Historians in Canada are publicly disagreeing with each other according to an open letter written by a number of prominent Canadian historians in response to a letter published by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA)..CHA initially released a letter July 1 (Canada Day) saying it’s “abundantly clear” Canada is guilty of genocide against the nation’s indigenous population. The CHA’s letter claimed a “broad consensus” among historians regarding Canada’s “genocidal intent” exhibited in Canadian policy towards indigenous peoples, such as the Indian Act..Since the release of the CHA’s letter, historians across Canada have come out with an open letter calling the organization out for attempting to “promote a single ‘consensus’ history of Canada.” The counter letter read “with this coercive tactic, the CHA Council is acting as an activist organization and not as a professional body of scholars.”.Historians have long disagreed over the extent of Canada’s colonial history, but this debate was re-sparked with a vengeance following the discovery of thousands of Indigenous bodies on the sites of former residential schools..The CHA’s initial letter went so far as to condemn other historians for perpetuating “the violence” of colonization through them being “reticent to acknowledge this history as genocide.”.Both parties seem to be playing semantics in this discourse. The term “genocide” has been defined by the United Nations (UN) as: “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”.The UN’s definition has been called out for being too broad. By the listed definition, Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples would likely check off at least a couple points such as “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”.Payam Akhavan, McGill Uni law professor, said we should be careful about splitting hairs on defining terms like genocide, and just because it doesn’t specifically check all of the definition’s boxes doesn’t mean it wasn’t genocide..“The cry of a six-year-old torn away from the arms of her mother speaks more forcefully than any legal label about the gravity of this historical injustice and the work of healing that remains ahead,” Akhavan said in a 2016 article..Another troubling sentiment discovered from the letters was a comment made by a.senior Indian Affairs bureaucrat during a Senate Committee in 1920: “…our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.”.Canada has also been accused by many of committing “cultural genocide,” a term first coined by chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Murray Sinclair..Sinclair described Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous population as “nothing short of cultural genocide — a systemic and concerted attempt to extinguish the spirit of Aboriginal peoples.”.Trent University professor Christopher Dummitt signed the counter-letter saying CHA’s letter was to “protest that the (Canadian Historical Association) is wielding institutional power to incorrectly say that the scholarly debate over the ‘genocide’ discussion is settled when it isn’t.” Dummitt went on to say in the letter “historical debate isn’t settled by professional public statements.”.Don Smith and J.R. Miller, two prairie-residing historians, countered claims that there is “little doubt” Canada’s creation of residential schools was intended to destroy First Nations culture and language by saying assimilation isn’t the same as genocide..Smith and Miller said attempts to suppress the culture or language of First Nations “was to control Indigenous people but not to eradicate them.”.Since the release of the counter-letter calling out the CHA, CHA president Steven High said “we don’t have an official response to yesterday’s open letter except to reiterate that there is a broad consensus within the discipline on this interpretation.”.Prominent figures on the subject, such as Pamela Palmater, a professor from Ryerson University who was deeply involved with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, believes the Indian Act currently governing First Nations people was created to destroy Indigenous people as a whole..“The Act was never designed to create a group (of) Indians for their own cultural protection,” she said, “it was intended to identify and eliminate the ‘problem’ — i.e., those standing in the way of accessing the vast lands and resources in Canada.”.Jackie Conroy is a reporter for the Western Standard.jconroy@westernstandardonline.com
