In the Stories We Tell: Narrativizing Genocide in the Context of Canada and Canadian Master Narratives

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BY

Sydney Budgeon

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS IN

Holocaust and Genocide Studies Universiteit van Amsterdam

Supervisor: Kjell Anderson July 2016

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Abstract

In recent years, the word “genocide” has become increasingly popular to describe the

experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada, both within Indigenous communities and by non-Indigenous Canadians. The genocide studies community has been polarized about the meaning of genocide and how it can be ascribed to specific acts of cultural violence, such as colonialism, with many arguing that the genocide must be decolonized and freed from attachment to physical genocides, in particular, the Holocaust, as originally intended by Raphael Lemkin. This paper argues that when used in conjunction with personal narrative, genocide as a concept wields a power in ex-colonial nations in addressing the forgotten or ignored historical oppression and genocide and the ongoing wrongs as legacy of genocide. In the context of Canada, the genocide narrative works to counteract the historical and future-oriented master narratives that reinforce colonial dynamics while pushing forward state policies of “reconciliation” and

“multiculturalism” marketed to repair intercultural, racial rifts in Canadian society. In particular, the genocide narrative demonstrates that historical and contemporary myths about Canadian culture as a “peace-making” culture are not only false, but used to distract from its attempts to extinguish Indigenous cultures. Outside of the Canadian context, the idea of genocide narratives may expand genocide and open it to be shaped outside the localized, largely European

perspectives who have traditionally dictated how it is understood and applied to particular contexts.

Key words

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Terminology

“Aboriginal” has become recognized as the most inclusive term in both general and political usage in Canada to recognize First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples collectively. Its use in the Canadian Constitution of 1982, particularly in section 35, recognizes the quality of belonging to these groups without having “Indian status,” as currently determined by the Indian Act. It is not completely without controversy, however, and most 1

notably has been rejected by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs for the technical root of its definition meaning “not” (ab) “original.” While 2

acknowledging the problematic root of the word, I will use “Aboriginal” when referring to First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Canada, in addition to other Indigenous peoples outside of Canada. It is not perceived to be grammatically incorrect to choose not to capitalize Aboriginal, but for this text I shall recognize the term (along with First Nations, Indigenous, Indian, Inuit, and Métis) as a proper name for a people and, therefore, capitalize it.

The term “allies” refers to non-members of a community who support the community members. In this text, it shall refer to non-Indigenous peoples who support Indigenous communities in their claims to sovereignty, cultural freedom, and recognize the scope of crimes committed by the state against Indigenous peoples.

The terms “colonialism” and “imperialism” are closely intertwined but distinct. The term “imperialism” refers to “the policy of acquiring and maintaining an empire,” while “colonialism” refers to “the practices involved in the transforming of the acquired territories into colonies.” 3

The term colony can refer both to an area occupied or under full or partial political control of another nation, and the a group of people from

another nation living in a foreign place. 4

Linc Kesler, “Aboriginal Identity and Terminology,” Indigenous Foundations (Vancouver: First Nations

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& Indigenous Studies UBC, 2009), http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/identity/ aboriginal-identity-terminology.html.

Don Marks, “Opinion: What’s in a name: Indian, native, aboriginal or indigenous?” CBC News

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Manitoba (2 October 2014), http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/what-s-in-a-name-indian-native-aboriginal-or-indigenous-1.2784518.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part I:

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Origins to 1939: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 1 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 11.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “Colony,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colony

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Aboriginal

Allies

Colonialism and Imperialism

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While sometimes used broadly to refer to all Indigenous peoples (including also the term “First Peoples,”) the term “First Nations” is noted to be shifting towards a particular usage in referring to status Indians, replacing the term “Indian.” It therefore is not applied to non-status Indians, or Inuit and Métis peoples. 5

“Indian” is a complicated term that has dual meaning. In the “Indian Act” and prior to 1961, it has been used to distinguish Indigenous peoples who had not been forcibly educated and therefore not enfranchised as

Canadian citizens. Status as an “Indian” was also controlled through marriage: it was lost by Indigenous women who married a non-Indian man, and gained by non-Indigenous women who married status-Indian men. It is still popularly used within Indigenous communities for self-identification, regardless of status or membership within an Indigenous reserve community. 6

The Indian Act is a Canadian federal law first passed in 1876 that politically manages Indigenous peoples, particularly in matters of status, band, and reserves. Most importantly, it authorizes the federal

government to regulate both the day-to-day lives of status or registered Indigenous peoples, and much larger aspects, such as the rights of Indigenous people to practice their culture and traditions and their identities as “Indians” (see above.) 7

“Indigenous” has historically meant “native to the area.” It is becoming a more popular and the least problematic term to refer to Aboriginal peoples around the world. For this text, “Indigenous" will be used interchangeably with “Aboriginal.” To distinguish from “indigenous,” the adjective, I will capitalize Indigenous as a proper name. 8

Kesler, “Aboriginal Identity and Terminology,” http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/

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identity/aboriginal-identity-terminology.html. Ibid.

6

Linc Kesler, “The Indian Act,” Indigenous Foundations (Vancouver: First Nations & Indigenous

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Studies UBC, 2009), http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-indian-act.html.

International Journal of Indigenous Health, “Defining Aboriginal Peoples within Canada,” University of

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Victoria Journals, 5. Accessed at https://journals.uvic.ca/journalinfo/ijih/ IJIHDefiningIndigenousPeoplesWithinCanada.pdf.

Indian

Indian Act

Indigenous First Nations

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An emerging term that describes survivors of long-term, intergenerational effects of the Canadian residential school system. They are the siblings, children, grandchildren or

great-grandchildren of residential school survivors, and have been subject to similar abuses or adverse living conditions in communities affected by alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual violence and poverty - effects which have all been identified as stemming from the IRS system. 9

Aboriginal peoples who traditionally live in the arctic regions of northern Canada (the territories of Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut.)

Inuit belong to a larger circumpolar population in the arctic regions

belonging to Alaska, Greenland and Russia. 10

A group of Aboriginal peoples whose ancestry is traced through the intermarriages and unions of European men (mostly Scottish, English and French) and Aboriginal/First Nations women. While Métis most directly refers to a unique cultural identity, it has also been applied and used by other peoples of mixed ancestry outside of the Métis cultural collective. Métis are recognized as one of the three “Aboriginal” groups in Canada. 11

“Postcolonialism” refers the period after a state of colonialism, including the legacies of colonialism. “Neocolonialism” refers to the "economic and political policies by which a great power indirectly maintains or extends its influence over other areas or people,” and emphasizes ongoing

colonial dynamics, despite the popular belief that colonialism by western

Christianity has ended.

“Settlers” has been a term used by academics to refer to non-Indigenous

Canadian society of a Christian or caucasian background whose ancestors directly benefited from colonial policies by owning and cultivating territory belonging to Indigenous peoples. It can be used problematically in assuming that all caucasian Canadians have family ties to Canadian settlers from the early 20th century or centuries prior. For this reason, I shall use “Euro-Canadian” instead to refer to caucasian Canadians who,

Rosanna Deerchild, “Blog: Intergenerational impacts of residential schools, 1st steps of

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reconciliation,” CBC News Aboriginal (13 June 2015), http://www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal/ intergenerational-impacts-of-residential-schools-1st-steps-of-reconciliation-1.3109827.

Allan Billie and Janet Smylie, “First Peoples, Second Class Treatment: The role of racism in the

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health and well-being of Indigenous Peoples in Canada,” Well Living House for Wellesley Institute (Toronto: the Wellesley Institute, 2015), ii.

Ibid. 11 Inuit Métis Neocolonial and Postcolonial

Settler and Euro-Canadians Intergenerational Survivor

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as a demographic, have historically and presently wield the most political and economic control within Canada.

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Abbreviations

AMC - Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs

CMHR - The Canadian Museum of Human Rights

DIAND - Department of Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development Canada FASD - Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder

FMS - False Memory Syndrome INM - Idle No More Movement IRS - Indian Residential Schools

IRSSA - Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

RCAP - The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples RCMP - Royal Canadian Mounted Police

RMS - Repressed Memory Syndrome RMT - Recovered Memory Therapy

SATRC - South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission SQ - Sûreté du Québec

TRC - The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada UN - United Nations

UNCG - United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of

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Acknowledgments

In these acknowledgments, I wish to recognize the diverse number of actors and influences that inspired me to write this thesis.

Firstly, I would like to thank my professors of my undergraduate education, most

particularly, Keavy Martin, Sarah Carter, and Robyn Fowler, who have challenged me and inspired my desire to study colonial history and English literature. They are teachers in the purest form of the word, and the work they continue to do today in dismantling internal racism and colonial hegemony is astounding. I would also like to recognize the professors of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at the University of Amsterdam, in particular, my thesis advisor Kjell Anderson.

I wish to recognize the support of many individuals in my personal life. Endless thanks are owed to my incredible support network back in Alberta: Bruce Cinnamon, Jordan Volker, Laura Salter, Danielle Deschamps, Marcella Boyle, Megan Paranich, Avery Parkinson, and Stina Nagel. For my support network abroad this past year, I wish to fondly thank Carla Davis Castro, Will Layden, Shu-Yu Wang, and Danny Janssen. To the people I have met through this program and while here in Amsterdam: Hannah Hunter, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Danny Tatlow, Phillip de Tombe, Nicole Toedtli, Rick Hoefsloot, Pablo Campaña, Rosie McLeod, Leah Mair, Marloes Vasse, Christiaan Serné, Andrei Rydzkowski, and Amélie van Waerbeke, I am still incredibly awed at how close we have become in such a short time, and how impossible this would have been without each of you with whom to weather the rough and celebrate the good.

I am most eternally grateful to everyone in my family. Thank you to my parents, Grant and Kathy Budgeon, grandparents, Aase and Larry Friis and Myrna and Fred Budgeon, and my sister, Hilary Budgeon, in particular, for their financial support and emotional support of my academic endeavours. Their patience has been boundless. I also wish to recognize my aunt, Shelley Budgeon, who as a scholar in the humanities has given me lots of advice, but who also has acted as my home away from home while I’ve been studying in Europe.

I also wish to recognize the family no longer with me, in particular, my

great-great-grandparents, Elsie Weber and Frederick Budgeon, who many, many years ago met on the Morley Reservation in Southern Alberta. Their positions as instructors in the subjects of cooking and farming and blacksmithing to the peoples of the Stoney Nation allowed for the opportunity to meet each other, to come to know each other, and, eventually, marry each other and have children. Without this chance of fate, I would not be here today. But I also must recognize that Elsie and Frederick acted directly as executors of the colonial genocide I write about in this paper. They and every single member of my family, including myself, have benefited and prospered from this system of dispossession and dehumanization. With this said, I must recognize, most importantly of all, all the peoples, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, of the Treaty Seven and Treaty Six territories: the territories of my birth and of my post-secondary undergraduate education at the University of Alberta. In

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remembering that we exist under the same treaties with the same duties to respect each other, I hope that any legacy I should leave be at least a small contribution towards righting the many wrongs that have been intentionally and unintentionally committed by my people, my family, and, most regretfully, also myself.

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INTRODUCTION

‘The Truth about Stories’

The conceptual world view that gave rise to the genocide of Aboriginal Peoples remains in place, unchallenged; its lineaments invade all aspects of present majority thinking about Indian Residential School. Unless this world-view is recognized, and the damage it has done and continues to do is brought into focus, the long-term agenda of Indian Residential School will succeed, even while we congratulate ourselves on having met it head-on and defeated it. 12

- Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, The Circle Game: Shadow and Substance in the

Residential School Experience, 1995. The truth about stories, is that’s all we are.

- Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, 2010. 13

In the annual CBC Massey Lecture in 2003 at McGill University, Cherokee American-Canadian author Thomas King remarked: “the truth about stories, is that’s all we are.” While a very 14

poetic point, King has drawn on a very real, universal concept that permeates through every individual, every community, and every nation: the importance of narrative. For the speaker of narrative, it is a way of self-conceptualizing: from singular events through to one’s entire life trajectory. It is also a way to relate to those outside of the self: in one’s family, community, nation, or even those on the other side of the world. For the listener, narrative is a basic

component of human meaning-making that transcends personal experience: listening to a story of another’s personal experience can create feelings of compassion and empathy through the

process of imagining what living that story was like, and understanding the gravity of the story and why it must be told.

Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, The Circle Game: Shadow and Substance in the Residential School

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Experience in Canada (Penticton, B.C.: Theytus Books, 1995) 6.

Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: House of Anansi Press,

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2010), 1. Ibid.

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In contrast to the universal nature of the narrative, genocide is a word that has become a victim to its own specificity. Many have conjectured it may become a lexical relic for its inability to be applied to situations outside of the major textbook genocides, namely the Holocaust,

Rwanda, Bosnia, and Armenia. The application of genocide to only extreme circumstances of nearly total physical annihilation of a population describes the exaltation of this type of crime as the ultimate crime against human rights. In addition to being the more common understanding of genocide, identity-based physical extermination and murder has also been adopted as the central component to the genocide legal definition, as formally recognized by the U.N. in 1948. It has been used since as a tool to identify the symptoms and motivators of extremely violent situations against certain cultural groups, and additionally has been made the central concept around which the global subject of genocide studies has evolved. However, when Raphael Lemkin, a Polish legalist, coined and conceived genocide, he had never intended such specificity nor for it to be shelved less than a century later. He had originally envisioned genocide to encompass the social targeting and cultural deaths of nations, with physical annihilation only as a singular component of this crime. With Lemkin’s intentions in mind, many scholars within genocide studies and history have forcefully challenged the legal definition, along with those outside of academic circles who have contributed, intentionally or unintentionally, to shaping a more popular conception of the word outside of its formal, official definition.

Instead of attempting to justify prying genocide from its legal context, I want to combine the ideas of genocide and narrative to create a more informal definition: “a genocide narrative.” The genocide narrative, like other national narratives, is a story that is used by people in a group to make sense of their group identity. Traditionally, national narratives have been understood as extremely triumphant, detailing the myths about victories won, the lives of national heroes, the series of events that led to the nation’s creation, or even the naming of their nation. In contrast to the more traditional understanding, national narratives can also be understood as stories of extreme loss and death; struggles of survival of languages, cultural practices, religion or spirituality; wrongs committed against the nation by another; or stories of imbalanced power resulting in cruelty and inhumanity. The narrative of genocide may be equated to a narrative of victimhood, and while genocide narratives do feature a perception of being victimized, they are

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not solely that. The very act of speaking these narratives demonstrates the resilience of the group identity, particularly in reaffirming for the individual a way to make sense of who they are and the importance of their nation’s survival.

We can see examples of genocide narrative in the multitude of Holocaust survivors who published their memoirs and testimonies in the years following their liberation from Nazi death camps or emergence from hiding. The genocide narrative has also emanated from the survivors of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Armenian. It appears in Hollywood, in Oscar-nominated and other critically acclaimed films across the world; it is the subject of dramatic plays, works of art, and told through memorials and museum exhibits. The genocide narrative also appears in academia through scholars who work to piece together the parts of a nation shattered by violence. And it is now slowly being applied by an increasing number of academics who perceive a related type of violence and aftermath in Indigenous nations targeted by colonialism, as well as being used by members of the targeted communities, including survivors of violence and their allies.

Colonial atrocities often resist discussion and understanding. They are atrocities composed of multiple moving parts: nuances that demonstrate complexities of history and the present. Unlike the classic type of genocide perpetrated explicitly by mass murderers, colonial genocides have far fewer actors directly seen as “perpetrators.” Colonial genocides (or settler genocides) are also not dependent on a single regime; they endure as leaders die, political parties change, even through significant regime change. Those who do participate in these genocidal 15

strategies may often not be malevolently intentioned, instead perceiving their own benevolence in the belief they are “saving” the Indigenous “savage.” Conversely, other colonizers may intend harm and take advantage of the polarizing power imbalance to economically profit or satisfy their debased desires. Colonial genocides often do not have singular strategies applied evenly across the land, but through the colonialism internalized in nearly every colonial European

Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research

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subject, they are often successful in netting those who must be “colonized” into the system. 16

Such strategies or policies may not affect each person the same way; some may believe they benefitted in some ways from such policy, but others may be severely disadvantaged.

In addressing colonial crimes, there is often an apparent issue at hand: the very question of how to address colonial crimes. For non-indigenous peoples, colonialism is understood as a dark and regretful subject, but this word is still considerably impotent in describing the actual scope of social and physical violence committed in the name of progress. It can be argued that a more potent word than colonialism is required to be able to reframe colonialism in the minds of the colonizers’ progeny and in the minds of those who reap the benefits of postcolonial

citizenship today. In addition to its use for understanding group identity and memory of the past, Indigenous peoples have appropriated the word genocide as a tool to publicly address

colonialism, often at the criticism of non-Aboriginal peoples. The danger of non-Aboriginal citizens of a postcolonial state telling Aboriginal peoples how to understand their personal history and judging the appropriateness of using genocide, even in a public sphere, is that the colonial dynamics are again repeated and refortified. This subjugation further obscures the fuzzy quality of colonial remembrance and acknowledgment.

Postcolonial memory does engage quite highly with the concept of human rights and genocide, but mainly only for crimes committed in other places of the world. Holocaust museums and memorials have been built; November 11th has popularly been designated as a holiday for remembrance of the world wars; and learning about Auschwitz has become almost a rite of passage in grade school curricula. The centricity of these histories of genocide and violence, in the popular incantation of saying “never again” or “lest we forget,”shows that the rememberers do not believe their society is distinct from the barbaric genocidal societies that committed these crimes. It also reflects that the rememberers do not believe that all the people who committed these atrocities had full intentions or knowledge of their actions. If they believed either point, they would realize there would be no point in the “never again” memorials and

Andrew Woolford, “Discipline, Territory, and the Colonial Mesh,” Colonial Genocide in Indigenous

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monuments, of the museum exhibits dedicated to the human suffering. These acts of memory are resurrected in public memory for the belief that it may prevent future tragedies - that anyone among our own society will remember these narratives of genocide and their personal humanity before becoming a participant.

Conceptual blockages in settler or postcolonial state memory regarding state crimes are ubiquitous to nearly all postcolonial nations, but each have their own distinct histories of colonialism and genocidal state policies. Conversation around colonial genocide in the United States and Australia have been prevalent, but in recent years the association of Canada with the term genocide has become more a phenomenon in academic and public discourse. It has been applied to multiple aspects to the Canadian colonial process including economic dispossession, spread of disease, forced starvation, forcible child-removal, forcible cultural assimilation, forcible relocation, and interference with biological reproduction. The Indian Act of 1876 has also been cited as an instrument of genocide because it assumes the power in determining the eligibility of a child’s “Indian” identity, or status; such Indian “status” means eligibility for benefits from the federal government as negotiated by treaties. With the enduring presence of 17

the Indian Act and other unchanged, unaddressed colonial legacies, many of these aspects associated with genocide are still ongoing in Canada today.

The concept of Canadian genocide has mainly evolved around the Indian Residential Schools (IRS), a cultural genocide scheme masked as education policy created by the Canadian government to isolate Indigenous children from their communities and families in the hopes of eradicating Indigenous languages, cultures, and spiritualities and replacing them with Euro-Canadian culture, either English or French, and Christianity. While the practice of child-removal for “education” was used throughout Canadian history, the official IRS policy was not

implemented until the late nineteenth-century, and remained in place for over a hundred years in an arrangement between the federal government, who funded the schools, and the United,

Kiera Ladner, “Political Genocide: Killing Nations Through Legislation and Slow-Moving Poison,”

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Catholic and Anglican churches, whose employees ran them. It is estimated there were 150 18

official residential schools - though 1300 are still being petitioned to be added to the list. In 19

addition to being removed from their families without consent, most students of residential school were subject to a number of abuses - emotional, physical, and sexual - and were often neglected, malnourished, overworked, and subject to epidemics of deadly disease and extreme loneliness. 38,000 cases of sexual and serious physical abuse were claimed, however less than 20

fifty former IRS employees were convicted. While this was not the case for all schools, it has 21

been determined most schools failed their students in terms of education, leaving them ill-equipped for success in the Canadian market economy. 22

It has also been determined that colonialism has been the cause of a number of intergenerational effects in Indigenous communities. Indigenous communities are extremely disadvantaged as ninety-six of the one hundred most disadvantaged communities in Canada. 23

Today, the rates of suicide are twice that in Indigenous populations than for the non-Indigenous Canadian population; in fact, Inuit communities face a much higher rate of six to eleven times higher than the national average. In 2011, Aboriginal people made up 28% of incarcerations 24

while Aboriginal people only constitute 4% of the total Canadian population. In addition to 25

conditions of poverty and intergenerational abuse, the rate of incarceration has also been linked

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future:

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Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, v.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, They Came for the Children: Canada,

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Aboriginal Peoples and Residential Schools (Winnipeg: Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication, 2012),, 1.

Ibid.

20

Idem, 8.

21

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The Legacy: The

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Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 5 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015), 5.

Idem, 35. 23 Idem, 7. 24 Ibid. 25

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to Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), a physical intergenerational phenomenon stemming from the alcoholism prevalent in IRS survivors. Aboriginal people have been made more 26

vulnerable to crime as well: they are 58% more likely to be victims of crime, and Aboriginal women, in particular, are likely to be victimized nearly three times higher than non-Aboriginal women. Cultural effects have also been severe: the United Nations Education, Scientific, and 27

Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has revealed that 70% of Indigenous languages in Canada are in danger of going extinct. These and more findings can be studied in greater depth through the 28

Final Reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC.)

By engaging with the colonial genocide narrative in this paper, I want to question the way in which Canada, as an example of a postcolonial nation, muzzles interpretations of genocide committed against Indigenous peoples in Canadian history. In engaging with the concept of genocide as a narrative in Canada, I will not be examining the acts of atrocity that occurred in the history of Canadian colonialism and may be ongoing in the postcolonial present. Rather, I want to use this concept to frame it among the national narratives Canada currently upholds and uses to resist recognizing colonial genocide. I hope to show how the genocide narrative reveals ongoing hegemony in Canadian history, identity and the state for the benefit of non-Indigenous Canadians, specifically Euro-Canadians, which ultimately also complicates the popular Canadian narratives of reconciliation and multiculturalism.

The three chapters of this thesis will break my argument into three discernible parts. In the first chapter, I will discuss the evolution of the term genocide, the scholarly debates around the expansion of its definition, and the perception by some scholars that the word needs to be “decolonized” from its European origins of meaning. I will also explore how the term has recently come to be used more popularly in Canada, and how its use in Canada can be described as a “genocide narrative.” In the second chapter, I will explore the historical Canadian national narrative examining the mythic tropes of the European-Canadian “peacemaker” and the “Indian”

TRC, The Legacy, 7. 26 Ibid. 27 Idem, 6. 28

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as conceptualizations of identities of the colonizer and the colonized, and how these myths endure in representations of Canadian history today. I will also speak to the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s role in contributing a different, conflicting story to the historical narrative through personal testimonies of genocide survivors. In the last chapter, I will examine Canada’s newest future-oriented national narratives, reconciliation, and

multiculturalism, and the ways in which they replicate old ways of thinking from the colonial and genocidal past. In examining acts of contrition by the Canadian state towards Indigenous peoples, such as the 2008 apology and the establishment of the TRC, I will show the narrative of reconciliation has not changed the power-relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and needs to go further to establish a relationship of true respect between these groups. Similarly, multiculturalism as a narrative has been used to forcibly incorporate Indigenous peoples into Canadian identity, and distracts from the very visible disparity, as legacy of the genocide, in Indigenous communities today. By understanding the Canadian master narratives and their enduring fantasies of national superiority, it is revealed why the genocide narrative is cast as a subversive and inaccurate version of Canadian history by the mainstream society, and, additionally, how more common recognition of colonial genocide may signify a larger systemic change within Canada than many scholars and Canadians give credit.

In analyzing popular master narratives through the lens of the genocide narrative, it becomes apparent how tied “reformed” Canadian identity and culture are to the old roots of colonial empire, and the cunning genocidal aspects of that culture. It is also revealed, however, how powerful personal narrative is against a society blind to its own biases, and how powerful words, like genocide, that command attention and reverence in the global vocabulary, can be reshaped to become more inclusive and useful in understanding the past and the future. In the divisions that form against who who use these words and how they are used, the very real, often still wounded, dynamics of postcolonial societies are exposed, and ready to be identified.

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CHAPTER ONE

To “Restory” and Restore Power: Genocide as Narrative in Canada and the World

How can genocide be understood as a narrative?

“It was cultural genocide. People were beaten for their language, people were beaten… because they followed their own ways.”

- Conrad Burns, intergenerational survivor of Industrial Residential School program. 29

The genocide narrative and how it has come into meaning for Indigenous peoples in Canada begins with the history of conception and popularization of the word genocide in academia. The definition of genocide has been greatly contested, in many ways because of its association to the Holocaust of the European Jews. Even in academic contexts, genocide evokes meaning in highly emotional ways and has resulted in an intellectual and moral stalemate between liberal and post-liberal thinkers. Further complicated by the UN’s adoption of genocide as a legal term in 1948, 30

contemporary discursive strategies in expanding the definition to recognize other forms of genocide, such as cultural and colonial genocide, have been widely dismissed by scholars in favour of the power of international law. In countering these notions, some scholars have recognized that the term genocide has yet to be decolonized and freed from Eurocentric conceptions to see the genocidal nature of “developmental,” “progressive” strategies of colonialism, and also embrace intercultural concepts of life and culture.

Discussions of genocide in the Canadian context have faced similar obstacles. Since the 1990’s, when stories of the personal experiences of survivors of residential schools and other Indigenous peoples living in Canada have gained attention across the country, the term genocide has been increasingly applied to conversations about Canadian colonial crimes. It has been used by survivors or allies of Indigenous nations to address both the state-led and society-led

TRC, The Legacy, 6.

29

A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas on the ‘racial century,’:

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initiatives that drove violent attempts of culture erasure through government policy, in addition to massive neglect and population decline of Indigenous nations. While many have directly cited the legal definition of genocide in referencing these crimes, the term cultural genocide has also been used to describe strategies wherein a state power eliminated Indigenous control of land by targeting Indigenous cultures.

While not all Indigenous peoples accept genocide to describe aspects or events of colonial oppression, it remains a part of the recurring vocabulary in Indigenous descriptions of their relationship with Canada. In using the term genocide and relating to it through personal and cultural narratives, Indigenous peoples have established a genocide narrative. The genocide narrative re-empowers Indigenous cultures by reasserting control over their historical and

contemporary narratives as they conceive of it, but it also acts as a counter-narrative, challenging the hegemonic master narratives. The struggles that many Indigenous peoples face when

speaking of their story as an experience of genocide is that such use of the word is seen to require validation. But we would be amiss in believing that genocide as a concept was shaped in a neutral environment: the forms of violence it is popularly interpreted to encompass and not encompass demonstrates a rather intentional arbitrary understanding that privileges physical violence over cultural violence, what also may be a false dichotomy.

This alternate life and meaning of genocide serves to free the concept from the specificity of its legal definition, particularly, in its strict association with the Holocaust. Additionally, it gives power back to the groups who use it, outside of the power of past or current oppressors; and, finally, understanding the power of genocide as narrative allows for a more inclusive shaping of its meaning that may more accurately reflect global experiences of attempted annihilation and erasure. The implications of understanding genocide as a story, particularly in cases of attempted cultural genocide, are, not coincidentally, completely related to the cultural: those qualities that were targeted for destruction. By definition, to defy physical genocide is to keep breathing, but to defy cultural genocide is to tell the story of survival.

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Genocide as a Legal Term

As David Maybury-Lewis has said, genocide is a new name for an old outrage. While 31

the word was coined in the twentieth century, and so often thought as a “twentieth-century word,” many post-liberal historians have urged the word to be understood in a wider, more historical context as its neologist, Raphael Lemkin, envisioned. Inspired by the massacres of 32

the Armenians by Turkey during the First World War, Lemkin, a legalist, wanted to create a word that could make similar crimes more tangible for the international community to identify and thus easier to prevent or prosecute. The word he came up with was genocide, taken from the Greek genos, meaning “people or race,” and cide, from Latin, meaning “to kill.”33Lemkin intentionally conceived of genocide as a linguistic vessel of nuanced understanding of identity-based destruction. His intentions, identity-based on his journals and other documents he authored, have revealed that he understood the complexities of targeting a group for the purpose of destroying its culture, not necessarily the lives of the people in it, as a component of genocide. In one of the most debated passages of his writing, Lemkin described genocide as:

A coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential

foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social

institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even lives of the individuals belong to such groups.” 34

By prefacing the physical destruction of the lives of the individuals with an “and even,” many scholars believe Lemkin explicitly left the door open for genocide as a form of social and cultural destruction. His use of “essential foundations of group life” has also been used to show

David Maybury-Lewis, “Colonial Genocide,” Genocide: A Reader ed. by Jens Meierhenrich (Oxford:

31

Oxford University Press, 2014), 82.

Roger W. Smith, "Human Destructiveness and Politics: The Twentieth Century as an Age of

32

Genocide," Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. by Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 21.

Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals

33

for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79. Ibid.

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that Lemkin recognized that cultural components are also “essential” in the identity of a group, and likewise can be a central target of genocide. As argued by scholars Christopher Powell and 35

Julia Peristerakis, Lemkin saw “physical and cultural violence as differing paths to the same end.” 36

An additional thought from Lemkin not only directly referenced the act of colonialism but placed what he called “the national pattern” of the target group as the focus of the crime, not necessarily the lives of the people in the target group:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.37

Removal, therefore, did not require extermination. This idea, however, was not as relevant to the type of total annihilation that had been witnessed in the atrocities against the Jews. While the world meditated and attempted to conceptualize the scale and methods of barbarity used by the nation of Germany during the Holocaust, other factors of genocide, as Lemkin perceived it, were ignored. To Lemkin cultural genocide was the most important part of the convention. 38

Despite Lemkin’s insistence for a more expansive definition, debates during the U.N. meeting on the definition of genocide on October 25, 1948, ultimately led to the exclusion of cultural genocide (Article III.) The exclusion featured notable supporting votes by a significant number of main colonial powers: South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States,

Christopher Powell and Julia Peristerakis, “Genocide in Canada: A Relational View,” Colonial

35

Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. by Andrew Woolford et al. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2014), 87.

Idem, 88.

36

Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79.

37

A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” Empire,

38

Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses, (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 12-13.

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Australia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and, of course, Canada. Thereafter, Article II of 39

the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) was adopted by the UN Assembly, declaring genocide as:

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”40

The passing of the UNCG in 1948 without Article III rendered Lemkin’s brainchild a specific formal and legal term, which has led to genocide being applied sparingly as an official label. In this sense, the term has been a victim of its own specificity. In the academic community, some scholars and legalists have perceived genocide strictly within the confines of its legal definition, while others, in addition to institutions and victim groups, have debated the usefulness of its formal and informal applications. Such debates have given rise to multiple meanings of the word, in fact, many inspired by the original notes of Raphael Lemkin’s journals. The emphasis of the meaning of genocide remains to be most particularly drawn to the physical destruction of human lives, rejecting other forms of harm that do not involve the intentional physical extermination of a group. It has resulted in the coining of multiple related forms of genocide not so intrinsically tied to the physical annihilation of a nation, including cultural genocide, politicide, ethnocide, and even indigenocide. Scholars most particularly from the camps of Indigenous and colonial history have advocated either for the recognition of these alternate forms, or the re-inclusion of cultural genocide back into the common understanding of genocide.

Hirad Abtahi and Philippa Webb, The genocide convention : the travaux préparatoires (Boston:

39

Martinus Nijhoﬀ Publishers, 2008), 1509-1510.

United Nations General Assembly, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocide

40

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Differentiating Genocide from Holocaust

A troubling aspect of the politics surrounding the word genocide has in large part involved the intertwining of genocide with Holocaust, in particular the image of the infamous death factories like Auschwitz-Birkenau. The brutal nature and scale of the Holocaust, in terms of mechanized methods of destruction, the number killed, and the vast geographical reach of the violence, cannot be underemphasized, and, likewise, its impact on the world is almost impossible to imagine without. Through the genocide studies community and Holocaust remembrance institutions, the Holocaust has been regularly pushed as a model through which to understand other genocides. In the words of John Torpey, the Holocaust has now “emerged as a kind of 41

gold standard against which to judge other cases of injustice…” While this standard has 42

perhaps helped make other genocides recognizable to the international community, broadening of the concept of genocide has been resisted by many in the history and genocide studies

community, particularly with growing recognition of cultural genocide and colonial genocide in North America, Latin America and Australia in the 1990’s. Revisionism to genocide as a 43

concept has been perceived as directly challenging the uniqueness of the Holocaust; proponents of this theory have continually denied that genocide has occurred in colonial contexts. One 44

such proponent, Steven Katz, an American historian, refined his definition of genocide as “the intended and unmediated extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child,” effectively excluding all other possible cases of genocide. 45

David B. MacDonald, “Canada’s history wars: indigenous genocide and public memory in the

41

United States, Australia and Canada,” Journal of Genocide Research 17:4 (December 2015), 415.

John Torpey, “‘Making Whole What Has Been Smashed’: Reflections on Reparations,” The Journal

42

of Modern History 73:2 (June 2001), 338. MacDonald, “Canada’s history wars,” 413.

43

Idem, 416.

44

Steven Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context. Volume 1: The Holocaust and mass death before the

45

Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 10. Quoted by David B. MacDonald, “Canada’s history wars,” 416.

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For many scholars in colonial and Indigenous studies, the power of the Holocaust as the “gold standard” genocide had been troubling. David Stannard and Ward Churchill had

recognized that in particular, the “Americanization” of the Holocaust had been directly damaging to Indigenous interests. They have contended North American cultural obsession with the 46

German-perpetrated atrocities has been demonstrated in the number of Holocaust museums or in grade school curricula, where the concept of genocide has been presented at a safe and

comfortable distance, allowing North Americans to maintain a moral high ground while exploring genocide as a historical crime. Since the late 1990’s, more scholars focussed on

Indigenous and colonial history have campaigned for the term genocide to be applied to a greater number of contexts, most specifically under the label cultural genocide. Canadian historian David MacDonald has suggested that using cultural genocide instead of directly claiming

genocide in colonial cases is more useful at avoiding the trappings of a comparison with the

Holocaust in addition to right-wing, neoconservative deniers. 47

This is not to say, however, that all scholars within the field of Indigenous history and anthropology have advocated for genocide to be extended to examples of colonial violence. Some scholars, like Joseph P. Gone and Dr. Payam Akhvavan, have wondered if genocide has any practical application to the colonial context, seeing the word as rather futile in changing the disadvantages Indigenous peoples face today.4849 Andrew Woolford has also indicated the danger of using the cultural genocide label may imply reduced complexity of colonialism and

MacDonald, “Canada’s history wars,” 415.

46

Idem, 424.

47

Jeﬀ Benvenuto, Andrew Woolford and Alexander Laban Hinton, “Introduction: Colonial

48

Genocide in Indigenous North America,” Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. by Andrew Woolford et al. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2014), 17.

Joseph Brean, “‘Cultural genocide’ of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples is a ‘mourning label,’ former

49

war crimes prosecutor says,” The National Post (January 15, 2016), http://news.nationalpost.com/news/ canada/cultural-genocide-of-canadas-indigenous-people-is-a-mourning-label-former-war-crimes-prosecutor-says.

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Indigeneity by suggesting it is a singular event that occurred against a singular group. In 50

contrast, Australian historian, Inga Clendinnen, whose lengthy career has focussed on a myriad of topics in history including Mayan and Aztec history, the Holocaust, and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations in Australia, believes the genocide should not be applied to colonial contexts. She has argued “that to take the murder out of genocide is to render it vacuous, and I believe with Orwell that it is essential to keep such words mirror-bright because, given the nature of human affairs, we will surely continue to need them.” Likewise, Bill Thorpe and Raymond 51

Evans, two other Australian historians in Aboriginal history, have cautioned against using genocide to describe actions of coerced assimilation and child removal for the running “the risk of what Steven Katz calls ‘offensive moral chauvinism’ by diminishing or conflating the Jewish experience, as well as being ahistorical.” 52

The conflation of the term genocide with Holocaust has been noted in achieving two effects. It has placed the Holocaust at the top of the apex of suffering as the “ultimate crime” and therefore also devalued the experiences of suffering of others in addition to their recognition. It also has distracted ex-colonial nations from addressing what some historians are defining as genocidal crimes. Australian historian Donna-Lee Frieze has criticized Inga Clindinnen’s interpretation of genocide as a “narrow” definition that in turn represses many victims of other forms of genocide. David Nersessian has asked: “if indeed the highest values of a society are 53

Andrew Woolford, “Ontological Destruction: Genocide and Aboriginal Peoples,” Genocide Studies

50

and Prevention 4:1 (April 2009), 81.

Inga Clendinnen. Quoted by Wayne Warry, Ending Denial: Understanding Aboriginal Issues, (Toronto:

51

University of Toronto Press, 2007): “Chapter 3: Ending Denial: Acknowledging History and Colonialism.”

Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe, “Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History,” Overland

52

163 (2001): 36.

Donna-Lee Frietze, “‘Simply Bred Out’: Genocide and the Ethical in the Stolen Generations,”

53

Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton et al. (New Brunswick-New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 85.

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expressed through its criminal laws, what message is being conveyed by not labeling acts of cultural genocide as criminal? Perhaps a message better left unsent.” 54

While the academic discourse around genocide and cultural genocide may seem defined by “bickering,” it may prove to be a more productive and empathetic conversation for those 55

who have known genocide as a personal reality. A. Dirk Moses, an Australian historian of modern European history and comparative genocide studies, has recommended that instead of placing all value in the arguments of proving genocide singularity between the two camps of “liberal” and “post-liberal” historians, it is more purposeful to understand how the Holocaust and colonial genocides are linked. The linkages he has emphasized, ideas of “progress” and 56

“European world domination,” are, after all, in danger of creating more victims of similar genocides. The groups who can most valuably make these linkages are the survivors, and, 57

therefore, they must be allowed to situate their suffering, and relate it to the suffering of others. 58

During a conference on colonial genocide in Manitoba in 2012, Justice Murray Sinclair, also Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada and member of the Ojibway Nation, told the following story of an apology he made to a Holocaust survivor over the term

cultural genocide after publicly acknowledging it as part of Canadian history in the Indian

Residential School system:

But one of the first things I did was call one of our honorary witnesses who is a survivor of the concentration camp Buchenwald to apologize to him because I said you know in using the term I don’t want you to think because you’re so supportive of the commission and the work that we’re doing I don’t want you to think that somehow I’m trying to denigrate the Holocaust. I don’t want you think to think that we’re trying to reduce or minimize what in the minds of many are the ‘true genocides’ which is [sic] these

David Nersessian, “Cultural Genocide,” Genocide: A Reader, ed. by Jens Meierhenrich (Oxford:

54

Oxford University Press, 2014), 82.

Wayne Warry, Ending Denial: Understanding Aboriginal Issues (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007):

55

“Chapter 3: Ending Denial: Acknowledging History and Colonialism.”

Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and definitional dilemmas in the ‘racial century’,” 35-36.

56

Ibid.

57

Ibid.

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instances in which many thousands of people were killed - Rwanda, Serbia, and the Holocaust in the Second World War. In these instances were many, many thousands of people, if not millions, were [sic] actually physically killed to talk about a process like residential school where murder was not the intended policy of a part of the schools… but the killing of the culture was the …intent. I apologized to him because I don’t want you to think that we’re somehow undermining what you and your colleagues are saying about the Holocaust. And he said that you know it’s not. We don’t own the term, he said, we own the experience and that’s the difference, so it’s not that. Genocides occur in different ways and we can’t classify them simply because one falls into a certain kind of a definitional category and not into another and thereby eliminate one because it’s not as serious as the other. If we take that kind of an approach to the definition to the term than we are undermining… the importance of the experience. The experience of residential school survivors is important. 59

In the opinion of Joseph P. Gone, Sinclair’s apology revealed weakness in his support of the cultural genocide label between the descriptive and evaluative functions of the term; Sinclair still defaulted to treating physical extermination as a worse crime, no matter the degree of violence in colonial assimilation. While this may be the case as a concept still internalized by Sinclair, his 60

exchange with the Holocaust survivor has also demonstrated the power in how the term can be shared between two experiences. In the Holocaust itself, there are a range of types of survivors: those who survived concentration and death camps, those who survived in hiding, those who survived by fleeing or by joining an underground resistance movement. There are a plethora of unique Holocaust experiences of survival and loss; it would be morally problematic to rank them against each other or to establish particular criteria to judge who is a true genocide survivor. It is also important to realize that no word can or should sum up any personal experience; in speaking of the past, a word like genocide is used to assist in communicating, identifying and relating. Inga Clinnenden has bemoaned a possible reality of the Holocaust happening again if genocide is no longer kept “mirror-bright,” but it may be of little use to survivors today in communicating, identifying or relating their experiences to others if the word is locked out of reach, like an unlit beacon in a tower.

Murray Sinclair, “Manitoba Conference - Keynote - September 20, 2012 - Questions and Answers,”

59

https://itunesu.itunes.apple.com/feed/id981640759: 11:29- 13:33.

Joseph P. Gone, “Colonial Genocide and Historical Trauma in Native North America:

60

Complicating Contemporary Attributions,” Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. by Andrew Woolford et al. (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2014), 307.

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Decolonizing Genocide

In lifting genocide out from its legal context and using it in the cultural genocide context, Indigenous nations have demonstrated their ability to shape the word outside the power of colonialism. It is important to recognize who historically has shaped the word genocide, why it was shaped with such a particular definition, and what the consequences of the definition have been. As previously mentioned, eight major colonial powers voted to exclude Article III from the genocide convention in 1948. The hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations under the control of these states did not get a vote. In the decision not to recognize cultural genocide as a crime, realities of cultural genocide, such as child removal policies in Australia and Canada, continued all over the globe, implicating genocide in a colonial context and as a colonized term.

Scholars who are proponents of recognition of cultural and colonial genocide, typically identifying as ‘post-liberal,’ have argued that further exclusion in the sphere of genocide studies continues without sufficient reasoning. In many ways, this exclusion likely continues because of the implications of values still embedded in Western society, and, in fact, even society itself. For Alison Palmer, genocides committed against Indigenous people can be differentiated as “society-led,” rather than “state-“society-led,” genocides that speak more to a societal drive for progress than a state-driven conspiracy project. Vinay Lal has pointed out the lack of logic that more people 61

have been “killed in the name of ‘development’” in the past century than all other victims of recognized genocides put together, and yet scholars still struggle to understand ‘development’ as a form of genocide. According to Ward Churchill, Keetoowah Cherokee professor American 62

Indian Studies and famous advocate for recognition of cultural genocide, the works of scholars of the “exclusivist persuasion” are produced by top academic presses, and upheld by the peer review process, where works focusing on colonial and cultural genocide are not. In the sphere 63

Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House, 2000), 209. Quoted by A. Dirk

61

Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and definitional dilemmas in the ‘racial century,’” 25.

Vinay Lal, “Genocide, Barbaric Others, and the Violence of Categories: A Response to Omer

62

Bartov,” American Historical Review (October 1998), 1190.

Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to Present (San

63

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of public history (as will be discussed more in depth in the following chapter), lobbying has also played a major role in deciding what histories are displayed. As Tricia Logan has noted,

Aboriginal lobbyists representing their deprived communities have had to focus their lobbying efforts on community welfare, not historical representation. 64

Andrew Woolford, a Canadian sociologist, has asserted that in order to understand the meaning of the destruction of a group, decolonizing Eurocentric assumptions within genocide studies is essential. He has argued that social linkages between group members as perceived by the group, and not the perpetrators, are most relevant to the definition. In many Indigenous identities, territory and other nonhuman elements or actors, including animals, are included in the group’s social identity, making any assault on the territory, actors or the stories that sustain the connection of their identity to the territory, an assault directly on the group. The social linkages, 65

therefore, are also more vital to the question of territory control than the lives of the members themselves, which is why destruction aimed at the group’s interactions and the ways the group is constituted and reproduced can achieve the same destruction for a cultural identity. 66

Furthermore, in terms of destruction, modernist perspectives primarily rely on arbitrary

categorizations, such as “nature” and “culture,” denying any hybridity or points where the two may be amalgamated or overlap. Processes of destruction in colonial contexts, such as the 67

spread of European disease and destruction of ecology, are often labeled as natural tragedies, denying the cultural elements of how European actors facilitated these diseases or destruction. 68

The spread of disease in Indigenous communities, for example, was most successfully facilitated through contact enforced by Christian missionaries and fur traders; later, in the residential

Tricia Logan, “National Memory and Museums: Remembering settler colonial genocide of

64

Indigenous peoples in Canada,” Remembering Genocide: Remembering the Modern World (London & New York: Routledge, 2014), 124.

Woolford, “Discipline, Territory, and the Colonial Mesh,” Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North

65

America, 48. Ibid.

66

Woolford, “Ontological Destructions,” 90.

67

Ibid.

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schools, tuberculosis outbreaks became deadlier from poor nutrition, cramped spaces, and lack of will of school administrators to find adequate solutions. Labeling these instances as “natural,” 69

Woolford has contended, is “exposed as disingenuous at best.” 70

Scholars, like Woolford, who have advocated for recognition of cultural or colonial genocide, also have emphasized the purpose of genocide for the genocidaires, rather than to describe the way or type of destruction that is caused. With this in mind, theories like Patrick Wolfe's that creole or settler colonialism is at heart a “winner-take-all project” seeking to completely replace the Indigenous presence on the land, reveal a different type of intentionality not often recognized as genocidal. The goal of colonialism in eradicating Indigenous power and 71

ownership in the process of establishing a new order is and will always be a part of the central motivation for the society-led project, even if those within that project have difficulties

identifying those motivations. If genocide is not decolonized as a term and an idea, then it risks being rendered too specific to European understanding in global discourse.

The Indigenous peoples who have claimed genocide as part of their cultural past pull it away from the control of the colonial powers. It is impossible to completely remake the concept, nor would anyone want to, but in adapting it genocide can become a word that is made more whole in representing the recognized and unrecognized destruction of social groups. As described by Shaobo Xie: “it is impossible to construct identities and forms of knowledge uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images, but it is possible and necessary to take up a third space of revision to dwell… in a ‘beyond’ that is neither the

Indigenous past nor the colonized present.” Still, the application of genocide in this third space 72

Woolford, “Ontological Destructions,” 90.

69

Idem, 91.

70

Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transofmration of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an

71

Ethnographic Event (London & New York: Cassell, 1999), 163. Quoted by Anthony Moran, “As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing settler nationalism and the challenges of settler/indigenous relations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25:6 (2002), 1016.

Shaobo Xie, “Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism,” New Literary History 28:1 (Winter 1997),

72

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of revision of colonial history continues to be taken less seriously by many scholars or legalists. Former U.N. war crimes prosecutor and professor of law, Payam Akhavan, has stated that the use of the word genocide by such Indigenous groups is more like a “mourning metaphor” or “song of bereavement” than accurate legal label, which seems to problematically romanticize their

suffering than attempt to understand it. 73

As scholars and the field of genocide studies may continue to resist any changes put forth by alternative genocide conceptions, the field will only become defined further by exclusion. Many scholars have insisted that their discomfort with the word as applied to colonial situations stems in the wish to avoid unproductive argumentative discourse marked by what Clendinnen describes: “the slamming shut of minds.” Some scholars, like Thorpe and Evans, have 74

proposed new terms, such as “developmental genocide” or “indigenocide,” to avoid conflict and better communicate the nature of the violence Indigenous people have suffered. Akhavan has 75

vocalized his concerns that purporting so much meaning onto the word genocide creates an issue where terminological debates do little to create real change in the larger society. It is a reality 76

that while stories of colonial and cultural genocide cannot be censured into silence, they also cannot be forced to be recognized by other groups and scholarship.

In asserting authority over these discussions, cultural and racial identities of scholars and politicians have rarely been seen as legitimizing factors of their purviews. The National Post article, “‘Cultural genocide’ of Canada’s indigenous peoples is a ‘mourning label,’ says former war crimes prosecutor,” asserts Dr. Payam Akhavan as a vested arbiter on the subject multiple times through text, including the obvious headline. As an Iranian of Baha’i faith who had to flee

Brean, “‘Cultural genocide’ of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples is a ‘mourning label,’ former war crimes

73

prosecutor says.”

Inga Clendinnen in Ron Brunton, Inga Clendinnen, Michael Duﬀy, Rod Moran and Robert Manne

74

(2001) "In denial correspondance," Quarterly Essay 2, 106. Quoted by Wayne Warry, Ending Denial: Understanding Aboriginal Issues: “Chapter 3: Ending Denial: Acknowledging History and Colonialism.”

Evans and Thorpe, “Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History,” 36.

75

Brean,“‘Cultural genocide of Canada’s indigenous peoples is a ‘mourning label,’ former war crimes

76

In the Stories We Tell: Narrativizing Genocide in the Context of Canada and Canadian Master Narratives

Table of Contents

Terminology

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE