Winnipeg, Canada’s sixth biggest city, is in the news again and it’s all bad..Home to the most urban indigenous people in Canada (102,000) and the second largest proportion of indigenous people in Canada (12%,) the city is still reeling from the recent mass murder of four aboriginal women. As detailed in my first post on this issue, Winnipeg police charged Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man, with the premeditated murder of four indigenous women on December 1..The charges are based on DNA evidence presumably found in his apartment, the locale where he is said to have lured them. Though no motive has been given for his crimes, Skibicki could easily be termed a serial killer if found guilty of these four murders. (If convicted of a single murder however, it would be challenging to claim mad psychological impulses as a motive, if only because such killings are so high in Winnipeg. At least 11 mostly homeless indigenous women and girls have been murdered in the city since June 2019..Following the December 1 police announcement, several indigenous groups began urging governments and other power brokers to fulfill the 231 Calls for Justice in the final report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, released in 2019.."The political will of all levels of government is required to end this ongoing genocide," the National Family and Survivors Circle said, in a December 2 statement. The group said indigenous women are disproportionate victims of violence in Canada due to "unchecked racism and misogyny" and that "the political will of all levels of government is required to end this ongoing genocide.".Despite the elementary observation the roots of indigenous problems are firmly planted right in their homes, indigenous activists have always rushed to blame external and historically remote forces like colonialism, the Indian Residential Schools and racism for every aboriginal adversity whose cumulative effects they say constitute genocide. The genocide claim is particularly outlandish because it stretches the authoritative 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide so much as to render the concept meaningless. This is why Irwin Cotler, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a former attorney-general of Canada and perhaps the country's most prominent international human rights lawyer, opined, "If we say everything is a genocide, then nothing is a genocide" in response to the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls describing the 1,200 or so random or missing indigenous women and girls as casualties of a "genocide.".The UN Convention has such a high threshold that governments around the world, including Canada, have officially recognized only eight genocides, none of which occurred in our peaceable kingdom..Perhaps recognizing these facts, but still keen to politicize these tragic murders, Niigaan Sinclair, an Anishinaabe writer, editor, and activist based in the city, has come up with a novel theory explaining the murder of the four women in Winnipeg. Sinclair is head of the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba where he holds the Faculty of Arts Professorship in Indigenous Knowledge and Aesthetics. He is also the son of Murray Sinclair, a retired Province of Manitoba judge, a retired senator and the former chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the country’s Indian Residential Schools. Arguably, he is the most influential indigenous advocate in Canada..The younger Sinclair also has a weekly column in The Winnipeg Free Press where he published a disturbing article on December 7, 2022 (updated on December 8.).In a piece titled 'Fomenting hate sets stage for heinous criminals’ devastating acts,' Sinclair begins by misrepresenting the nature of violence against indigenous women..Rather than being an inter-group form of violence as he claims, however, the evidence from Canada shows the murder of aboriginal females is mainly confined to the indigenous community itself. Two comprehensive RCMP reports reveal that 70% of murders are committed by indigenous men who knew their victims; 72% of indigenous women are murdered in their homes; 60% of murders occur outside metropolitan areas like Winnipeg and Edmonton where many people are indigenous and live on or near reserves; and very few women in the sex trade, indigenous or otherwise, are murdered by their clients..All these carefully collected facts dispute Sinclair’s outlandish claim “While some perpetrators [of violence against indigenous women] are indigenous men, the worst and most extensive examples of violence are committed by non-indigenous men.”.Has Sinclair already forgotten four of the 10 victims slaughtered by Myles Sanderson, a Cree indigenous man, were indigenous Cree women? But Sinclair makes an even more outrageous assertion about the motivations and internet influences underlying Skibicki’s alleged killing spree when he argues: “It’s been well documented on social media, Skibicki … posted videos and articles that celebrated white supremacy.".“One thing that hasn’t been talked about was he supported residential school denialism online..“Skibicki’s postings included statements and other material denying the existence of unmarked graves of children at residential schools and others arguing that survivors’ stories were lies…".“Manitoba has its share of writers — including former provincial cabinet ministers, judges and professors — who chant “free speech” while saying residential schools were needed and survivors lie about their experiences…..“Jeremy Skibicki may have acted alone when he allegedly murdered indigenous women, but he spent years being conditioned, encouraged and enabled to believe indigenous people lie about the violence they experience and something must be done to silence them…..“They, in part, are responsible for the violence against indigenous people.”.This diatribe was supplemented by the following personal email he sent me on December 8 linking to his Winnipeg Free Press article with the subject line reading, "You helped create this monster.".On the same date, he also sent the following email to James McCrae who served as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 1986 to 1999 in the Progressive Conservative Party caucus. From 1988 to 1999, McCrae was a cabinet minister in the government of Premier Gary Filmon. And in recent years, McCrae published many thoughtful articles critiquing the prevailing narrative concerning many indigenous issues..From: "Sinclair, Niigaan" <niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca>.Date: December 8, 2022 at 3:05:28 PM CST.To: James McCrae <jasmac@live.ca>.Subject: A gift.“Since you’re so obsessed with wanting me to tell the truth I wrote this with you and your ilk in mind.”.Fomenting hate sets stage for heinous criminals’ devastating acts.winnipegfreepress.com.On the same date, Sinclair posted the following comment on his Facebook page:.“As a follow up on my Winnipeg Free Press column today — all who write and promote residential school denialism now wear the fact an (alleged) serial killer was influenced by and believed your work and employed this violence on indigenous women.”.Sinclair’s posts implicate people like McRae, myself, and others in the horrific murder of these four indigenous women..Is there any factual, logical, or theoretical basis for his doing so?.No, there is not..First, there is no “fomenting of hatred,” let alone incitement of violence, in making verifiably accurate assertions about indigenous issues. That includes talking about the Indian Residential Schools..No, people like Sinclair don’t agree with them, for reasons they never document or are willing to defend with counter evidence. They prefer instead to slander those who make them by labelling their findings “hate speech” and their overall motive “residential school denialism” — a deliberate and loathsome analogy to Holocaust denial. Presumably, they do so because they could not counter the thoughtful and factually rich evidence in essays and opinion pieces found here and here showing the Indian Residential Schools were far from the horror houses their critics have tried to paint them..Second, even when actual hate speech is linked to violent acts, there must be proof that such speech caused the behaviour attributed to it. If Sinclair were familiar with the scientific literature on this issue, he would have found, “While calls to censor hate speech and violent extremist content on social media platforms are common, there’s little evidence that online incitement leads to real-world radicalization. Ironically, such calls may actually galvanize extremists, who interpret hostile media coverage, commentary and censorship policies as confirmation of their victimhood narratives and conspiratorial thinking.”.These words come from a recent Quillette essay which referenced a 2018 journal article titled 'Exposure to Extremist Online Content Could Lead to Violent Radicalization: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence' which: “… scanned the content of more than 5,000 previous studies, but found that only 11 included ‘tentative evidence that exposure to radical violent online material is associated with extremist online and offline attitudes, as well as the risk of committing political violence among white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and radical Islamist groups. The authors acknowledged they could not conduct a systematic meta-analysis ‘due to the heterogeneous and at times incomparable nature of the data.’ To the extent generalizations were possible, they reported ‘active seekers of violent radical material [appear] to be at higher risk of engaging in political violence as compared to passive seekers.’ If that's the case, then preventing extremist content from being published on large-scale social-media platforms is unlikely to be highly effective, as it is primarily being consumed by those who already have committed to its message.”.Niigaan Sinclair was recently named to the “Power List” by Maclean’s magazine as one of the most influential individuals in Canada. He helped organize Idle No More Winnipeg events and frequently speaks on indigenous issues on CTV, CBC and APTN. In 2018, he won Canadian columnist of the year at the National Newspaper Awards for his bi-weekly columns in The Winnipeg Free Press and is a featured member of the "Power Panel" on CBC's Power & Politics. Sinclair won the 2019 Peace Educator of the Year from the Peace and Justice Studies Association based at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He was also previously named one of Monocle Magazine‘s “Canada’s Top 20 Most Influential People.”.For a university professor with all these honours to make such baseless and defamatory accusations against other researchers using mind-numbing pop psychology as his theoretical framework, is beyond the pale..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indian Residential Schools newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba.
Winnipeg, Canada’s sixth biggest city, is in the news again and it’s all bad..Home to the most urban indigenous people in Canada (102,000) and the second largest proportion of indigenous people in Canada (12%,) the city is still reeling from the recent mass murder of four aboriginal women. As detailed in my first post on this issue, Winnipeg police charged Jeremy Skibicki, a 35-year-old white man, with the premeditated murder of four indigenous women on December 1..The charges are based on DNA evidence presumably found in his apartment, the locale where he is said to have lured them. Though no motive has been given for his crimes, Skibicki could easily be termed a serial killer if found guilty of these four murders. (If convicted of a single murder however, it would be challenging to claim mad psychological impulses as a motive, if only because such killings are so high in Winnipeg. At least 11 mostly homeless indigenous women and girls have been murdered in the city since June 2019..Following the December 1 police announcement, several indigenous groups began urging governments and other power brokers to fulfill the 231 Calls for Justice in the final report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, released in 2019.."The political will of all levels of government is required to end this ongoing genocide," the National Family and Survivors Circle said, in a December 2 statement. The group said indigenous women are disproportionate victims of violence in Canada due to "unchecked racism and misogyny" and that "the political will of all levels of government is required to end this ongoing genocide.".Despite the elementary observation the roots of indigenous problems are firmly planted right in their homes, indigenous activists have always rushed to blame external and historically remote forces like colonialism, the Indian Residential Schools and racism for every aboriginal adversity whose cumulative effects they say constitute genocide. The genocide claim is particularly outlandish because it stretches the authoritative 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide so much as to render the concept meaningless. This is why Irwin Cotler, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a former attorney-general of Canada and perhaps the country's most prominent international human rights lawyer, opined, "If we say everything is a genocide, then nothing is a genocide" in response to the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls describing the 1,200 or so random or missing indigenous women and girls as casualties of a "genocide.".The UN Convention has such a high threshold that governments around the world, including Canada, have officially recognized only eight genocides, none of which occurred in our peaceable kingdom..Perhaps recognizing these facts, but still keen to politicize these tragic murders, Niigaan Sinclair, an Anishinaabe writer, editor, and activist based in the city, has come up with a novel theory explaining the murder of the four women in Winnipeg. Sinclair is head of the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba where he holds the Faculty of Arts Professorship in Indigenous Knowledge and Aesthetics. He is also the son of Murray Sinclair, a retired Province of Manitoba judge, a retired senator and the former chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the country’s Indian Residential Schools. Arguably, he is the most influential indigenous advocate in Canada..The younger Sinclair also has a weekly column in The Winnipeg Free Press where he published a disturbing article on December 7, 2022 (updated on December 8.).In a piece titled 'Fomenting hate sets stage for heinous criminals’ devastating acts,' Sinclair begins by misrepresenting the nature of violence against indigenous women..Rather than being an inter-group form of violence as he claims, however, the evidence from Canada shows the murder of aboriginal females is mainly confined to the indigenous community itself. Two comprehensive RCMP reports reveal that 70% of murders are committed by indigenous men who knew their victims; 72% of indigenous women are murdered in their homes; 60% of murders occur outside metropolitan areas like Winnipeg and Edmonton where many people are indigenous and live on or near reserves; and very few women in the sex trade, indigenous or otherwise, are murdered by their clients..All these carefully collected facts dispute Sinclair’s outlandish claim “While some perpetrators [of violence against indigenous women] are indigenous men, the worst and most extensive examples of violence are committed by non-indigenous men.”.Has Sinclair already forgotten four of the 10 victims slaughtered by Myles Sanderson, a Cree indigenous man, were indigenous Cree women? But Sinclair makes an even more outrageous assertion about the motivations and internet influences underlying Skibicki’s alleged killing spree when he argues: “It’s been well documented on social media, Skibicki … posted videos and articles that celebrated white supremacy.".“One thing that hasn’t been talked about was he supported residential school denialism online..“Skibicki’s postings included statements and other material denying the existence of unmarked graves of children at residential schools and others arguing that survivors’ stories were lies…".“Manitoba has its share of writers — including former provincial cabinet ministers, judges and professors — who chant “free speech” while saying residential schools were needed and survivors lie about their experiences…..“Jeremy Skibicki may have acted alone when he allegedly murdered indigenous women, but he spent years being conditioned, encouraged and enabled to believe indigenous people lie about the violence they experience and something must be done to silence them…..“They, in part, are responsible for the violence against indigenous people.”.This diatribe was supplemented by the following personal email he sent me on December 8 linking to his Winnipeg Free Press article with the subject line reading, "You helped create this monster.".On the same date, he also sent the following email to James McCrae who served as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 1986 to 1999 in the Progressive Conservative Party caucus. From 1988 to 1999, McCrae was a cabinet minister in the government of Premier Gary Filmon. And in recent years, McCrae published many thoughtful articles critiquing the prevailing narrative concerning many indigenous issues..From: "Sinclair, Niigaan" <niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca>.Date: December 8, 2022 at 3:05:28 PM CST.To: James McCrae <jasmac@live.ca>.Subject: A gift.“Since you’re so obsessed with wanting me to tell the truth I wrote this with you and your ilk in mind.”.Fomenting hate sets stage for heinous criminals’ devastating acts.winnipegfreepress.com.On the same date, Sinclair posted the following comment on his Facebook page:.“As a follow up on my Winnipeg Free Press column today — all who write and promote residential school denialism now wear the fact an (alleged) serial killer was influenced by and believed your work and employed this violence on indigenous women.”.Sinclair’s posts implicate people like McRae, myself, and others in the horrific murder of these four indigenous women..Is there any factual, logical, or theoretical basis for his doing so?.No, there is not..First, there is no “fomenting of hatred,” let alone incitement of violence, in making verifiably accurate assertions about indigenous issues. That includes talking about the Indian Residential Schools..No, people like Sinclair don’t agree with them, for reasons they never document or are willing to defend with counter evidence. They prefer instead to slander those who make them by labelling their findings “hate speech” and their overall motive “residential school denialism” — a deliberate and loathsome analogy to Holocaust denial. Presumably, they do so because they could not counter the thoughtful and factually rich evidence in essays and opinion pieces found here and here showing the Indian Residential Schools were far from the horror houses their critics have tried to paint them..Second, even when actual hate speech is linked to violent acts, there must be proof that such speech caused the behaviour attributed to it. If Sinclair were familiar with the scientific literature on this issue, he would have found, “While calls to censor hate speech and violent extremist content on social media platforms are common, there’s little evidence that online incitement leads to real-world radicalization. Ironically, such calls may actually galvanize extremists, who interpret hostile media coverage, commentary and censorship policies as confirmation of their victimhood narratives and conspiratorial thinking.”.These words come from a recent Quillette essay which referenced a 2018 journal article titled 'Exposure to Extremist Online Content Could Lead to Violent Radicalization: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence' which: “… scanned the content of more than 5,000 previous studies, but found that only 11 included ‘tentative evidence that exposure to radical violent online material is associated with extremist online and offline attitudes, as well as the risk of committing political violence among white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and radical Islamist groups. The authors acknowledged they could not conduct a systematic meta-analysis ‘due to the heterogeneous and at times incomparable nature of the data.’ To the extent generalizations were possible, they reported ‘active seekers of violent radical material [appear] to be at higher risk of engaging in political violence as compared to passive seekers.’ If that's the case, then preventing extremist content from being published on large-scale social-media platforms is unlikely to be highly effective, as it is primarily being consumed by those who already have committed to its message.”.Niigaan Sinclair was recently named to the “Power List” by Maclean’s magazine as one of the most influential individuals in Canada. He helped organize Idle No More Winnipeg events and frequently speaks on indigenous issues on CTV, CBC and APTN. In 2018, he won Canadian columnist of the year at the National Newspaper Awards for his bi-weekly columns in The Winnipeg Free Press and is a featured member of the "Power Panel" on CBC's Power & Politics. Sinclair won the 2019 Peace Educator of the Year from the Peace and Justice Studies Association based at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He was also previously named one of Monocle Magazine‘s “Canada’s Top 20 Most Influential People.”.For a university professor with all these honours to make such baseless and defamatory accusations against other researchers using mind-numbing pop psychology as his theoretical framework, is beyond the pale..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indian Residential Schools newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba.
