Canada Day 2021: Not to celebrate; but to mourn, acknowledge genocide and commit to change
This is no dazzling red and white Canada Day ode to our nation. As many have urged, whatever the nature and validity of past July 1st revelries has been, this year is and must be decidedly different. I could not agree more.
No day to celebrate
While there is indeed very much that is remarkable and special about our country, this is not a year of celebrating Canada; not a year of patriot love and glowing hearts for the True North strong and free. This is, in fact, a year of both grieving and mourning the very essence of Canada.
That is not to say that it is a year without celebration. But the celebration – and the honouring – is of the determined survival and tremendous strength of First Nations, Inuit and Métis families, communities and their ancestors across the country throughout these 154 years.
For settlers across the country this Canada Day we must reckon with the undeniable reality we have avoided for so very long. Canada was founded in and exists because of genocide. Canada has grown, expanded and thrived on the back of genocide. Canada is a nation of genocide.
My own Canada Day pledge is that I acknowledge and accept responsibility for that shameful truth. And very significantly I understand that it is by no means only a truth about the past for which my forebearers carry the blame over previous generations.
It is about the present, a country in which my many opportunities and certainly my comfort and well-being flow from what genocide has wrought. That is ugly and deeply uncomfortable. As it must be. But we can no longer look away.
It is certainly also about the future and the need for each of us individually and collectively to make change that is grounded in respect for rights and Treaties, is honest about our history, commits to justice, accountability and redress, and recreates Canada.
The inescapable reality of genocide
Nearly seventy years ago, in September 1952, Canada ratified one of the first international human rights treaties that emerged at the newly established United Nations, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. We were not exactly a trailblazer, though, being the 35th country to do so four years after the Convention had been adopted by the UN.
At the time Canada and other states very much had in mind the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust and other genocides committed by the Nazis during the Second World War, all very recent and very raw.
But those haunting horrors were by no means the only instances of the ravages of genocide at that time. And Canada need not have looked to far-flung corners of the world to come face to face with what has often been called the “ultimate crime”.
No distant lands at all, for genocide against Indigenous peoples – through law and policy, action and inaction – had been insidiously, brutally, gradually and unrelentingly underway in Canada long before and since Confederation, certainly including at the time of Canadas’s ratification of the Genocide Convention in 1952.
The legal analysis and conclusions about genocide in Canada have been thoughtfully and thoroughly advanced by others and are, frankly, irrefutable.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission noted that,
The central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide”.
Notably, the Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada at the time, agreed, referring also to “cultural genocide” in a speech in May 2015.
And in June 2019, the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found that,
The violence the National Inquiry heard about amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools and breaches of human and Indigenous rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.
The National Inquiry released a separate report specifically addressing genocide, providing the comprehensive expert legal and evidentiary analysis that stands behind that conclusion.
That this is Canada’s history and reality is abundantly clear from the stark definition of genocide enumerated in article 2 of the UN Convention.
… genocide means 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.
Read that definition again and again. Sit with it. The wrenching truth is that from the outset of Confederation the Canadian state’s “intent to destroy” Indigenous peoples “as such” has, through a wide array of official policy and unchecked brutality, encompassed all five of those enumerated horrific acts: killing, bodily and mental harm, physically destructive conditions of life, preventing birth, and forcibly transferring children. Of course it has. And it is genocide outright, no qualification or softening of it as “cultural” applies.
As mass and unmarked graves come to light across the country Canadians are reeling from renewed reminders of the degree to which so many of the victims of genocide and survivors of attempted genocide over the decades have been children, forcibly sent to so-called residential schools, as part of a sinister and cruel policy which Canada’s now widely discredited first Prime Minister, John A MacDonald, described as being an effort to “take the Indian out of the child.” We need in fact go no further than that despicable Canadian chapter in reaching the conclusion about genocide. But Canada’s history and current day Canada take us so very much further into harrowing corners of genocidal abuse, cruelty, racism and death.
Where would we draw the line?
Some of us may respond to these facts of genocide by asserting, or perhaps wishing, that we can conclude that is all about the past; and that while serious deficiencies continue when it comes to recognizing and upholding the rights of Indigenous peoples in Canada, in 2021 it is not about genocide any longer.
But just exactly where would we draw that line? The truth is that we cannot draw it.
Genocide is not one single moment in time; here today and gone tomorrow on its own accord. Genocide does not start suddenly on Monday and end abruptly on Tuesday. It is not confined to the gruesome images of bodies in Holocaust death camps, or the killing sprees in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica or Rohingya villages in Myanmar. The ground is laid for genocide over time. It is planned, it begins, it builds, it deepens, expands and pervades, it is at times intense and other times gradual, and it is at once both overt and insidious. For the perpetrators and those who follow, benefiting from what has been gained through the extreme depravity of genocide continues long into the future.
Always with an intent to destroy, in whole or in part.
Do we draw the line somewhere between residential schools, the Sixties Scoop and current discriminatory underfunding of First Nations child protection services and say that was genocide and this is not?
Do we draw the line between distributing smallpox infested blankets in the 1800’s and forcing Indigenous communities today, still, to live with unsafe drinking water that has continued for decades?
Do we draw the line between blatant and violent abrogation of the land and resource rights promised under Treaties between Indigenous peoples and the Crown, and forcing First Nations into protracted, expensive and contentious litigation to stave off mines, pipelines, dams and logging that imperil their very survival?
Given that Indigenous women are in court seeking redress for forced sterilization that has continued to this very day, there is certainly nowhere to draw that line. Nor is there a line yet when it comes to the racism against Indigenous peoples that permeates health care, policing and prisons, and disproportionately ends in death.
Do we draw any of these lines when, every time a United Nations human rights expert or committee turns its attention to scrutinizing Canada’s record, longstanding and systemic violations of virtually all of the rights of Indigenous peoples account for pages of concern and recommendations?
When we can indeed draw those lines, we can perhaps start the conversation with Indigenous peoples about genocide being Canada’s past.
When we have established the channels and mechanisms of redress, justice and accountability for genocide that Indigenous peoples demand and expect, and international law requires, including with respect to residential school graveyards across the country, we can perhaps start that conversation.
When we have moved from excusing and denying to acknowledging and understanding genocide, we can perhaps start that conversation.
Working towards change
Earlier this month Parliament passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. That means that the Declaration, forged and negotiated collaboratively with Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations over the course of 25 years before it was finally adopted in 2007 (with disgraceful opposition from Canada at the time), is now part of the laws of Canada. The Act requires the federal government, in consultation and cooperation with Indigenous peoples, actively to ensure that the laws of Canada are consistent with the Declaration. And importantly, within two years the government must, in consultation and cooperation with Indigenous peoples, prepare and implement an action plan to achieve the objectives of the Declaration.
Ensuring that a robust, meaningful and comprehensive action plan for implementing the Declaration is indeed developed and adopted must become key to drawing the line on genocide. That too is at the heart of my Canada Day pledge.
And while I’m here. Do you know the Treaties? Concluded between Indigenous Peoples and the Crown, they are after all, our Treaties. The rights they protect are enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. Settlers, including those who live in Treaty lands, are largely unaware and unconcerned about the Treaties that govern where they reside. Most could not name the applicable Treaty if asked. Settlers who live in territories that have never been ceded through Treaties, rarely understand what that means and what responsibilities that carries.
Another fine way to mark Canada Day would be to move beyond the land acknowledgements that have become increasingly common at many gatherings, and begin reading and reflecting upon the meaning and importance of the Treaties. Start perhaps with Treaty No. 1, in force in Manitoba since 1871, and work forward from there.
It certainly should be a day for action as well, including joining one of the many calls for justice for Indigenous children in Canada.
Beyond heartfelt but largely meaningless sympathy and regret there is so much ahead of us in understanding genocide in Canada, and working to bring it to an end. There is no better and more necessary day than Canada Day to commit to that journey.
