What do the facts say?

As immeasurably tragic as every single murder is, the numbers in question are orders of magnitude smaller than any genocide ever documented. Even combining missing and murdered women inflates the toll because 14 percent of the total comprises missing persons, many of whom are eventually located alive. This reduces the estimated murders to 32 per year between 1980 and 2012, as determined by two RCMP reports. This, in turn, yields an annual Indigenous female murder rate of 5 per 100,000 during the period in question. By way of comparison, Honduras has 12 times this murder rate and an Indigenous population proportionately twice as large as Canada’s but has never been accused of genocide. These data simply do not support the use of words like “epidemic” or “emergency” when compared to real genocides.

Rather than being an inter-group form of violence, the evidence from Canada also shows that the murder of Aboriginal females is largely confined to the Indigenous community itself. RCMP statistics reveal that 70-90 percent of murders are committed by Indigenous men who knew their victims; 72 percent of Indigenous women are murdered in their homes; and very few women in the sex trade, Indigenous or otherwise, are murdered by their clients. 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.”

According to the same RCMP findings, of the 20,313 national homicides between 1980 and 2012, 5 percent of victims were Indigenous women. This is, admittedly, several times as high as the murder rate for non-Aboriginal women. Still, during the same period, Indigenous men represented at least 70 percent of murdered or missing Aboriginal persons. On its face, it seems strange that an inquiry into the murder of Indigenous Canadians would deliberately exclude male victims.

Did the Inquiry marginalize these men because Indigenous males are the main killers of Indigenous females? Was misandry behind the inquiry’s call for first-degree (premeditated) murder charges to be levelled against accused killers of Indigenous women, even in circumstances suggesting second-degree charges, i.e., crimes of passion or rage? This is the most common category of Indigenous domestic murder. Overall, the data suggest the MMIWG Inquiry’s formation privileged the murder and disappearance of Indigenous females over males.

Further, blaming colonial and post-colonial policies for the murdered and missing females, and elevating the phenomenon into “genocide,” is questionable because, by and large, Indigenous activists have fought to strengthen or refine most of the traditional colonial and post-colonial features of their relationship with the Crown. Prominent examples include the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the establishment of reserves (now called First Nations), the Indian Act, Constitutional recognition, untold billions of dollars of special programmes and funding reserved for Indigenous people, and two federal agencies devoted to Indigenous issues. In other words, Indigenous leaders themselves have not generally sought to decouple their people, their lives and their communities from what Woolford calls the “mesh” of colonial Canada, but have sought to benefit from and build upon the relationship. This, too, is unlike any genocide in history. The Inquiry’s report also either denies or ignores that the post-contact European treatment of Canada’s first people involved neither conquest by warfare nor slavery, ethnic cleansing, total assimilation, nor tribute extraction.

Every murder is an outrage, and the murder and disappearance of some 1,200 Indigenous women and children is undeniably a tragedy. Sadly, however, it is shared with non-Aboriginals suffering from similar domestic pathologies including broken homes, negligent parenting, family trauma, physical and emotional abuse, substance addiction, joblessness, and the hopelessness of inter-generational welfare dependence.

From stagnant population pre-contact to a century-long open-ended baby boom

The vast area that would become Canada was remarkably unproductive in terms of population growth in the pre-contact period, compared to many other regions of the world. The Indigenous settlers had at least 15,000 years to populate the northern half of the continent, but on the eve of European settlement there were still only between 150,000 and 500,000 Indigenous people in Canada, or at most one person per 20 square kilometres. Low population numbers and density were a product of stone-age technology and chronic inter-tribal warfare on levels that make the post-contact period look like a model of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and abundant reconciliation.

There is no denying that Western infectious diseases brought death to tens of thousands of susceptible Indigenous people in the early post-contact period. This is a human tragedy of epic proportions (although it pales by comparison to the Black Death, which killed an estimated 75 million to 200 million people in Eurasia between 1346 and 1353). Still, the Indigenous population began to recover quickly from the beginning of the 20th century, and today is Canada’s fastest-growing demographic cohort. This is largely due to the miracle of modern Western medicine, a higher birth rate, and the Canadian welfare state.

In 2016 Canada had 1.7 million Indigenous people, accounting for some 5 percent of the total population. This was up from around 4 percent in 2006 and 3 percent in 1996, even as Canada’s population was growing overall. Since 2006, Canada’s Indigenous population has increased by about 43 percent – more than four times the growth rate of the non-Indigenous population over the same period. According to Statistics Canada’s population projections, “In the next two decades, the Aboriginal population is likely to exceed 2.5 million persons.”

Some genocide. No wonder the murder of Canada’s Indigenous women and girls is being called a “slow genocide”. Or, as even Chief Commissioner Buller said, “The type of genocide we have in Canada is…death by a million paper cuts for generations.” A better label might be “accidental genocide”, but this would still be nonsensical since genocide by definition is deliberate. And no genocide ever recorded has coincided with a population explosion in the targeted group.

It’s a sad fact that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people included the unfortunate and unjustified period of legislated racial segregation for treaty Indians between 1885 and 1951, as well as other small and large injustices from the first contact to the present. But the European settlement of northern North America, starting in 1535, was vastly less violent than the Spanish Conquest of Central and South America and numerous other colonisations. It led to permanent pacification – including the abolition of endemic tribal warfare and the voluntary signing of treaties. Following this, huge sums of money were spent since Confederation in 1867 to enhance the life-chances and physical wellbeing of Indigenous peoples, along with legislation, Constitutional provisions and numerous court rulings which have defined, enhanced, and preserved Indigenous special rights and privileges. Taken together, this looks more like anti-genocide.

What is the objective?

To dodge these inconvenient facts, radical genocide scholars, influenced by both anti-scientific post-modernism and person-centred victimology studies, have so expanded the notion of genocide as to include any real or alleged action that its presumed targets claim qualify as such. This approach is clear from the primacy the inquiry gave to the unverified and unimpeached (i.e., not cross-examined) evidence that was presented. As the report states: