RUBENSTEIN: Did Sir John A. Macdonald engage in genocide against indigenous children?

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.The defamatory non-stop claim that Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, committed genocide against indigenous people, including Indian Residential School children, is the most scurrilous slur hurled against him by his critics. Accordingly, it is necessary to examine this claim using the gold standard for doing so: the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.The Convention lists five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” any one of which constitutes genocide. These acts are: (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, and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group..Two influential Canadian social activists, Phil Fontaine, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and Bernie Farber, former chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress, have argued that: “… the entire residential school system also passes the genocide test, in particular if you consider the fact that the Department of Indian Affairs, headed by Duncan Campbell Scott, deliberately ignored the recommendations of Peter Bryce, Canada’s first Chief Medical Officer, regarding the spread of tuberculosis [TB] in the schools. Such willful disregard for the basic principles of public health constitutes an act of genocide by omission, if not deliberate commission.”Proof for this commonly made claim is that many Aboriginal children died from tuberculosis during the early years of their operation. In doing so, genocide proponents always ignore the elementary fact that TB was rampant throughout Canada, including the Indian reserves, during the same era. They also never mention that there was no effective treatment for this disease until the use of streptomycin in 1944. Most important of all, they ignore Dr. Bryce’s assertion that nearly all children entered these boarding schools already infected with this disease or that this deadly affliction also killed thousands of non-Native Canadians in urban areas throughout Macdonald’s time in office.As for the genocide claims made by indigenous people, though many students have claimed their attendance at residential schools harmed them because they were physically assaulted, sexually abused, underfed, or given spoiled food to eat, demeaned for their indigenous status, or culturally prevented from speaking their native languages in their classrooms and playgrounds, there is no proof that any such claims rose to the level of an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” their indigeneity..Though Indian Residential Students often disparaged the food they were served — a common complaint in government-funded institutions of all kinds, especially hospitals, around the world — there is no evidence they were starved to death. Indeed, conditions on the reserves regarding food, clothing, and shelter were far worse than in the schools.Still, Macdonald made unprecedented efforts to prevent starvation on the students’ home reserves, even though contemporary writers have condemned the inadequacy of his emergency food measures for indigenous people. Patrice Dutil, Macdonald’s latest biographer, has shown that our first prime minister devoted, against fierce Liberal Party opposition in Parliament, as much money to food relief as his government spent on the entire justice system. The aid was never enough, but he did what he could against the daunting barriers of geography and politics..And as Greg Piasetzki has argued:“The initiatives of Macdonald’s government to save tens of thousands of Indigenous lives are equally inconsistent with the notion that he had any interest in genocide.” “Smallpox killed thousands of Indigenous people in Canada in some pre-Confederation years. Macdonald’s government initiated a program that ran for more than 20 years to ensure that every Indigenous person in Canada, no matter how remote their location, was vaccinated against it. Macdonald’s national vaccination program ended that threat.”“Similarly, when the buffalo population collapsed in 1880, Macdonald immediately initiated what was certainly the largest famine relief operation in Canadian history. At one point, it was estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 Indigenous people depended on the program.” “An objective assessment of Macdonald’s record shows that, far from engaging in genocide, his policies likely saved more Indigenous lives than those of any other prime minister.”.So much for the act of “deliberately inflicting on the group — Indigenous people generally and boarding school students in particular — conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”Of the five genocide acts, the only remotely credible claim of genocide in the Indian Residential Schools is “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” This was partially achieved by segregating the sleeping quarters of students based on their gender, a practice that lowered but did not eradicate occasional pregnancy among female students. Still, nearly all such girls were immediately sent home or dispatched to homes for unwed mothers to deliver their offspring if they had no home to go back to. There is no evidence that any of them were forced to accept an abortion at any Indian Residential School. More importantly, the perennial claim that genocide occurred because children were forcibly transferred from loving homes to another group, namely those who ran the boarding schools, is contradicted by a substantial body of evidence contained in its report.For example, until 1920, parents had to sign an application form for their children’s admission to these schools. When school attendance became mandatory in 1920, parents could still send their children to Indigenous Day Schools on their home reserves, if these were locally available, or to nearby provincial public schools. If residential school attendance was the sole option, force was not used to compel students to attend unless they were orphans or living in neglectful or abusive households..Of the minority of indigenous students who attended a residential school — one-third of all eligible students — Robert MacBain points out:“Indeed, the testimony of hundreds of former students and the unspeakable horrors they described at the TRC hearings would break a heart of stone. But that’s not the whole story of Indian residential schools in Canada, many of which provided sanctuary for thousands of Aboriginal children from horrific circumstances in their profoundly dysfunctional home communities, and helped them integrate into the mainstream of Canadian life. In light of these facts, there is no reasonable basis upon which to charge Macdonald or anyone else with the crime of genocide.”The single most telling fact disputing the genocide accusation is the absence of a single substantiated case of an Indian Residential School student murdered at any of the boarding schools during the 113 years of their operation, 1883-1996. So much for the genocidal act of “killing members of the group.” Each of the counterclaims discussed above is also carefully documented here, here, here, here, and here. Taken together, they prove genocide never occurred in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, before, during, or after Sir John A. Macdonald’s time in office.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

RUBENSTEIN: Did Sir John A. Macdonald engage in genocide against indigenous children?

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