The case for controversial finding of ‘ cultural genocide’
In its landmark report on Tuesday, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission lays out a litany of appalling historical facts and one highly controversial conclusion: that Canada perpetrated a kind of genocide on its First Nations.
“Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group,” the report reads. “States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.
“In its dealing with Aboriginal people,” the report states, “Canada did all these things.”
There is discomfort with the term “cultural genocide,” and not just because it seems to put Canada in a hall of shame with Germany, Rwanda, Turkey, and others. Nor just because it may have legal consequences.
Mainly, it is because the term seems to get to genocide, the most fearsome crime of all, by skipping over deliberate mass murder. Residential schools, after all, were schools, not death camps or killing fields.
The idea of irreparable cultural destruction is gaining new urgency as ISIL continues its iconoclastic rampage through the great antiquities of Syria.
Its new use in Canada, however, in a country widely seen as a model of applied human rights, is likely to return “cultural genocide” to the global vernacular.
The term was linked to “genocide” proper, in 1944, when the late Polish American jurist Raphael Lemkin published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
“Genocide has two phases,” Lemkin wrote. “One, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”
The idea of cultural genocide, or ethnocide, reflected Lemkin’s view that genocide is not simply mass murder.