shield themselves domestically by choosing how they would incorporate or not incorporate the convention into their own legislation.

Moving beyond Specific Intent

A central focus of legalist analysis is specific intent; this is often lacking in cases of Indigenous genocide, sometimes because the evidence has been destroyed, in other cases because the general climate of the time made genocide against Indigenous peoples a widespread and normal expectation. Those whom I call pluralists have moved beyond the UN definition, recognizing the politics behind the convention, how some groups were excluded, and other issues. They have moved beyond the seminal role of settlers in colonial genocides, to explore how settler societies and settler norms can, in fact, be genocidal in and of themselves. In this view of genocide, no state ideology targeting Indigenous peoples and calling for their destruction is necessary.

One of the trailblazers of this type of analysis was historian Tony Barta, who famously developed the term “relations of destruction” when describing the genocide of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over two centuries of Australian history. In 1987, he argued persuasively that many genocides, especially those in colonial contexts, had relied on unintended consequences rather than specific intent.15

While white settler Australians often claimed that they had no directly genocidal relationship with Aboriginal peoples, Barta countered that such a relationship existed through settler exploitation, land appropriation, and other means, even if settlers had never actually met an Indigenous person. Indeed, unequal, exploitative, and ultimately genocidal relations were “fundamental to the history of the society in which they live; and that implicitly rather than explicitly, in ways which were inevitable rather than intentional, it is a relationship of genocide.” Moving beyond state responsibility for genocide, Barta explored Australia as a “genocidal society,” marked by the “remorseless pressures of destruction inherent in the very nature of the society.”¹⁶

Through a logic of competition, Indigenous peoples were presented as being in the way of lands and other resources needed for settlement. A settler logic that saw the “vanishing,” or “melting away,” of Indigenous peoples as inevitable excused their widespread “disappearance” in the face of Western colonization. In the Canadian case, Daniel Francis has traced an unquestioned belief among many settlers that Indigenous peoples were fated to physically disappear. This was simply expected, and little effort was expended to actually reverse the process other than trying to assimilate them into settler society. There were, he argued, “no plans presented for halting their seemingly inexorable plunge toward extinction. In part, this was because such plans were unthinkable.”¹⁷

Why unthinkable? Because, as Francis argues, Indigenous peoples were wrongly seen as being inferior to white Europeans, and so when these groups confronted one another, their decline was conceived as inevitable. In such a scenario, their disappearance need not be overtly stated as a policy goal. Rather, it might occur by the omission of any policies to save Indigenous ways of living, or Indigenous lives, or by not stopping the spread of European diseases that decimated the Plains peoples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, causing the elimination of many nations. The idea that Indigenous peoples were genetically susceptible to dying from European diseases led to a high degree of settler apathy when trying to stop the causes of disease and save lives. Take, for example, an official response to the spread of tuberculosis and other diseases by Frank Oliver, deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs. He put it this way: “The excessive mortality occurs mainly among Indians in process of transition from the aboriginal to the civilized environment.” While he predicted that the situation would improve as Indigenous peoples became more “civilized,” his report suggested an inevitably high number of deaths before this would occur.18

Myths of the inevitability of Indigenous disappearance, Sherene Razack argues, have allowed successive Canadian governments to evade responsibility for the negative impacts of colonization, since they are only there to promote Western civilization and law, while Indigenous peoples are “dying due to an inherent incapacity to survive modern life.”¹⁹ Similarly, Andrew Woolford’s sociological understanding of genocide moves beyond the need for specific intent and looks instead to the ways in which intent is “negotiated under structural and discursive conditions.” A settler colonial society may establish the basis for the destruction of Indigenous peoples through a range of settler institutions and actions. Absent any sort of military chain of command, as in a wartime situation, those carrying out genocidal destruction may do so in different and potentially contradictory ways. Looking for the Wannsee minutes or a smoking gun may be unrealistic in a scenario where group destruction is enabled through societal pressure and narratives that inferiorize Indigenous peoples, together with situational factors such as biased institutions, ingrained settler racism and fear, and hunger for Indigenous lands and resources.²⁰

This type of theorizing provides tremendous range for pluralistic thinking about genocide that can largely be distinguished from specific intent, speed, or war. It helps develop the case for revisions to the definition of genocide under international law, which would seek to move beyond the emphasis on dolus specialis. We might explore genocide as a series of processes that seek group attrition over a long period of time, which, following Sheri Rosenberg, can include “forced displacement, the denial of health and health care, the denial of food, and sexual violence.”21 Robert Nixon’s concept of “slow death” details how people die in ways that fail to appear on the radar of public consciousness. The public, he argues, is conditioned to respond to certain types of events, which are usually short in duration, highly visible, and explosive in content. Slow violence, however, is not terribly newsworthy because it happens over time, as a result of processes that are neither exciting nor quick, “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”²²

Paradoxically, some can take for granted the slow death of a group, even while seeking the health of individual members. In his 1936 essay on the dangers of tuberculosis in Indigenous communities, David Stewart (medical superintendent of the Sanatorium Board of Manitoba) made the case that since Indigenous peoples would inevitably be merged into the settler population, as individuals they should be cured as soon as possible. The general logic of colonization and biological absorption held that the “mixture of blood, which has gone on for nearly two hundred years … will no doubt continue until the red race is absorbed into the general population.” Stewart reasoned, “This forecast surely gives a special motive for doing the best we can for the Indians.” In other words, since the Indians as a separate racial category would either die off or become assimilated, it made good sense to combat tuberculosis right away, largely as protection for settlers.²³

Countering a legalist focus on war, specific intent, and mass murder, many pluralist arguments suggest that lack of speed and deliberation do not necessarily mitigate the long-term genocidal impact on the affected groups. In a settler colonial situation, the government already exercises considerable control, so the strategy is more about management, about conducting policy in a manner that will ensure consistency over a long time. Several authors writing on Indigenous genocide in Canada have articulated this slow but steady approach. In an early work published in 1973, Davis and Zannis called for a wider definition of genocide, one that included not just “mass homicide” but also cultural destruction through the forcible transfer of people in the North.²⁴ Later works like Menno Boldt’s Surviving as Indians described the reserve system as a form of “Indian genocide,” in which the concentration and isolation of Indigenous peoples led to heightened levels of alcoholism and drug abuse, alongside violence and suicide.25

Chrisjohn and Young’s well-known book The Circle Game similarly likens Indigenous genocide to a “slow, lingering death” over a long time period, genocide with no end point, with little fear of domestic resistance or international accountability.²⁶ In her work, Andrea Bear Nicholas also outlines the case for the convention’s applicability, given Indigenous experiences with “extreme social, cultural, physical, and spiritual dislocations, which lead, in turn, to dramatically increased rates of death as a consequence.”²⁷ To this we can add Neu and Therrien’s Accounting for Genocide, which analyses parallels between Indigenous and Jewish genocides. A marked difference in Canada, they argue, was that the genocide was slower and more subtle, using “assimilation and absorption, compulsory enfranchisement.”²⁸ The slow and steady process of demonizing Indigenous peoples, stripping them of their lands, and outlawing their spiritual traditions and languages brought about genocide without international warfare or industrial-scale mass murder.²⁹

The lack of war, and indeed the lack of necessity for war, potentially marks out Indigenous genocides as distinctive. European Jews, Rwandan Tutsi, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Bosnian Muslims – these were all self-sufficient and demographically thriving communities. They were not suffering from dramatic reductions in mortality resulting from foreign diseases and rapid environmental changes. In a sense, European and African perpetrators needed to use war as a means to destroy target groups. However, Indigenous genocide in the context of the Indian residential schools took place when Indigenous peoples in Canada were already experiencing demographic decline; this situation marks a very different confluence of events.

Indigenous Genocide: Beyond Human Groups

The non-human world – that is to say, the actual world – does not form a part of Lemkin’s cosmology or the Genocide Convention, which is focused on protecting human national, racial, religious, and ethnic groups. We should consider how colonial genocides of Indigenous peoples present particular circumstances that necessitate us seeing genocide differently. Without being essentialist, we might observe that many Indigenous perspectives privilege an interrelated, holistic approach to humans and their environment, an environment that is very much alive, moving, expanding, and changing. For Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot), many Indigenous paradigms stress “ideas of constant flux, all existence consisting of energy waves/spirit, all things being animate, all existence being interrelated, creation/existence having to be renewed, space/place as an important referent, and language, songs, stories, and ceremonies as repositories for the knowledge that arise[s] out of these paradigms.”30

Similarly, in her overview of Indigenous-settler history, Indigenous scholar Lisa Monchalin has focused on the sacred links between human beings and everything around them, including plants, rocks, and the land, which are “equal, interconnected, mutually dependent, and embracing a sacred relationship with this world.”³¹ Similarly, Nêhiyaw legal theorist and novelist Tracey Lindberg elaborates on the concept that “the earth is our mother” by describing an expanded understanding of Indigenous group identity, distinct from European conceptions: “Included within that familial relationship is the understanding that we have a relationship with the land that is reciprocal. It has cared for us. We must care for it.”³²

Western views are often seen as being fundamentally different, even incommensurable with Indigenous realities. Nêhiyaw-Saulteaux Knowledge Keeper Blair Stonechild has observed that, for many Indigenous peoples, “all entities – whether animal, plant, reptile, insect, and even what others consider to be inanimate objects – have life, energy, and supernal significance. In other words, all entities in this world – animate and inanimate – are purposeful beings in their own right.”³³ Without a sense of how a group understands its identity in relation to its own group members and to those not of the group, it becomes impossible to engage with whether the group was actually targeted for destruction. Land and the environment, for example, are often seen as not just supporting group life but also being “key components of group life.”34

Anishinaabe Elder Fred Kelly outlines the scope of the violence committed by the state in stealing Indigenous lands: “To take the territorial lands away from a people whose very spirit is so intrinsically connected to Mother Earth was to actually dispossess them of their very soul and being; it was to destroy whole Indigenous nations.”³⁵ Land, in addition to its spiritual significance, may also play a central role in cultural memory and cultural reproduction. Lynne Kelly’s study of oral memory highlights some of the many mnemonic strategies of Australian Aboriginal peoples – in particular, their use of songlines. Here, the “method of loci” ties a complex memory of events in the life of the group with specific locations, which as ceremonial locations are also spaces of memory.³⁶

Indigenous conceptions of group identity may also include close familial interrelationships with non-human animals, like the buffalo in Nêhiyaw filmmaker Tasha Hubbard’s seminal studies of buffalo communities and buffalo genocide, which include both academic writing and films (such the 2013 animated work, Buffalo Calling). Hubbard sees aspects of genocide in the near-extinction of the buffalo, which deprived Plains people of their traditional food, clothing, and shelter, and hastened their deaths. However, Hubbard goes further and, in applying an epistemological framework appropriate to her people, believes that animals who share their lives with humans can be members of the group, even though they are of a different species. Hubbard reflects on her teachings that “the buffalo people take care of us and teach us how to live, much like a benevolent grandparent.”³⁷ Further, “Indigenous peoples saw the buffalo as their protector, who took a position on the front line in the genocidal war against Indigenous peoples.”³⁸ Hubbard’s contribution offers tremendous scope for reflection on how a group can include non-humans and how genocide can involve the targeting of relationships between humans and non-humans. Her work also suggests that genocide can involve targeting the relations among different groups and that these relationships may also perform a central role in group identity.

From some Indigenous perspectives, relations of destruction can be the result of omissions, inaction, silences, and the squandering and exploitation of the non-human world. Sylvia Saysewahum McAdam (one of the founders of Idle No More and a Nêhiyaw legal scholar) outlines several concepts worth considering. Particularly important for an understanding of groupness is ohcinêwin, “the breaking of a law(s) against anything other than a human being.” Here humans are understood to have obligations to maintain respectful and harmonious relations with everything around them. Cruelty to animals and the environment and not respecting traditional hunting laws and relationships between humans and animals – these are considered to be part of ohcinêwin, “to suffer in retribution for an action against creation.” McAdam puts it clearly: “Animals are regarded as persons in their own right; the relationship between the Nêhiyaw and animal-persons is governed by the same legal considerations that govern human relationships.”39

If we understand groups as being inseparable from animals, plants, water, and air, group identity can never be reducible to a small number of European-defined characteristics like languages, famous heroes and battles, novels, and religious practices. Given the multidimensional nature of some Indigenous identities, methods of committing genocide may also be more complex, concentrating their attention on areas that are not traditional targets of genocide in Western literature. Thus, Nêhiyaw scholar Matt Wildcat articulates a view of genocide focused on the destruction of the “webs of relationships and kinship” among groups of Indigenous peoples.⁴⁰ The destruction of these “inter-Indigenous bonds” was a strategy of the settler state to weaken Indigenous identities and resistance to colonial expansion, yet does not form part of the UNGC.

There have been recent efforts to consider the many forms of Indigenous collective identities. Robert Innes’s work on kinship, which is based on research with his own Cowessess First Nation, stresses pluralism in group membership and a lack of rigid boundaries demarcating inside and outside. In his Cowessess nation, membership was largely based on kinship practices. People could marry into the group, and membership was largely understood by who was related to whom, in a “fluid, flexible, and inclusive” arrangement. “Band membership, then, served to strengthen social, economic, and military alliances with other bands of similar cultural origins.” As such, by the 1870s, Innes’s nation was, in fact, “multicultural” in the sense of being based on kinship relations and including members of five Indigenous groups.41

Innes problematizes the idea that there were clear and distinct tribal boundaries, and he notes that many bands did not aim to create a single culture based on hybridity, but practised multiple cultures in the same group.⁴² In many cases, he notes the mixed lineage of many influential leaders (Chiefs Pîhtokahanapiwiyin, Mistahimaskwa, and Payipwât, for example) and the fact that Métis were integral members of bands, despite how they were later seen as distinct, and administered by the provinces and not the federal government.⁴³ A key point here is that settler colonial explorers, traders, and officials have tended to stress the differences between Indigenous peoples, while downplaying the commonalities, connections, and intermarriage between families and groups as well as the fluidity and interchanges of group identities.

From a settler historian’s perspective, James Daschuk explores the phenomenon of “ethnogenesis” in his work – the joining together of groups that were once distinct in the aftermath of high rates of mortality during the eighteenth century. He focuses in his work on the Western Ojibwa (Saulteaux), the Plains Cree, and the Plains Métis. While at one time, the Indigenous peoples of the Plains were some of the tallest and healthiest in the world, they became one of the sickest due to high rates of tuberculosis, smallpox, and other diseases.⁴⁴

The sometime fluidity and multiculturalism of group membership does not mean that these were somehow not “real” groups for the purposes of the UNGC. Jews were, after all, defined by Nazi Germany based on complex racial laws passed in 1935, not on religion, language, geographic region, or other criteria, while Tutsis in Rwanda were targeted based on characteristics defined from 1926 by Belgian colonial officials. Nevertheless, this argument serves to alert us to the Eurocentrism of the Genocide Convention and its focus on certain types of assumed group boundaries, which generate insides and outsides that may not correspond to some Indigenous traditions.

The Return of Cultural Genocide

Cultural genocide has a distinguished legal pedigree, and while it has no legal standing now, it certainly had potential legal standing when the residential schools were in operation. Indeed, but for the actions of Canada and other settler colonial and colonizing states, cultural genocide might have been accepted as authentic, UN-defined genocide. Lemkin clearly saw cultural genocide as an inseparable part of genocide, and he realized that the primary reason that cultural genocide was hived off and voted out from the Genocide Convention was that colonial and settler colonial states did not want to enact laws that would clearly bind their hands in dealing with Indigenous peoples. We also need to better understand that when there is a wide divergence between the cultures of perpetrator and target groups, especially in how groupness and group membership is determined, cultural genocide can be disastrous for the reproduction of group life. Those studying genocide have generally failed to adequately examine the key differences between oral and written cultures and how knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next. Does cultural genocide make a bigger impact when the targeted group and the perpetrator are starkly different?

We see a clear example of how the IRS system impacted Indigenous identities by understanding oral history and culture. A Survivor of three residential schools, Michael Cachagee (Chapleau Cree First Nation), served as the executive director of the National Residential School Survivors Society. He offered an example to me, in an interview, of how the residential schools had broken his continuity with the past and impeded the transmission of his culture. When he was three, in the spring of 1943, he was taken to residential school and lost the ability to communicate with his family, including his grandmother:

I didn’t see my Granny when she died, she died in 1955, my Granny was 103 years old … being 103 she could probably go back to 1860 and have vivid memories of 1860 and in that, from 1860 she would have had the opportunity to talk to people directly that could remember back two centuries. … I’m cut off from that resource as a person of oral history … what’s the difference of burning a history book or destroying people whose history is based upon oral translation?45

Mr. Cachagee has consistently argued in favour of applying the convention to his experiences, and he articulates a strong case for understanding the intergenerational breaks among parents, grandparents, and children as a form of cultural genocide.

To this, Woolford suggests that, in oral societies, where language and culture are transmitted through children, child removal will mean far more than simply “an interruption of reproductive and socialization patterns.”46 If a society depends on its language and its children to continue its culture and maintain the identity of the group, cultural genocide may be a clearer road to group extinction among Indigenous peoples than Europeans. If relationships with animals, plants, and waters are central to identity, destroying these living beings and networks may have far more significant ontological consequences for Indigenous peoples than simply removing water and food “supplies” might for European peoples.

Western settlers like me may find it difficult to understand how different our imposed systems may be, and how destructive, but we are starting to learn. Patrick Wolfe’s observation that “settler colonialism destroys to replace”⁴⁷ expresses the processes I examine later in this book: the means by which our government and church representatives sought to destroy Indigenous societies and replace them with something altogether different. The greater the differences, the more traumatic that replacement could be. In coming to terms with Indigenous genocide, genocide theorists will need to prioritize and privilege Indigenous peoples and their own understandings of group composition, identity, and destruction.

Conclusions

From pluralist perspectives, the IRS system is but one manifestation of much larger processes of colonial genocide at work, at varying degrees of intensity and in different regions. Expanding our understanding of genocide to better capture Indigenous experiences may lead those of us who are settler academics to question the human-centred nature of groupness and to problematize how group identity is presented as being a relatively impermeable shell dividing insiders from outsiders. Expanding our understanding also involves better engaging with group identities in relation to land and waters, and the spiritual practices derived therefrom.

These views of genocide take the term well outside its legalist confines and may lead to a range of new understandings that better reflect historic and ongoing Indigenous experiences of colonization. However, to reach out to a larger settler public, many of the Indigenous writers discussed in this book make ample use of the Genocide Convention. This may be because it is the most expedient path right now to create a “ground floor” for understanding genocide in the IRS system. Further, the convention is the standard by which Canada’s provincial and federal elected bodies have chosen to officially recognize seven genocides (about which more in chapter 7). This indicates that there is a commonly accepted standard of what genocide is, and public institutions like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights are using this standard to teach about genocide and genocide prevention. In this context, however, we also need to work for a more just convention, one that reflects the types of crimes to which Indigenous peoples were and are still subject.