Canadian genocide of Indigenous peoples

Canadian genocide of Indigenous peoples
They Came for the Children a publication by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Location	Canada
Target	Indigenous peoples in Canada
Attack type	Genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, collective punishment, sexual abuse, starvation, forced conversion
Assailants	Government of Canada, Catholic Church, Anglican Church, United Church, and Presbyterian Church
Motive	Capitalism Christianity French Imperialism British Imperialism Settler colonialism White supremacy

Throughout the history of Canada, the Canadian government (its colonial predecessors and settlers) have been accused of what has variously been described as atrocities, crimes, ethnocide, and genocide, against the Indigenous peoples in Canada.^[a][2][3][4] There is debate among scholars about the terms used and type of genocide that has occurred,^[5][6][7] or if the term genocide even applies to Canada's experience.^[8]

Canada is a settler-colonial nation whose original economy was based on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples using various justifications for its discriminatory practices.^{[9][10][11][12]} The Canadian government implemented policies such as the Indian Act,^[b] residential schools, health-care segregation, and displacement that attempted to assimilate Indigenous peoples into Euro-Canadian culture while asserting control over the land and its resources.^[14][10]

A period of redress began with the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada by the Government of Canada in 2008.^[15] This included recognition of cultural genocide,^[16] settlement agreements,^[15] and betterment of racial discrimination issues, such as addressing the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women.^[17]

The scholarly debate surrounding Indigenous genocide in Canada is a complex and contentious issue.^[18][19] The majority of Canadian scholars contend that the treatment of Indigenous peoples by European settlers and subsequent Canadian governments constitutes genocide,^[2][20] while others question if the term is applicable in the Canadian context.^[21][20] The debate centers around the definition of genocide as outlined in the United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes acts such as killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destructions.^[22][20]

External videos
" Is it really genocide? In Canada?" (2019) – TVO (7:25 min)

Academics, scholars and Indigenous leaders unanimously agree that the historic actions and government policies have had a devastating effects, however some historians and government officials argue that the term genocide doesn't apply, as legally genocide refers to the systematic extermination of an "entire group".^{[20][23][24][25]} Another point of debate is that focusing on the term genocide detracts from the multitude of crimes and ethnocide in which Indigenous peoples have endured, while others see the use of the term as a necessary acknowledgment of the gravity and culmination of atrocities incurred, and avoiding the word or debating a legal definition is a form of Indigenous genocide denialism.^{[26][27][28][29]} Many scholars and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada use the specific term cultural genocide, because of the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and displacement that has occurred over generations.^[30][26]

Attempts to assimilate Indigenous peoples were rooted in imperial colonialism centred around European worldviews and cultural practices, and a concept of land ownership based on the discovery doctrine.^[31] Original assimilation efforts were religiously-oriented beginning in the 17th century with the arrival of French missionaries in New France.^[32] Although not without conflict, European Canadians' early interactions with First Nations and Inuit populations were relatively peaceful.^[33] First Nations and Métis peoples played a critical part in the development of European colonies in Canada, particularly for their role in assisting European coureur des bois and voyageurs in their explorations of the continent during the North American fur trade.^[34] These early European interactions with First Nations would change from friendship and peace treaties to dispossession of lands through treaties and displacement legislation such as the Gradual Civilization Act,^[35] the Indian Act, ^[36] the Potlatch ban,^[37] and the pass system,^[38] that focused on European ideals of Christianity, sedentary living, agriculture, and education.^[39]

Indigenous groups continued to suffer from racially motivated discrimination,^[40] such as criminal justice inequity, police brutality, high incarnation rates, and high rates of violence against Indigenous women.^[41] More recent understandings of the concept of "cultural genocide" and its relation to settler colonialism have led modern scholars to a renewed discussion of the genocidal aspects of the Canadian states' role in producing and legitimating the process of physical and cultural destruction of Indigenous people.^[42][26][43] Patrick Wolfe's analysis of settler-colonialism, as a structure (rather than an event) premised on the elimination rather than exploitation of the Indigenous population, creating a "structural genocide" of the Indigenous people of Canada.^[44]

The impact of colonization on Canada can be seen in its culture, history, politics, laws, and legislatures.^[45] This led to the systematic removal of Indigenous children from their families, the suppression of Indigenous languages and traditions, and the degradation of Indigenous communities. Other actions which have been highlighted as indicative of genocide include sporadic massacres, the spread of disease, the prohibition of cultural practices, and the ecological devastation of indigenous territories.^[46]

As a consequence of European colonization, the Indigenous population massively declined.^[47][48][49] The decline is attributed to several causes, including the transfer of European diseases,^[49][50] conflicts over the fur trade, conflicts with the colonial authorities and settlers, and the loss of Indigenous lands to settlers and the subsequent collapse of several nations' self-sufficiency.^[51][52] Roland G. Robertson suggests that during the late 1630s, smallpox killed over half of the Wyandot (Huron), who controlled most of the early fur trade in the area of New France.^[53]

The most well documented incident against Indigenous Canadians is the Indian Residential School System.^[54] Other examples include the forced relocation of Inuit populations during the cold war to propagate Canadian sovereignty,^[55] medical segregation that led to poor conditions and lack of innovations being implemented,^[56] the sterilization of Indigenous men and women,^[57] and the modern day plight of violence and discrimination faced by Indigenous females being marginalized.^[58]

With the death of Shanawdithit in 1829,^[59] the Beothuk people, and the Indigenous people of Newfoundland were officially declared extinct after suffering epidemics, starvation, loss of access to food sources, and displacement by English and French fishermen and traders.^[60] The Beothuks' main food sources were caribou, fish, and seals; their forced displacement deprived them of two of these. This led to the over-hunting of caribou, leading to a decrease in the caribou population in Newfoundland. The Beothuks emigrated from their traditional land and lifestyle, attempting to avoid contact with Europeans,^[61] into ecosystems unable to support them, causing under-nourishment and, eventually, starvation.^[62][63]

Scholars disagree in their definition of genocide in relation to the Beothuk.^[6] While some scholars believe that the Beothuk died out as an unintended consequence of European colonization, others argue that Europeans conducted a sustained campaign of genocide against them.^[64][65]

Such a campaign was explicitly without official sanction after 1759, any such action thereafter being in violation of Governor John Byron's proclamation that "I do strictly enjoin and require all His Majesty's subjects to live in amity and brotherly kindness with the native savages [Beothuk] of the said island of Newfoundland",^[66] as well as the subsequent Proclamation issued by Governor John Holloway on July 30, 1807, which prohibited mistreatment of the Beothuk and offered a reward for any information on such mistreatment.^[67] Such proclamations seemed to have little effect, as writing in 1766, Governor Hugh Palliser reported to the British secretary of state that "the barbarous system of killing prevails amongst our people towards the Native Indians — whom our People always kill, when they can meet them".^[59]

Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples experienced several earlier smallpox epidemics, about once per generation after European contact began in the late 18th century: in the late 1770s, 1801–03, 1836–38, and 1853. These epidemics are not as well documented in historical records as the 1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic.^[68]

The 1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic started in Victoria on Vancouver Island and spread among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and into the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Plateau, killing a large portion of Indigenous from the Puget Sound region to Southeast Alaska. Two-thirds of British Columbia Indigenous died—around 20,000 people.^[69]

While colonial authorities used quarantine, smallpox vaccine, and inoculation to keep the disease from spreading among colonists and settlers, it was largely allowed to spread among indigenous peoples. The Colony of Vancouver Island made attempts to save some Indigenous inhabitants, but most were forced to leave the vicinity of Victoria and go back to their homelands, despite awareness that it would result in a major smallpox epidemic among the Indigenous population of the Pacific Northwest coast. Many colonists and newspapers were vocally in favor of expulsion.^[70]

Some historians have described it as a deliberate genocide because the Colony of Vancouver Island and the Colony of British Columbia could have prevented the epidemic but chose not to, and in some ways facilitated it.^[71][72] According to historian Kiran van Rijn, "opportunistic self-interest, coupled with hollow pity, revulsion at the victims, and smug feelings of inevitability, shaped the colonial response to the epidemic among First Nations"; and that for some residents of Victoria the eviction of Indigenous peoples was a "long-sought opportunity" to be rid of them; and, for some, an opportunity to take over First Nation lands. At the time, and still today, some Indigenous leaders say that the colonial government deliberately spread smallpox for the purpose of stealing their land.^[73][74]

External videos
"Residential Schools in Canada: A Timeline" (2020) – Historica Canada (3:59min)

Beginning in 1874 and lasting until 1996,^[75] the Canadian government, in partnership with the dominant Christian Churches,^[76] ran 130 residential boarding schools across Canada for Aboriginal children, who were forcibly taken from their homes.^[77][78] Over the course of the system's existence, about 30% of Indigenous children, or roughly 150,000, were placed in residential schools nationally; at least 6,000 of these students died while in attendance.^[79][80] While the schools provided some education, they were plagued by under-funding, disease, abuse, and sexual abuse.^[81][82] The negative effects of the residential school system have long been accepted almost unanimously among scholars researching the residential school system, with debate focussing on the motives and intent.^[83]

Part of this process during the 1960s through the 1980s, dubbed the Sixties Scoop, was investigated and the child seizures deemed genocidal by Judge Edwin Kimelman, who wrote: "You took a child from his or her specific culture and you placed him into a foreign culture without any [counselling] assistance to the family which had the child. There is something dramatically and basically wrong with that."^[84][4] Another aspect of the residential school system was its use of forced sterilization on Indigenous women who chose not to follow the schools advice of marrying non-Indigenous men.^[85][86][87]

Indigenous people of Canada have long referred to the residential school system as genocide,^[88][89][90] with scholars referring to the system as genocidal since the 1990s.^[91] According to some scholars, the Canadian government's laws and policies, including the residential school system, that encouraged or required Indigenous peoples to assimilate into a Eurocentric society, violated the United Nations Genocide Convention that Canada signed in 1949 and passed through Parliament in 1952.^[92][93] Therefore, these scholars believe that Canada could be tried in international court for genocide.^[94][95] Others also point to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted into Canadian law in 2010, where article 7 discusses the rights of indigenous people to not be subjected to genocide or "any other act of violence, including forcibly removing children of the group to another group".^[96]

The executive summary of the TRC concluded that the assimilation amounted to cultural genocide.^[97][98] This conclusion has been supported by other scholars, including David Bruce MacDonald and Graham Hudson, who also comment that the residential school system may also amount to more than just cultural genocide,^[99] laying out specific arguments as to how the residential school system met the dolus specialis requirement of the Genocide Convention.^[100] The ambiguity of the phrasing in the TRC report allowed for the interpretation that physical and biological genocide also occurred. The TRC was not authorized to conclude that physical and biological genocide occurred, as such a finding would imply a legal responsibility of the Canadian government that would be difficult to prove. As a result, the debate about whether the Canadian government also committed physical and biological genocide against Indigenous populations remains open.^[101][102]

The First Nations nutrition experiments were a series of experiments run in Canada by Department of Pensions and National Health (now Health Canada). The experiments were conducted between 1942 and 1952 using Indigenous children from residential schools in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Ontario.^[103] The experiments were conducted on at least 1,300 Indigenous people across Canada, approximately 1,000 of whom were children.^[104] The deaths connected with the experiments have been described as part of Canada's genocide of Indigenous peoples.^[105]

The experiments involved nutrient-poor isolated communities such as those in The Pas and Norway House in northern Manitoba and residential schools^[106] and were designed to learn about the relative importance and optimum levels of newly discovered vitamins and nutritional supplements.^{[107][108][109]} The experiments included deliberate, sustained malnourishment and in some cases, the withholding of dental services.^[110]

Compulsory sterilization in Canada has a documented history in the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.^[111] In June 2021, the Standing Committee on Human Rights in Canada found that compulsory sterilization is ongoing in Canada and its extent has been underestimated.^[112]

In Alberta the Legislative Assembly passed the Sexual Sterilization Act in 1928 to promote eugenics.^[113] With the arrival of the Great Depression in 1929 sterilization efforts increased, especially against Indigenous people and immigrants, due to fears of jobs being stolen by immigrants and living lives of poverty.^[114] Indigenous women made up only 2.5% of the Canadian population, but 25% of those who were sterilized under the Canadian eugenics laws – many without their knowledge or consent.^[85][86][87] In comparison to the "2834 individuals sterilized under Alberta's eugenic policy, historian Angus McLaren has estimated that in British Columbia no more than a few hundred individuals were sterilized".^{[115] [116]} The disparity between the numbers sterilized in the two provinces can be attributed in part to the tighter provisions of British Columbia's Sexual Sterilization Act.^[116] Whereas the Alberta legislation was amended twice to increase the program's scope and efficiency, British Columbia's sterilization program remained unchanged.^[117][118]

The High Arctic relocation happened in the context of the Cold War, the federal government forcibly relocated 87 Inuit citizens to the High Arctic as human symbols of Canada's assertion of ownership of the region. The Inuit were told that they would be returned home to Northern Quebec after two years if they wished, but this offer was later withdrawn as it would damage Canada's claims to the High Arctic; they were forced to stay.^{[119][120][121]} In 1993, after extensive hearings, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples issued The High Arctic Relocation: A Report on the 1953–55 Relocation.^[122] The government paid compensation and in 2010 issued a formal apology.^[123]

The Indian hospitals were racially segregated hospitals, originally serving as tuberculosis sanatoria but later operating as general hospitals for Indigenous peoples in Canada which operated during the 20th century.^[124][125] The hospitals were originally used to isolate Indigenous tuberculosis patients from the general population because of a fear among health officials that "Indian TB" posed a danger to the non-indigenous population.^[126][127] Many of these hospitals were located on Indian reserves, and might also be called reserve hospitals, while others were in nearby towns. Low salaries, poor working conditions, and the isolated locations of many hospitals made it difficult to maintain adequate numbers of qualified staff.^[128] These hospitals also did not receive the same level of funding as facilities for non-Indigenous communities. Although treatment for tuberculosis in non-Indigenous patients improved during the 1940s and 1950s, these innovations were not propagated to the Indian hospitals.^[126] From 1949 to 1953, 374 experimental surgeries were performed on TB patients, without the use of general anesthetic at the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital.^[129]

From 2016 to 2019, the Canadian government conducted the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The final report of the inquiry concluded that the high level of violence directed at First Nations, Inuit, and Metis women and girls is "caused by state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies."^[130] The National Inquiry commissioners said in the report and publicly that the MMIWG crisis is "a Canadian genocide."^[131] It also concluded that the crisis constituted an ongoing "race, identity and gender-based genocide."^{[132][133][134]}

External videos
"B.C.‘s infamous Highway of Tears" (2006) - CBC Archives, (2:32, min)

The MMIWG inquiry used a broader definition of genocide from the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act which encompasses "not only acts of commission, but 'omission' as well."^[132] The inquiry described the traditional legal definition of genocide as "narrow" and based on the Holocaust. According to the inquiry, "colonial genocide does not conform with popular notions of genocide as a determinate, quantifiable event" and concluded that "these [genocidal] policies fluctuated in time and space, and in different incarnations, are still ongoing."^[135]

On June 3, 2019, Luis Almagro, secretary-general of Organization of American States (OAS), asked Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland to support the creation of an independent probe into the MMIWG allegation of Canadian 'genocide' since Canada had previously supported "probes of atrocities in other countries" such as Nicaragua in 2018.^[136] On June 4, in Vancouver, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that, "Earlier this morning, the national inquiry formally presented their final report, in which they found that the tragic violence that Indigenous women and girls have experienced amounts to genocide."^[132]

External videos
" Canada's cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples" (2017) – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (3:59 min)

A period of redress began in 2008 with the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the Government of Canada,^[15] resulting in recognition of cultural genocide,^[16] settlement agreements,^[15] and betterment of racial discrimination issues, such as addressing the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women.^[17] In 2008 an apology by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Canadian government and its citizens for the residential school system was issued.^[137] In 2015, Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin said that Canada's historical treatment of Indigenous peoples was "cultural genocide".^[138] Indigenous leaders and scholars such as Phil Fontaine and David Bruce MacDonald have argued that the Canadian government should "officially" recognize the various atrocities as "genocide" inline with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Canadian Historical Association, especially after the 2021 Canadian Indian residential schools gravesite discoveries.^[139][140]

In October 2022, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion to have the Canadian government officially recognize the residential school system as genocide against Indigenous populations.^[141][142] This acknowledgment was followed by a visit by Pope Francis who apologized for Church members' role in what he labeled the "oppression, mistreatment and cultural genocide of indigenous people".^{[143][144][145]} Scouts Canada also issued an apology for "its role in the eradication of First Nation, Inuit and Metis people for more than a century".^[146]

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which opened at the University of Manitoba in November 2015, is an archival repository home to the research, documents, and testimony collected during the course of the TRC's operation.^[147]

• Bloody Falls massacre
• List of Indian massacres in North America
• Long-term drinking water advisories
• Native American genocide in the United States
• Racism against Native Americans in the United States