Is Canada carrying out nothing less than an intentional “genocide” against Indigenous peoples— not centuries or decades ago, but right now?

The inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls made that dramatic charge this week, and the fallout will be felt for a long time to come. Already, the Organization of American States wants a panel of experts to investigate.

On one level, the answer is easy. Placed against the horrific events that have defined the word in modern times — the Holocaust, the slaughter in Rwanda, massacres of Muslims in Bosnia — Canada’s current treatment of Indigenous peoples obviously doesn’t compare.

The word evokes the most appalling images — concentration camps, gas chambers, wholesale slaughter and mass graves. No wonder such people as Sen. Roméo Dallaire, who knows a thing or two about genocide from his time in Rwanda, say using the word to describe the Indigenous experience in this country goes way over the mark.

Further, asserting that “present-day Canadian state conduct” — not just the actions of long-dead colonial figures — amounts to actual genocide comes with a host of legal, financial and political consequences under international law.

It’s completely unclear where that might lead, but the OAS demand for some sort of investigation provides a taste of what might be to come. Does Prime Minister Justin Trudeau realize the consequences of endorsing (or at least appearing to endorse) the inquiry’s use of “genocide” to describe Canada’s conduct, as he did on Tuesday?

Only three countries (Germany, Rwanda and Cambodia) now acknowledge responsibility for genocide within their borders. Is that a club we want to join? Most importantly, have we thought through the implications?

How, then, can the inquiry argue seriously that genocide is the right label for Canada’s actions, right into the present day, toward Indigenous peoples? Those who oppose using the word should at least grapple with the inquiry’s real arguments, which are set out at length in a supplementary report issued along with its findings this week, rather than the caricatures presented by too many critics.

They are well worth reading in full. The inquiry’s experts do not, in fact, argue that the Indigenous experience in Canada is comparable to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany or Tutsis in Rwanda. Quite the contrary.

The issue, they write, is that the international law governing genocide, starting with a 1948 United Nations convention that Canada signed onto the following year, was developed right after the Second World War with the horror of the Holocaust fresh in the world’s mind.

The law therefore developed along the lines of what the inquiry calls the “Holocaust model” — a “limited prototype of genocide as time-intensive, mass murder, which is calculated, coordinated within a nation-state, and well planned by authoritarian leaders espousing ideological worldviews.”

None of that fits easily, as the inquiry’s legal experts acknowledge, with the experience of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The inquiry argues they suffered, and continue to suffer, from something else: “colonial genocide” that has “taken place insidiously over centuries.”

Rather than being a time-limited event, so the argument goes, colonial genocide is a whole series of events that range from outright murder (such as distributing smallpox-infected blankets or paying rewards for scalps in the 18th century) to planned starvation, forced relocation, residential schools, poverty and a host of other abuses.

Importantly, it also involves “omissions” — things that Canadian authorities should have done to ensure Indigenous peoples had decent health services, education, housing and the like, but failed to do.

But has Canada actually been out to “destroy” Indigenous peoples, as the UN definition of genocide says? The inquiry argues that should include not just physical destruction, but “the destruction of a group as a social unit” with a distinct history, traditions and relationships. By that definition, relocating people or removing children from families could amount to “destroying” them as a people.

In effect, the inquiry seems to be arguing that even if Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples doesn’t actually fit the legal definition of genocide, it should. And if Indigenous peoples had been at the table as the law was developed, it would be quite different. It would take into account the long impact of colonialism, not just the more limited spasms of violence that have shocked the world too many times.

No doubt that is true. But it amounts to an acknowledgement that what we understand to be “genocide” and the impact of colonialism in the present day aren’t really the same thing. Lumping them together is a dramatic way of making a point about continuing injustice, but it doesn’t stand up under careful scrutiny.

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Perhaps we need a new word to describe the ongoing harms of the colonial legacy. “Genocide” isn’t it.

But more than disputing over words, surely, we need actions to address the real-life wrongs endured by Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous women and girls. The government should focus on that, as should we all.

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