The tragic deaths of Indigenous women are undeniable but do not meet the legal definition of genocide
In a recent commentary, Troy Media columnist Gerry Chidiac states, “The crime of genocide was committed by the Canadian government against Indigenous Canadians.”
This serious charge has been made by many other Canadians, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But it has no factual basis compared to universally recognized mass murders.
One of these slaughters occurred in 1994 in the Central African country of Rwanda. Goaded by months of propaganda, the country’s Hutu army units, militias and packs of machete-armed civilians hunted, herded and swept through their country’s Tutsi minority.
In less than four months, an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, including about 70 percent of the Tutsi population, all in public view.
The Tutsi extermination was indeed a crime “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” hence a genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Fast forward to June 3, 2019. The place is a “Peaceable Kingdom” called Canada. Our very own alleged genocide was given its first formal recognition in the Final Report of the government-sponsored and funded National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). The report claims there exists in Canada – note the present tense – “a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples…empowered by colonial structures.”
Given that the Final Report adds nothing to what was learned from 98 previous reports since at least 1907 about the extent, nature, and causes of the issue, it seems likely there was a need for a shock-and-awe doublespeak term – genocide – to catch public attention while demanding more public money for, among other things, more public inquiries.
The Prime Minister himself helped get Canada into this conundrum through his weak-kneed response: “As I’ve said, we accept the finding that this was genocide.”
It is imperative, then, to ask whether there is any legal, moral or factual basis for the assertion.
None of the UN Convention’s features seem to readily apply to the murder or disappearance of 1,200 or so Indigenous women and girls since 1980. The independent murders of Indigenous females by numerous unconnected individuals, acting on their own, were certainly not “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular racial or ethnic group through the coordinated efforts of some other racial or ethnic group.
Despite the many differences between known genocides, there is one necessary and sufficient feature that distinguishes a genuine genocide: that the murder of members of another group be deliberate, systematic and organized, as opposed to coincidental, unconnected and uncoordinated, as was the case in the murder of these women and girls.
Rather than being an inter-group form of violence, the evidence from Canada also shows that the murder of Aboriginal females is confined mainly to the Indigenous community itself. RCMP statistics reveal that 70 to 90 percent of murders are committed by Indigenous men who knew their victims.
Every murder is an outrage, and the murder and disappearance of some 1,200 Indigenous women and children is undeniably a tragedy.
Even more tragic, Western infectious diseases brought death to tens of thousands of susceptible Indigenous people in the early post-contact period. This was a human tragedy of epic proportions, as Chidiac suggests.
But his claim that the government rejected efforts to reduce the rate of tuberculosis (TB) deaths among Indigenous children attending residential schools in the early 1900s ignores three elementary facts:
- Regardless of the opinion of Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, every child arrived at school already infected with TB;
- There was no effective cure for TB, a disease that was a scourge among all Canadians, until the 1940s; and
- Life-saving smallpox shots were administered nearly universally to Indigenous people from the mid-19th century.
Together with near universal peaceful co-existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people (unlike the Indian Wars in the U.S.), regular famine relief, and many other forms of aid, the result was the rapid growth of the Indigenous population from the late 1800s. For decades, Aboriginals have been Canada’s fastest-growing demographic cohort.
Canada has never been a genocidal society. And by almost any measure, no country has done more for its Indigenous people.
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba. He is co-author of Residential School Recrimination, Repentance, and Reality for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, where he is a senior fellow.
Follow the conversation:
Debunking claims of genocide against Indian Residential Schools by Hymie Rubenstein
The truth about genocide in Canada by Gerry Chidiac
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