Jeremy Skibicki is a 35-year-old Winnipeg man accused of killing four women, all believed to be indigenous. His case has led to accusations by activists that he is guilty of the worst of all crimes — genocide..Possibly Skibicki is a murderer. The courts will decide. However, only by stretching the definition of genocide beyond practical use, can that charge even be levelled against him, let alone sustained. Skibicki’s case is a nasty business but the reaction to it appears to be an opportunistic attempt to force-fit the facts surrounding the brutal murder of one indigenous woman and the disappearance of three others into a pre-determined narrative of the victimization of all indigenous peoples..This is wrong..So, what are the facts?.Skibicki was first arrested on May 18th and charged with the first-degree murder of Rebecca Contois, 24. Her partial remains were found in a garbage bin near a downtown apartment building. Police later found the rest of her remains in a Winnipeg landfill..On December 1, Winnipeg police also charged Skibicki with the premeditated murder of Morgan Harris, 39, Marcedes Myran, 26, and an unidentified woman. Their bodies have not been recovered. The charges are based on DNA evidence undoubtedly found in his apartment, the locale to which he is said to have lured them. Police said Harris, Myran, and Contois were killed in May, but no dates were given. The unidentified victim is thought to have been killed on or about March 15..Social media insights and records of past convictions do place Skibicki in an unflattering light..One unnamed female former high-school classmate says she deleted Skibicki as a Facebook friend about four years ago, after becoming alarmed by hate-filled posts on his profile. “He would go on tangents about race, (and) that intensified over the years,” she said. “At a certain point, he became very vocal on Facebook. It was very much white supremacist-like stuff.” Facebook posts viewed by the Winnipeg Free Press are said to contain threats of violence, antisemitic content and references to a white conspiracy theory..Yet, those who assert that Skibicki hated aboriginals and that his actions — if proven in a court of law — are genocide, will have to reconcile that with the fact that his two wives were both indigenous women..He was abusive to be sure and threatened to kill both of them..In June 2015, he was convicted of assaulting his common-law wife and spent about two months behind bars. According to a court statement of facts, Skibicki grabbed his pregnant partner's hair and punched her in the face several times, then tried to strangle her. He told her he would kill her if she called police..In 2019, Skibicki's estranged second wife successfully filed for a protection order against him, alleging that she suffered a litany of abuse at his hands and that he threatened to kill her. "He has suggested he would kill me or that other gangs will abduct me and torture or kill me or traffic me," and "told me he would put me in a garbage bag," she wrote in her application for the protection order. She said she was taking strong medication at night to sleep, and he would use that opportunity to rape her while she was sleeping, calling it her 'Sleeping Beauty syndrome.'."I woke up with my underwear down, and he had given me an STD, and that's how I caught him with his so-called fetish," she said in the protection order hearing, a probable allusion to anal penetration. She said Skibicki once tried to suffocate her by holding a pillow over her face, according to her protection-order application. He also threatened to kill her, according to that document..Police have said Skibicki and Contois knew each other but gave no details. Skibicki has claimed he is innocent..The circumstances appear to be barbarous but nevertheless, so far there are more questions than answers. But this has not prevented indigenous activists from calling these murders genocidal, their rallying cry being, “End this ongoing genocide.”.So, what is genocide?.Genocide claims are defined by the authoritative 1948 'United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.' The genocide definition embraces “killing members of the group” and that genocidal actions are those “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”.This is such a very high threshold that the Government of Canada has officially recognized only eight genocides, none of which occurred in our peaceable kingdom..This is also why even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada charged with investigating and reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the country’s Indian Residential Schools, refrained from referring to unqualified genocide in its 2015 Final Report. Instead, it used the term “cultural genocide,” an inflammatory charge to be sure, but one that is synonymous with the ordinary enculturation — internalization of the beliefs, values, and practices of a different culture — experienced by millions of immigrant children from non-Western European countries who have flocked to Canada for more than 200 years, the result being the loss of much of their ancestral cultures in one or two generations. Surely, such children and their descendants, forced by law to attend recognized schools in every Canadian province unless home schooled, are also the victims of cultural genocide..So, where did the current indiscriminate use of the charge originate?.The way it is referenced in discussions of the alleged murder of these four women by Skibicki shows that the source is the 2019 Final Report of the government-sponsored and funded National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. Unlike the Truth and Reconciliation’s nuanced use of the word ‘genocide,’ the MMIWG report is polemical, and claims there currently exists in Canada “a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples…empowered by colonial structures…leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.”.The commission's final report declares that its use of “genocide,” which occurs no fewer than 72 times in its first volume alone, is in keeping with the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide..But is there any legal, moral or factual basis for this assertion?.No there is not, since none of the UN Convention’s features apply to the murder or disappearance of some 1,200 indigenous women and girls since 1980. The independent murders of indigenous females by numerous unconnected individuals, acting on their own, were certainly not “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular racial or ethnic group. Nor do the organization, causes, and consequences of these murders have anything in common with the genocides officially recognized by the civilized world..Despite the many differences between and varying definitions of genocide, one necessary feature distinguishes a recognized genocide: The murder of members of another group has to be deliberate, systematic and organized, as opposed to coincidental, unconnected and uncoordinated..Moreover, the United Nations General Assembly resolved in 1946 that “genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.” Translation: Many random murders, as the murders of these four women appear to be, however heart-breaking and fiendish they are, do not add up to a genocide..Aboriginal activists and their supporters have chosen to ignore this crucial distinction. Niigaan Sinclair, an indigenous professor in the Native Studies Department at the University of Manitoba, has opined that “The epidemic of violence Indigenous women and girls have experienced, and continue to endure, is a national emergency.”.Others chimed in as well. “As a sociologist, I’m not interested in adjudicating this case according to an official legal definition of genocide,” wrote Andrew Woolford, a professor and self-described scholar at the University of Manitoba, in a column for the Winnipeg Free Press. Reinventing the accepted definition of is necessary, Woolford argued, because “… the history of settler colonialism in Canada includes a variety of efforts to remove, assimilate, starve and erase Indigenous nations. When one approach failed, the settler colonial mesh recalibrated.”.If you see an entire history as a linked web of genocidal actions and intentions, as Woolford appears to, then clearly anything bad that happens to indigenous persons is another instance and further evidence of genocide. Thus, Woolford’s theory seems to be both self-proving and logically unfalsifiable..Rather than being an inter-group form of violence, the evidence from Canada also shows that 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; and very few women in the sex trade, indigenous or otherwise, are murdered by their clients..There has been no evidence presented by the way, that any of the women alleged to have been murdered by Skibicki were occupants of the lowest and most dangerous rung of the prostitution ladder, namely streetwalking. What is clear however, is that contrary to urban mythology based on the vile Robert Pickton saga, the RCMP reports conclude that “… it would be inappropriate to suggest any significant difference in the prevalence of sex trade workers among Aboriginal female homicide victims as compared to non-Aboriginal female homicide victims.” That is another reason to challenge the ongoing blood libel..Of course, the alleged murders of these four women, whether by Skibicki or others, were heinous crimes regardless of the victims' occupations. Surely these women did not deserve to die..But just as surely true genocides like the Holocaust involving the slaughter of millions, do not deserve to be trivialized by equating them to a few horrific but sporadic murders..Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba, and editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter.
