Was there a Canadian genocide?

Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (4^th ed.)
by Adam Jones  

New York: Routledge, 2024
$61.99  /  9781032028101

Reviewed by Richard Butler

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In recent years there has been ongoing controversy over whether Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people—whether through the residential schools system or more generally—was and/or still is genocide.

That word came to prominence in that regard through the use of “cultural genocide” in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, published in 2015.¹

The issue was expanded in the 2019 Final Report of the Commission on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Girls and Women, where the commissioners concluded that the treatment received by those groups in the present-day justice system and elsewhere was indeed unqualified genocide.²

The question of whether there had in fact been pure, unqualified genocide became particularly pointed following the 2021 Canada Day announcement in that respect by the Canadian Historical Association.³ Some historians asked whether there was any precedent for an association of historians stipulating that there is (or, worse, that there must be) a consensus respecting any but the most obvious points of history. They observed that the word had a range of meaning which properly made true consensus impossible. They may have wondered whether any dissent meant denialism and racism by association. Would jobs or research funding be lost? Others then wrote back in support of the announcement.

More recently, the focus has been returned to residential schools by a 2023 private member’s bill which, if passed, would have made it a Criminal Code offence to willfully promote hatred against Indigenous people by condoning, denying, justifying, or minimizing the facts about residential schools.⁴ How would genocide fit in?

A Conservative candidate in the 2025 Canadian federal election [Aaron Gunn, the CPC candidate who was criticized for his post, got elected, as did the NDP’s Leah Gazan, proponent of the private member’s bill respecting denial of harms of residential schools.] has been widely castigated for saying that, notwithstanding the acknowledged harms of residential schools, they did not constitute a genocide as that term is properly understood.⁵

Clearly there is need for a broader understanding of precisely what “genocide” may mean, and for a more nuanced assessment of whether Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people does or does not fall under such an indictment, and why.

Where better to look for guidance on those points than the 2024 edition of the “most wide-ranging textbook” on the subject, a world-wide standard which happens to have been authored by a British Columbian who teaches at UBC Okanagan?

Readers should not let the fact it is a textbook deter them. The book is wonderfully written and remarkably engaging. It is conversational in style and never pedantic. The chapters are structured to make the basic information about the various features of genocide as accessible as possible. Within the chapters there are headings and sections. For instance, in the first chapter, author Adam Jones presents anthropological instances of genocide and a section on Raphael Lemkin’s naming of genocide for purposes of the 1948 United Nations Convention, with attendant boxes containing lists and details. He then sets out 25 scholarly definitions of the term in Box 1.4, before engaging in a comparative analysis and offering conclusions on which meaning he personally favours and why. One can pause or skip ahead as one wishes. One simply never gets bogged down.

Overall, I would give this book my very strong recommendation, with some qualifications on certain specific points set out below. It is a book for everyone. However, it is not inexpensive. I have the privilege of a review copy. You will probably choose to obtain yours through your local library, via inter-library loan. Even so, especially at this seemingly pivotal point in our national history, it is well worth the effort.

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Chapter 1 of the overview provides a starting point for defining genocide:

Lemkin (1944)

By genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or ethnic group, … not necessarily … immediate [but] a coordinated 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 [through the] disintegration of political and social institutions … [and] destruction of personal security [etc.]. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity and the actions involved are directed against individuals not in their individual capacity but as members of the national group. [It] has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. …. (16-17)

Stephen Holmes

[It is a special kind of crime] because culture is the unit of collective memory, whereas the legacies of the dead can be kept alive. …. To kill a culture is to cast its individual members into individual oblivion …. (17)

The UN Convention

The Convention places stronger weight on physical and biological destruction and less on broader social destruction. Yet it is not necessary to kill anyone in order to commit genocide under the Convention. Serious bodily or mental harm qualifies, as does preventing births or the forcible transferring of children. (22)

Chapter 1 continues by providing the basis for a more nuanced assessment of the essential features of genocide. I will return to more of the substance of that chapter at the end of this review.

First, though, let me tell you a little more about what the rest of this illuminating book contains.

Chapter 2 gives insight into the breadth of genocide as a social phenomenon. In that chapter, Jones introduces us to the “four horsemen of the genocidal apocalypse”—namely, State and Empire, war and revolution.

The modern state, Jones tells us, tries to impose a “legible” order upon social formulations both beyond and within its borders. They typically do so through acts of imperialism and colonialism—imperial expansion followed by internal colonialism. Both, Jones tells us, are “mapped into the DNA of the state.”

Internal colonialism has greatest relevance for indigenous populations worldwide:

Native people occupy marginal positions both territorially and socially[. T]heir homelands are often coveted by metropolitan planners, developers and “settlers.” Profits flow from periphery to core[. T]he environment is ravaged. The result is the undermining and dissolution, often destruction, of indigenous societies, accomplished by massacres, selective killings, expulsion, coerced labour, disease and substance abuse. (86)

In Canada, the most proximate cause of deaths would seem to be limited to disease and substance abuse, together with the knock-on effects of inter-generational trauma as expressed through violence by Indigenous men against Indigenous women.

Jones adds that genocide is “further interwoven with colonialism in the phenomenon of settler colonialism” in which “the metropolitan power encourages or dispatches colonists to ‘settle’ the territory.”

One of the genocidal consequences can be what Jones terms “imperial famines,” in which millions of deaths from starvation occur as a result of administrative malfeasance and plain indifference of colonial governments. Jones gives as examples the famines in British India at the turn of the 19^th century and the Congo “rubber terror” resulting in the population being reduced by half.

Another example, closer to home, might be the extermination of the buffalo as described by Michelle Good in Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada:

This slaughter was encouraged by both the American and Canadian governments and was yet another implement in the colonial toolkit. Since the buffalo were critical to the survival of the Plains people, the decimation of the herds was an intentional strike against their ability to provide for themselves, a strike against self-sufficiency. The buffalo were a sacred gift to the people, providing them with food, clothing, and shelter. The wholesale slaughter was devastating to the people, not only because of the resulting impoverishment and starvation, but also because of the horror of such wanton destruction of the Creator’s gifts.

I had angrily decried Good’s bald assertion that that policy was genocidal, unsupported as it was by any evidence of the government’s genocidal intent. However, the broader view I have taken from chapter 2 of Jones’s book now gives me pause to wonder exactly what sense of the word genocide she may have meant.⁶

Chapter 2 continues by describing how genocide typically emerges in times of imperial ascent and then again during imperial dissolution. War, he says, often provides the setting. He provides, as examples, the dawn of industrial death in the first World War and the barbarization of warfare in the second.

In sum, the message I take from Jones’s overview is that genocide is much broader, conceptually, than I had previously thought. It can be said to occur in a wider range of circumstances, and through a much wider variety of means, than in my previous prototypical understanding based on the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan massacres. I once quoted Irwin Cotler as saying “If we say everything is a genocide, then nothing is a genocide.” My purpose then was to distinguish Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people from those more prototypical events. I see now the distinction was over-simple. The concept of genocide is not so binary.

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Part 2 of Jones’s book comprises case studies of various genocides, necessarily approached from the 10,000-foot level. Among those studies is chapter 3, a study of genocides of indigenous peoples, discussed further in a moment.

Part 3 approaches genocide from social science perspectives, including on the psychology of perpetuators and of rescuers; on political science; and on gendering genocide as an expression of root and branch extermination. Part 4 deals with the future of genocide, with chapters on memory, forgetting, and denial as well as on justice, truth, and redress. Of particular present interest are the segments on forgetting and denial, and on truth, reconciliation, and the role of redress and apology.

In chapter 3, Jones begins with the conquest of the Americas, its legal-utilitarian justification and eliminationist ideology. He writes about the effect on “Latin” America of invasion, occupation, and exploitations from the 15^th century onward, with the exterminatory impact only beginning to wane after 100 years. He writes of contact between Americans and indigenous people, the massacres that followed, and the express intentions which drove them. It is easy to accept this account as a “sustained campaign of genocide.” Writ large in that way, the case study nicely illustrates the general points made in chapter 2.

However, the few paragraphs on residential schools—which appear as part of the segment entitled “Other Genocidal Strategies”—are generally unhelpful.

Unaccountably, at least where Canada is concerned, Jones appears to rely largely on a 1997 article by Ward Churchill on residential schools in the United States. Churchill writes as follows:

[Residential schools were] the lynchpin of assimilationist aspirations … in which it was ideally intended that every single aboriginal child would be removed from his or her home, family, community and culture at the earliest possibly age and held for years in state sponsored “educational” facilities, systematically deculturated, and simultaneously indoctrinated … to the point of seeking as a matter of policy their utter eradication. (144)

That passage certainly reflects what Nicholas Davin reported back to Sir John A. Macdonald in 1879, prompting supposed statements about “killing the Indian in the child.”⁷ However, it also reflects a monolithic and asynchronous view of what actually happened at the schools—as described in such telling detail by Jim Miller, John Molloy, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.⁸ It is easy to build a case for genocide on the basis of the quoted passage. With all due respect, it is too easy. Even in a textbook, calling the Canadian residential school system genocide deserves greater granularity.⁹

Perhaps to that end, Jones presents the assertion of forcible transfer of children as being sufficient to bring Canadian residential schools within the UN Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide. Yet he does not mention facts which would tend to rebut that conclusion, including but not limited to the following:

-the lack of any legal basis allowing the forcible removal of groups of children;¹⁰

-the evidence that only one third of Indigenous children in Canada attended residential schools, with the rest enrolled in Indian day schools, provincial schools or not attending school at all;

-the fact that, for the most part, attendance at residential schools required parents to make an application before their children were admitted.¹¹

Jones also relies on mortality rates at the schools as evidence of genocide. Deaths were said by Churchill to “result from starvation, disease, systematic torture, sexual predation” at rates which matched or exceeded the death rates at Nazi concentration camps. Those causes and that scale of death are inconsistent with everything else I have read on the subject. Jones also rightly acknowledges, citing the 1907 Bryce report,¹² that disease was the greatest killer.

There is also mention of a report from Canada’s Ministry of National Health and Welfare to the effect that “100 per cent of the children at some [residential] schools were sexually abused between 1950 and 1980.” If that were in fact the extent of abuse, and it was known to the ministry, it defies all reason that the schools in question were not closed summarily. Unbelievable.

It is perhaps a little unfair to criticize Jones for not delving more deeply into this particular feature of indigenous genocide in North America, when the book has had so much else to cover.

Indeed, Jones ends chapter 3 with a section entitled “Complexities and Caveats.”

In that section, Jones acknowledges that recourse must be had to concepts of second and third degree genocide (by reference to features to be explained below) in order to support Churchill’s framing.

Jones further admits that one does not find a great deal of state-directed killing in Canada. The harms here were more often caused by the perceived imperatives of settler colonialism.

Genocidal effects, if that is what they were, came mainly as a result of political suasion and fiscal considerations. They were the product of a society “in which the whole bureaucratic apparatus might officially be directed to protect innocent people but in which a whole race is nevertheless subject to remorseless pressures of [inevitable] destruction.” Good intentions were at odds with the colonial project itself. “If near annihilation resulted … [it] was sometimes lamented … but it was never remotely sufficient to warrant the cancellation or serious revision of the enterprise.”

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This brings us full circle to the basic question inherent in each of the examples given at the start of this review:

-what did the TRC mean by “cultural genocide” as opposed to the broader form proposed by the MMIGW report?

-what did the Canadian Historical Association resolution mean, and what did the dissidents feel they were being forced to accept?

-in what sense of the word could genocide denial constitute an offence under the private member’s bill?

-what did the Conservative candidate really mean by saying the residential school system did not constitute genocide, and was he castigated as a denier in some other, broader application of the word than he intended?

It is hard to know the answers. In any event, for present purposes, I am more interested in surveying the possible causes of ambiguity.

For that, we can look back again to Jones’s chapter 1, which helpfully breaks down the concept of genocide into its defining features.

In general, Jones writes,

[t]he elements of the definition may be divided into harder or softer positions…. Harder positions are guided by concern that genocide will be rendered banal or meaningless by careless use. …. Softer positions reflect concerns that excessively rigid framings (for example, a focus on the total physical extermination of a group) rule out too many actions that, logically and morally, demand to be included [; and also a] wish to see a dynamic and evolving genocide framework rather than a static and inflexible one.” Sometimes within a given account of genocide, there may be a soft position in framing genocidal strategies combined with a hard approach in defining victim groups.

Jones then sets out those composite elements. Here is a summary for present purposes:

Agency—the actor(s) through which genocide is committed: clear emphasis on state and official authorities, but sometime private individuals as within settler colonialism. (29)

Victims: collectives and social minorities, sometimes self-defining. (30)

Goals: destruction/eradication of the victim group, whether physically or culturally or (in the case of political groups) of its social power.

Scale: some scholars require targeting of a victim group in its totality; others a “substantial portion.” (30)

Strategies: a coherent plan of different actions; direct or indirect (e.g. economic or biological subjugation); targeted against certain members of or relationships within the victim group (32)

Intent: with intent to destroy; structurally and systematically, through a series of purposeful actions (32). Intent is properly distinguished from motive (as for example in the prosecution of a mercy killing, or a program of cultural assimilation prompted by a genuine desire to make things better). Some scholars require “specific intent”—where the perpetrator clearly seeks to destroy. Others, noting the difficulties of proof, would substitute a more general, knowledge-based notion of intent—where the perpetrator is aware (knew or should have known) that destruction will occur in the ordinary course of events as a result of his/her action or inaction. (49)

[This is really the civil standard for a finding of culpable negligence, rarely if ever enough for a conviction in a criminal context—which is, of course, where an indictment of genocide would properly be tried.]

Killing: a substantial number of instances of killing is seemingly a core element of genocide. A widespread or systematic campaign of killing targeting a substantial or significant portion of the group. But note the difficulty—as in indigenous genocides—of finding evidence of intent in relation to a large number of relatively small massacres, not necessarily centrally directed and generally separated from each other spatially and temporally. (32-33)

In short, with all of the possible combinations and permutations, it is difficult to pin down precisely what anyone might mean in declaring something a genocide.

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At this stage, there is an overwhelming urge to say whether or not one considers Canada’s historical and present-day treatment of Indigenous people in general, or its residential schools system in particular, to be a genocide. But that is not a proper purpose of a book review.¹³

What I can say in closing is that “genocide” is sadly not a word which can be taken at face value.

For many people, “genocide” is a word of truth and power. Qualifying it with an adjective like “cultural” may seem to diminish the force of the indictment, the profound moral wrong.

For many others, “genocide” is an inflammatory word, a “blood libel,” an inaccurate and unjust attack on good faith conduct. They argue it reflects a misstatement as to strategy and a gross overstatement in scale. It suggests a persistent malign intent with respect to a series of harmful consequences that were either unforeseeable before the fact or irremediable afterwards. And in any event, while there were too many deaths, there is no documentary evidence of a single killing. Remarkably, some actually suggest that residential schools were on the whole not so bad a place to go for an education.¹⁴

For others still, imprecision and uncertainty of meaning, from Lemkin forward, has invited a counterproductive tendency toward “concept creep.” They point to the MMIGW Commission’s conclusion of plain unqualified genocide as an example, or the assertion of genocide with respect to society’s treatment of transgendered people.

Worst of all for me, “genocide” has become a flash point in a larger dynamic of narrative versus counter-narrative—with all that that entails. How I long for a truly neutral account.

Whatever one’s belief or stance on those matters may be, Adam Jones’s book can help each of us in reaching a principled position, in articulating it, and in understanding why others might rationally have arrived at and articulated a different view.

In doing so, the value and timeliness of the book cannot be overstated.

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Richard Butler lives on the traditional territory of the lekwungen-speaking Peoples, a retired lawyer and sometime law professor, and more recently a writer on various Indigenous subjects. He is the author of Taking Reconciliation Personally, I Dare Say… Conversations with Indigeneity, and the new title What Is This? Who Am I?: Culturally Informed Appreciation of Coastal Peoples’ Artworks, published through A & R Publishing. [Editor’s Note: Richard Butler recently wrote the essay An Exercise in Futility and has reviewed books by The Honourable Murray Sinclair CC, Mazina Giizhik, Reverend Al Tysick, John Borrows & Kent McNeil (eds.), Karen Duffek, Bill McLennan, Jordan Wilson (eds.), C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan (eds.), and Aaron A.M. Ross for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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1. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html . ↩︎
2. https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/ See Executive Summary, p. 3-5. ↩︎
3. https://cha-shc.ca/advocacy/the-history-of-violence-against-indigenous-peoples-fully-warrants-the-use-of-the-word-genocide/ see also https://www.christopherdummitt.com/blank-page and https://shekonneechie.ca/2021/08/13/open-letter-to-the-council-of-the-canadian-historical-association-and-the-canadian-public/ ↩︎
4. https://www.parl.ca/documentviewer/en/44-1/bill/C-413/first-reading . ↩︎
5. https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/conservative-candidate-aaron-gunn-to-stay-in-the-race-in-b-c / . ↩︎
6. Yet I still have difficulty accepting that the Canadian government positively encouraged the decimation of the buffalo—if that is indeed what Good means—including because doing so would be contrary to the policy of making Indians self-sufficient. ↩︎
7. There is apparently no documentary support for Macdonald ever saying this. However, for statements by him to the same troubling effect, see the Official Report  of the debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, 9 May 1883, 1107-08. ↩︎
8. J.S. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: a History of Native Residential Schools  University of Toronto Press 1996; John Milloy, A National Crime: the Canadian Government and the Residential School System 1879 to 1986 University of Manitoba Press 1999, 2017. ↩︎
9. In distinguishing the ways and means of indigenous genocide in the United States from what happened in Canada, I am mindful of what Paulette Regan terms the Canadian “peacemaking myth:” see Unsettling the Settler Within, UBC Press 2010., p. 67 ff. ↩︎
10. After 1920, the Indian Act did contain a provision for removal in individual cases of truancy or for children in need of protection. ↩︎
11. See Butler, Taking Reconciliation Personally, A & R Publishing (Amazon) 2022/223, pp. 34, 213, 244-50, 252, 272-73, 339-41, 359-64. ↩︎
12. https://openhistoryseminar.com/canadianhistory/chapter/document-1-bryce-1907/. ↩︎
13. In any event, my own evolving views on the matter have been published elsewhere: see Butler, I Dare Say, A & R Publishing (Amazon) rev. ed. 2023, p. 268-76; in my review of Grave Error https://thebcreview.ca/2024/07/2216-butler-champion-flanagan/; and more recently in my review of Murray Sinclair’s Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation https://thebcreview.ca/2025/01/08/2417-butler-sinclair/. ↩︎
14. See Grave Error chapters 12 and 14; see also https://nationalpost.com/opinion/nigel-biggar-residential-schools-were-no-atrocity-just-look-at-the-evidence. ↩︎