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The final report of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls dropped the word “genocide” — which quickly became the headline.

The relationship with Canada’s first peoples has been described as genocide in the past. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s report used the term “cultural genocide” but this is the first time the word has been used without qualification.

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Genocide is a loaded word and it refers to the worst of humanity. The Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and Rwanda immediately come to mind. But genocide has a wider connotation.

Article two of the 1948 United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The convention goes on to divide genocide into two elements: the mental (the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”) and the physical (which includes the “killing of 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 and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”)