Column misrepresented Sinclair’s position

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This article was published 22/01/2025 (312 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is a poor tribute to the Honourable Murray Sinclair to engage in residential school minimization and misrepresentation.

Jerry Storie (Residential schools: considering intentions and consequences, Think Tank, Jan. 20) interprets the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) use of “cultural genocide” as reflecting Sinclair’s view that residential schools do not meet the legal definition of genocide.

But one needs to bear in mind that the TRC’s mandate did not include adjudicative power, and Sinclair was clear that genocide is a legal question to be decided by the courts and not the TRC.

He did not refuse to call residential schools genocide.

Storie also misrepresents the origins of the genocide concept. He misattributes to Raphael Lemkin a notion of genocide as “a plan to eradicate a whole people based on ethnic and religious divides.”

This is different from Lemkin’s definition of genocide as “a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

For Lemkin, the “essential foundations” of group life included the cultural life of the group. Genocide did not “originally” mean killing people, as Storie claims — for Lemkin, cultural destruction, or ethnocide, was always involved in the crime of genocide.

The United Nations General Assembly, in their debates over what would become the UN Genocide Convention, would eventually dilute this component, though Lemkin did feel his concept of cultural destruction was preserved somewhat through the inclusion of article 2(e) “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Debates continue about whether residential schools meet the criteria of the Genocide Convention — for the record, I contend they do. But even those genocide studies and legal experts who think they do not would agree that the schools were, at minimum, a crime against humanity, which is still a very serious charge.

Storie also minimizes the destructive intent of residential schools and at times conflates intent with motive.

Residential schools did borrow from strategies used in other disciplinary institutions, such as religious schooling and reformatories. But these strategies were redirected toward eliminating the so-called “Indian problem.”

What made Indigenous Peoples a problem was that their cultures and values connected them to territories in a manner that interfered with Canadian settler colonialism.

This was not simply benevolence intended to uplift groups threatened to be left behind in a new world, though such rationalizations were at times used.

It was first and foremost an effort to denigrate and remove groups perceived as obstacles to land settlement, resource extraction, and national consolidation.

When leaders presented arguments for the need for residential schools, it was all too common for them to disparage Indigenous cultures as savage and backward. In the residential schools, staff treated Indigenous children as dirty and profane. Some among the latter group may have been motivated by a Christian humanism, but that is a separate issue from the intent of the system itself to erase Indigenous Peoples.

Because Indigenous children were dehumanized by the residential school system, it meant that the brutality of corporal punishment, which Storie notes was normal practice in schools of the time, often took more frequent and extreme forms, especially when Indigenous children resisted assimilation.

The sexual violence that was all too common is likewise not equivalent to any that occurred in non-Indigenous schools. Indigenous children were abused and violated for who they were, because they were viewed as less-than-human until they fully accepted their forced assimilation.

As someone who teaches criminology, I am skeptical of criminalization as a strategy to correct behaviour and sympathize with Storie’s worries about laws against denialism.

In an ideal world, those who deny or minimize the genocide against Indigenous Peoples in Canada would be persuaded of the wrongness of their thinking through reports like those produced by the TRC and National Inquiry for MMIWG.

But criminalization is not solely about correcting perpetrators.

It also one way that society recognizes that certain actions are so harmful that they cross a line in terms of their acceptability. For victims, criminalization of denial thus provides recognition of the suffering residential schools caused to Indigenous Peoples and demonstrates a social concern not to exacerbate this suffering further by enabling disingenuous debaters who try to salvage residential schools from their genocidal history.

Andrew Woolford is the department head and a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba.