Canada’s MMIWG report spurs debate on the shifting definitions of genocide

Lorelei Williams responds to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report.
Lorelei Williams, whose cousin was murdered by serial killer Robert Pickton and whose aunt went missing in 1978, sheds tears while responding to the report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.  |  THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

by Andrew Woolford, University of Manitoba


When the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report, it described the ongoing violence as a Canadian genocide. In the aftermath of the report’s release, many public intellectuals and journalists in Canadian news outlets and others on social media have contested the use of the term genocide.

I am a genocide scholar who has written widely about settler colonial genocide.

Genocide, originally defined near the end of the Second World War in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin and consequently taken up by sociologists, historians, lawyers and others, is for Lemkin “a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

As a sociologist, I’m not interested in adjudicating this case according to an official legal definition of genocide. Rigid legal concepts can interfere with understanding the social nature of group destruction. It can flatten the analysis of group relations. It can serve as a hammer to pound a complicated history into a singular event.

Two women sitting in the audience sadly embrace during the MMIWG report ceremonies.
Two women embrace during ceremonies marking the release of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report in Gatineau on June 3, 2019. | THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

One genocide is never the same as another, and therefore a static law or a fixed concept of genocide is of little use to protect us from its horrors. Understanding genocide as a process can help Canadians grapple with the ongoing threat faced by Indigenous peoples in Canada and Indigenous women and girls as outlined in the final MMIWG report.

Legal professionals over time have had to adjust their reading of genocide law. Since the Second World War, contesting ideas and debate have brought about changes to how legal scholars and courts interpret genocide. The authors of the genocide supplement for the MMIWG report draw upon these interpretations but also pose new challenges to the laws of genocide.

These questions are necessary because the history of settler colonialism in Canada includes a variety of efforts to remove, assimilate, starve and erase Indigenous nations. When one approach failed, the settler colonial mesh recalibrated.

For example, residential schools mutated into child removals and mass incarceration. Moreover, the strands of the mesh continue to entrap and strangle communities long after the supposed end of any one manifestation of group destruction.

This is the destruction to which the report draws our attention.

United Nations Convention on Genocide

The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (UNGC) is the basis for both international and national laws on genocide. The law is the product of a socio-political moment. In the meetings leading up to the convention on genocide, delegates from colonial nations such as South Africa, Canada, the U.S., Sweden and New Zealand voted against inclusion of cultural genocide (Article III) in the genocide convention..

Colonial and masculine assumptions are evident in genocide law, as is the political will of the drafting parties to protect their own nations from accusations of genocide, hence the withdrawal of Article III from the final document.

Despite these beginnings, the law develops as people engage with it, and genocide case law has gradually addressed some of the limitations of the UNGC.

For example, through decisions from bodies such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the groups protected from genocide have been expanded beyond narrow understandings of ethnicity, nationhood, religion and race.

As well, the social death caused by mass rape has been interpreted as genocidal.

The MMIWG final report seeks to bring a grassroots, gendered and Indigenous reading of these laws to the discussion of MMIWG and how Canada’s actions and omissions contributed to their deaths.

This is a valuable contribution and pushes the boundaries of the definition of genocide. Thinking on this topic always needs to be pushed.

Genocide is a transgressive act. It overturns all expectations, violates social norms and continuously mutates to take on new and surprising forms. Different readings and interpretations of genocide are needed to truly confront the many evolving methods of group destruction.

BC MLA Melanie Mark and her daughter listen as Indigenous women and allies respond to the MMIWG report.
British Columbia Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Training Melanie Mark, B.C.‘s first female First Nations MLA, and her daughter Makayla, 8, listen as Indigenous women and allies respond to the report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, in Vancouver, June 3, 2019. | THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Genocide as a process

Many genocide scholars view genocide as a process rather than an event. In my book, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States I focus on “cultural genocide,” though I treat cultural genocide as one technique of genocide rather than as a separate and distinct type.

I chart the development of Indigenous residential and boarding schools in North America and highlight the settler colonial practice of attempting to assimilate children through education.

Residential schools can be seen as situated within a series of nets that operated on all levels in society, including at the upper echelons of society among elite social influencers, and also through government and missionary institutions as well as individual teachers, principals and communities. There was a complex coordination of activities, habits, ideologies, motives and intents that were generally directed toward eliminating Indigenous peoples as distinct peoples.

These layers of destructive action can be likened to a settler colonial mesh constructed to entrap Indigenous peoples within an assimilative project. But the mesh is prone to snags and tears allowing for the emergence of resistance and subversion. Indigenous people were not passive; parents refused to send their children, children ran away and communities sometimes preserved their cultures when conditions allowed.

Impact on group destruction

The MMIWG report is about the results of such processes and their effects on community and family relationships: harmful relations established through settler colonialism, their impact on intimate and everyday group relations and the possibility of better relations in the future.

It demands more of genocide law, and more from Canadian society, to address the intersecting settler colonial and hetero-patriarchal wrongs that have led to the injustice of MMIWG.

Rather than staunchly defend a narrow conception of genocide, it is time to demand this concept to do what it was intended to do: enable human thriving through respectful collective relations.

Andrew Woolford, Professor, University of Manitoba


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Canada 150: Not the first celebration to spark…



Canada 150: Not the first celebration to spark controversy

by Matthew Hayday, Professor, University of Guelph


Canada Day is poised to be the high point of celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Confederation. Ottawa is in Party Central mode, with guests including Prince Charles, Bono and The Edge of U2 and a host of Canadian performers including Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Cirque de Soleil. But there has been a vocal debate across the country about how celebratory Canada 150 events should be — and even whether it should be celebrated at all.

Indigenous leaders have called the events a “celebration of colonialism.” A clever designer has been marketing T-shirts with an inverted Canada 150 logo over the words Colonialism 150. On Twitter, hashtags like #Resist150 and #Unsettle150 connect posts calling the celebrations into question. The @canada1504sale account draws attention to how corporations are trying to profit from patriotism.

Questions about how Canada 150 is being celebrated abound. Earlier this year the Parti Québécois launched a campaign called “L’autre 150e” to suggest Confederation has been bad for Quebec. People have questioned the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on Canada 150-related activities. Some MPs have criticized the limited place for Canada’s history in the government’s plans.

Should planners be concerned that this party has gone completely off the rails? Well, perhaps not. Controversy and contestation have always been part of celebrations in Canada, including landmark birthdays and national holidays like Canada Day. It would be more surprising if there wasn’t active debate about Canada’s past or what the path forward from here should be.

‘Day of lamentation’ in Nova Scotia

Dissent about celebrating Canada goes back to the early years of Confederation. Debating an 1869 bill about making Dominion Day a public holiday, Nova Scotia MPs argued that they would rather make it a “day of lamentation.” For these MPs, Dominion Day showed their powerlessness in the House of Commons. The bill was withdrawn, and not revived again until a decade later.

After the passage of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act, British Columbia’s Chinese communities organized Chinese Humiliation Day events to be held on Dominion Day. They wore badges stating “Remember the Humiliation,” organized speeches and handed out leaflets. Their goal was to overturn the law, which banned Chinese immigration to Canada.

In the 1960s, organizers designed the Indians of Canada pavilion at Expo 67 to challenge the celebratory atmosphere of the centennial. The pavilion discussed issues such as language loss through residential schools. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Quebec sovereigntists transformed the religiously oriented St-Jean-Baptiste Day events of June 24 into the explicitly nationalist Fête Nationale. This set up the holiday as a rival to Dominion Day events. Québécois artists took sides on the “national question” by deciding at whose party they would perform.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stops for a photograph during a street party for the Fête Nationale du Québec on June 24th in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

National celebrations have also had the potential to change the way our country functions. Governments have used them to set the tone about what Canada could be, rather than simply celebrating what it has been. As part of the 1927 Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the postmaster-general introduced a series of bilingual stamps. The stamps helped set a precedent for the gradual introduction of bilingualism into federal institutions.

The narrative of Canadian identity that has been part of the federal government’s Dominion Day and Canada Day events since 1958 has been dramatically transformed over the years. They used to be militaristic, British-centric portrayals of Canada’s heritage. Over the decades, bilingualism and multicultural Canada became central themes. Messages about Indigenous communities morphed from those that were explicitly assimilationist and colonial into a celebration of First Nations cultures and hope for reconciliation in the future.

Celebrations send messages to Canadians

The decisions made about which artists will perform at Canada Day celebrations, the languages they use and even the way they are dressed all send political messages to Canadians. Organizers of the Canada Day spectacles in Ottawa normally invite myriad francophone performers. They purposely include not just Québécois but also Acadians, Franco-Ontarians and other French-speaking Canadians. Doing so reinforces the idea of Canada as an officially bilingual country, and also sends a message that French-speaking Canada is not restricted to Quebec.

On Indigenous issues, the change in messaging has been dramatic. In 1965, First Nations were represented by tartan-clad, bagpipe-playing teenaged Indigenous girls from a British Columbia residential school. By the 1990s, this had changed to rock and pop artists who performed in the Innu-aimun (Montagnais) language or Inuktitut. It was a major shift from a message of forced assimilation to one encouraging revitalisation of Indigenous languages.

The laudatory ways that Canada is celebrated in official speeches on a Parliament Hill stage on Canada Day may mask ongoing deep problems in our society. But these events can also signal key symbolic shifts from the past, and possibilities of change in the future. It’s commonplace to dismiss Canada as a relatively young country by global standards. However, 150 years of a stable, democratic, multinational federation is nothing to sneeze at.

Canada’s political nationhood is an ongoing process that requires constant renegotiation and dialogue if we are to continue to live together. Events like Canada Day and Canada 150 provide opportunities to engage and educate Canadians about the problems of the country’s past and present. The stories of Canada told at these events may encourage Canadians to support new directions for the future. The controversies that surround the Canada 150 celebrations may actually indicate our desire to perfect and improve this country, rather than consign it to the dustbin of history.


The Conversation

Matthew Hayday is the co-editor of
Celebrating Canada, 
volume 1: Holidays, National Days and the Crafting of Identities

Released under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) License

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