The National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls heard thousands of stories of systemic and structural violence and reached the inescapable conclusion that the Canadian state has perpetrated a genocide against Indigenous peoples.

It produced a supplementary report providing its legal analysis on the applicability of genocide. It is important for the public, especially journalists and the legal community, to read this report in full. As co-authors of the National Inquiry’s legal analysis, we hope to bring to light here some of the important elements of the legal basis for using the term genocide.

To understand the true nature of genocide, we must dissociate from popular notions of it. Colonial genocide is a slow-moving process. Unlike the traditional paradigms of genocide, such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which took place in determined periods of time and were characterized by mass killings, colonial destruction of Indigenous peoples has taken place insidiously and over centuries. It is structural, systemic, and traverses multiple administrations and political leadership.

In international law, genocide is both a crime that entails individual criminal responsibility and a wrongful act that entails state responsibility. Colonial genocide elicits the responsibility of Canada as a state, because it is the unlawful conduct of the state spanning decades and composed of numerous distinct acts and omissions which, in aggregate, violate the international prohibition against genocide.

This gradual obliteration of Indigenous peoples and the lack of a uniform national policy spearheaded by a totalitarian mastermind, differentiate colonial genocide from our traditional understanding of the term.

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Genocide is defined in law as certain prohibited acts or omissions, carried out with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group of people. Genocide encompasses a variety of both lethal and non-lethal acts, including acts of “slow death” and all of these acts have very specific impacts on women and girls.

This reality must be acknowledged as a precursor to understanding genocide as a root cause of the violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada. There are five forms of prohibited conduct — killing is only one of them.

Other conduct that can amount to genocide includes inflicting mental or physical harm, such as sexual violence; imposing conditions of life meant to bring about physical destruction, such as lack of adequate food, water, or medical care; imposing measures intended to prevent births, such as forced sterilization; and the forced transfer of children from the group, such as residential schools and the Sixties Scoop.

The second legal element of genocide is the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the protected group. This “specific intent” element is somewhat fictional when assessing state responsibility, because, unlike an individual, a state is an abstract entity with no mind or thoughts. Consequently, the intent of a state can only be evidenced by policy, and more specifically a manifest pattern of conduct over time that demonstrate the state’s “intent” to destroy a particular group.

This destruction need not be just physical or biological, it also includes destruction of a social unit. Canada has displayed a continuous policy, to destroy Indigenous peoples physically, biologically, and as social units.

Many policies have persisted to the present day and have devastating impacts on Indigenous communities, particularly women and girls. When victims resist, defy, subvert, and survive destructive policies, it does not make these policies any less genocidal. More than anything, it is testament to the resilience and strength of Indigenous peoples. Genocide is not about the result, it is about the intent to destroy.

Calling Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people a genocide does not negate the suffering of other communities — this is not a competition of horrors — but to not use the word in this context would deny Indigenous peoples their suffering.

Genocide has occurred and the government has bravely accepted the term. Ending the Canadian genocide of Indigenous peoples is a legal obligation and requires an honest and active process of decolonization. This requires full and prompt implementation of the Calls for Justice made by this National Inquiry, now.

Amanda Ghahremani is an international criminal lawyer and co-author of the NIMMIWG’s legal analysis on genocide. Fannie Lafontaine is professor of law at Université Laval and Canada Research Chair on International Criminal Justice and Human Rights.

Two years ago, Prime Minister Trudeau unveiled Canada’s National Holocaust Monument. It was a culmination of a massive advocacy effort to remember the victims and survivors of the Nazi genocide: Jews, Roma, LGBT, the physically and mentally disabled, political adversaries, and many others.

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It also marked the end of a personal journey for me. After a five-year education and advocacy campaign, the National Holocaust Monument Act was signed into law in 2011, five years before the monument would be unveiled.

In an effort to connect with my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who never spoke of his experiences, I decided legislating the monument was the only way to permanently (and physically) preserve the memory of the Holocaust into our national consciousness.

Passing the legislation was no small feat. I had MPs laugh at me, throw me out of their office and tell me I was wasting my time. It was only when I described, in detail, the processes of intentional mass murders and showed photos of mass graves that people listened.

This is why I have been following with interest the debate over the term “genocide” in regards to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) report.

The disappearance and murder of thousands of Indigenous women in Canada is a moral abyss that should shake every Canadian. We can no longer afford to be complacent about the violence and racism far too many Indigenous women continue to experience in our country, and the colonial legacy that served as the backdrop for this shameful situation.

The question of whether these murders constitute genocide is a conversation that must reject any suggest of a hierarchy of suffering. A single life is of infinite and equal value. One could argue the question of whether the term genocide is the right one is not so much a matter of morality as law, and in this regard we have the benefit of seven decades of jurisprudence.

In December of 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted as its first treaty the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. While the Holocaust served as the catalyst for the convention and the enshrinement of the word in the world’s lexicon, genocide is not a term unique to the industrialized mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War.

Multiple atrocities have been internationally recognized as meeting the definition of genocide. Here in Canada, that list includes the Armenian genocide, the genocidal famine of Ukrainians, the Rwandan genocide, the Srebrenica genocide, and more recently the Yazidi genocide. A growing effort to have Parliament recognize the Roma genocide that took place during the Second World War has received support from the Jewish community and others.

In each of these cases, the question of genocide is one of intent, and on this point international law is quite clear. “The deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group” constitutes genocide, according to the Genocide Convention.

Does Canada’s history of colonialism create a context in which the racism and violence experienced by Indigenous women in recent years constitute genocide?

To conclude that it does requires asserting that the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes were singularly motivated by the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, Indigenous peoples. This is simply not supported by the evidence.

As author Erna Paris recently noted: “The men who killed Indigenous women were not genocidaires set on destroying a group. They were commonplace domestic criminals — murderers and predators who ought not to have been elevated to fit a paradigm.”

Words matter. Just as we must use the MMIW report as a catalyst for meaningful change, we must be accurate in how we describe the horrific situation at hand.

To be clear, the Government of Canada has failed Indigenous peoples, time and again. Throughout our nation’s history, Indigenous policy has often proven racist, patronizing, misguided, poorly conceived, and simply immoral.

And while there are many terms — some of them scathing — that can be used to describe Canada’s record in the period in which thousands of Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing, genocidal is not one of them.

Laura Grosman is vice president of philanthropy and government relations at Phaze 3 Management and founder of the Canadian Holocaust Memorial Project.

Note — June 12, 2019: An earlier version of this Big Debate opinion feature included a poll question for readers. It was an inappropriate treatment for this subject and has been removed.