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The Canadian government moved the Ahiarmiut to an isolated island and did not provide them with food, shelter or tools.

To survive, they ate bark and other scavenged food until winter came. Many died. In 1957, they were relocated again. They were given tents, as well as a “starvation box” that might feed them for a week. Many more died.

There were three more relocations after this.

The way Canada’s government treated the Ahiarmiut is similar to the way the Soviet Union treated several minority groups in 1944 including the Tartars, the Chechens and ethnic Koreans. Trainloads of people were sent to Siberia and left without food, clothing and shelter.

Up to 50 per cent died, just like the Ahiarmiut people. Scholars recognize the Soviet Union’s actions as genocide.

In legal terms, the only reason not to call the deportations of the Ahiarmiut genocide is the question of intent. The UNGC specifies that actions constituting genocide must be accompanied by “an intent to destroy” the group in question.

Perhaps Canadian bureaucrats did not intend that the Ahiarmiut should die. Perhaps they believed that Indigenous people could survive even if they were left on an isolated cold island they had never lived on before and where they were given no shelter, tools or food.

Even so, when Canada deported the Ahiarmiut, it violated its international commitments to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which Canada voted for on Dec. 10, 1948. This was a declaration, not a legal treaty. But it implied a commitment to all human rights, including rights to adequate food and protection from starvation, the right to housing and the right to health.