2024 Op-Ed for the Roger W. Smith Memorial Prize

By Isabella Sellar Voll, 2024 GHRUP Graduate

On October 27, 2022, Leah Gazan presented a motion in the House of Commons (HOC) calling on the federal government to recognize what happened in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) as genocide, consistent with the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNGC). Although the motion failed only one year prior, this time it passed unanimously. Some have expressed hope that this may signal a new era of reconciliation. A closer look at Canada’s evolving rhetoric offers some insight. 

Political Scientist Jennifer Dixon observes how states build their identities and claims to political legitimacy through the narratives they construct about themselves. Canada’s official narrative has evolved dramatically since confederation. Official rhetoric traditionally framed Canada as a nation of peacemakers, comprised of two ‘founding nations’ – a story in which evidence of Indigenous peoples, and their experiences of state building, was conspicuously absent. Historically, Canada promoted a paternalistic civilizing and Christianizing mission, insisting on their ‘benevolent intent.’ Over the ensuing decades, as norms changed, policy became explicitly assimilatory, working to absorb Indigenous peoples into the body politic such that the ‘Indian Problem’ would cease to exist. The Indian Residential Schools (IRS), operating from the 1830s-1990s, transferred Indigenous children, often forcibly, into institutions with the stated intention of destroying the indigeneity of the child through separation from family, culture, language, tradition, and community. The IRS was only one of many assimilatory policies that have sought to destroy Indigenous peoples over the longue durée, but it has largely become the focal point of Canada’s genocide narrative. 

Canada has frequently intervened in both domestic and international arenas to weaken norms against genocide and evade accusations of norm violation related to genocide. Canada was an active advocate for the successful removal of cultural genocide from the final 1948 draft of the UNGC. Not until 1970 did Canada finally amend the Criminal Code to include the prohibition against genocide, but with a stripped-down actus rei including only acts causing physical destruction of a group. The Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act finally made Canada’s domestic genocide laws consistent with international law, but not until 2000 and, notably, not until after the last IRS closed. Further, Canada was one of only four countries to vote against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007. In 2010, Canada endorsed the declaration but only as an aspirational document. The Bill did not finally receive royal assent until 2021.

In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) found that Canada’s past and current colonial policies, actions, and inactions towards Indigenous peoples constitute genocide, empowered through policies such as the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop and IRS. These findings, however, accusing successive Canadian governments of being complicit in a ‘slow moving’ genocide, remain intensely controversial.

The recent HOC recognition of IRS as genocide does not represent a complete reckoning. A deliberately exclusive focus on IRS, serves as a rhetorical distraction, locating Canada’s wrongdoing firmly in the past while avoiding attending to ongoing policies of ‘slow genocide’ persisting over generations into the present day. The possible graves unveiled the prospect of widespread lethal violence against an innocent group— consistent with lay perceptions of what constitutes genocide. The discovery of probable burials therefore challenged the strategic admission of the ‘cultural’ nature of Canada’s genocide, deployed historically as a semantic shield against accusations of genocide proper. However, locating genocide specifically in the IRS allows Canadian lawmakers to position the violence as a ‘sad chapter in Canada’s history,’ relativizing genocide to a historic process that no longer exists. The possibility of child burials produced shifts in public perception of the IRS, noted in domestic and international media, but a focus on ‘the bodies’ avoids attending to non-lethal processes of genocide that persist in Canada today. While it might be tempting to view the passing of the October 27 motion as a turning point, until Canada reckons with ongoing conditions of genocide, and responds in meaningful ways to accomplish the many outstanding calls to action laid out by the TRC and MMIWG, the motion represents little more than norm signalling. It is time for Canada to do more than ‘talk the talk’.