Journal of Genocide Research

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Canada and colonial genocide

Andrew Woolford & Jeff Benvenuto

To cite this article: Andrew Woolford & Jeff Benvenuto (2015) Canada and colonial genocide,
Journal of Genocide Research, 17:4, 373-390, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2015.1096580

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Published online: 11 Dec 2015.

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Journal of Genocide Research, 2015
Vol. 17, No. 4, 373 –390, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2015.1096580

Canada and colonial genocide

ANDREW WOOLFORD AND JEFF BENVENUTO

This introductory article offers an overview of debates about genocide and settler colonialism
in Canada. The argument is presented that Canada, although a marginal case to genocide
studies, provides important insights and challenging questions, particularly with respect to
the need to decolonize the field of genocide studies.

Introduction
In June 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released
its summary report and recommendations.1 With the report came the announce-
ment that an estimated 6,000 children perished while held within Canadian
Indian Residential Schools (IRS). From the mid nineteenth century until 1996,
when the last school finally closed, about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis
children were forcibly removed from their families and placed into institutions
fundamentally designed to destroy their indigenous identities.2 There are presently
an estimated 80,000 former students of the IRS system, who since the 1990s have
been commonly identified as ‘survivors’ (often with an upper-case ‘S’), a term that
inversely acknowledges the thousands of children who died in these schools.3
Many of these survivors have made public claims of ‘genocide’ in order to articu-
late their traumatic experiences. And because survivor testimonies are the bedrock
of the TRC, an institution with national scope and stature, such claims have eli-
cited an increasingly prominent debate in Canada in recent years.
Although many survivors speak simply of residential schools as ‘genocide’, the
TRC opted to use the term ‘cultural genocide’ when describing the destructive
nature of the Canadian IRS system. In his contribution to this special issue,
David MacDonald examines potential reasons for the TRC’s choice of terminol-
ogy, including a desire to avoid legal debate over the applicability of the United
Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(UNGC), a debate that may distract from the experiences of survivors. This pro-
nouncement nonetheless generated abundant media attention.4 Likewise, when
delivering the fourth annual Pluralism Lecture of the Global Centre for Pluralism
only a few days prior to the release of the summary report, Supreme Court Chief
Justice Beverley McLachlin said that Canada attempted to commit ‘cultural gen-
ocide’, making her the highest-ranking Canadian official to use the term in this
context.5 Her words gave further legitimacy to the TRC’s claim of cultural

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

ANDREW WOOLFORD AND JEFF BENVENUTO

genocide, though it was already firmly based upon more than 6,750 statements
from survivors and their families, along with the most thorough investigation
yet of residential school archival documents.
These are thus heady times for discussion of genocide in Canada. It is also
true, however, that use of the term genocide in the Canadian context has a
much longer pedigree, going back at least to the responses to the federal govern-
ment’s 1969 White Paper and its policy proposals aimed to repeal the Indian Act
and dissolve the federal government’s legal relationship with Aboriginal peoples.6
At that time, such language contributed to broader political discourses concerned
with what is referred to in Canadian politics as Aboriginal rights, as well as with
the field of indigenous rights that was emerging in international law and relations.7
Indeed, discussion of genocide in such contexts is often entangled with more
politicized issues related to claims for self-determination, which begins to
explain the activist underpinnings of genocide studies in Canada, a point exempli-
fied by Seth Adema’s analysis of Aboriginal prison writings in this special issue.
Since the onset of colonial settlement in North America, indigenous peoples have
struggled to assert their territorial rights and political autonomy in the face of mul-
tiple and coordinated efforts to destroy their unique forms of group life. Noted
destructive actions, in addition to residential schooling, include sporadic and
small-scale massacres,8 forced removals,9 negligent disease spread,10 prohibition
of cultural practices such as the potlatch,11 welfare-state child removals,12 the
sterilization of Aboriginal women13 and the ecological devastation of indigenous
territories.14
It was not until the 1990s that usage of the genocide keyword began centring on
the legacy of the IRS system.15 The issue attracted greater public attention as sur-
vivors raised class action lawsuits against the Canadian government and churches,
eventually leading to the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement
between the government, churches, legal counsels of former students, the Assem-
bly of First Nations and other Aboriginal organizations.16 The recent focus of the
‘genocide’ concept in the Canadian context is not exclusively on the IRS system,
as connections between residential schools and the broader project of settler colo-
nial dispossession and erasure are being drawn.17 For example, in the aftermath of
Ian Mosby’s 2013 article on the nutritional experiments carried out by the Cana-
dian government in residential schools and reserve communities,18 James
Daschuk used ‘genocide’ to describe findings from his well-received book, Clear-
ing the plains, pointing in particular to the starvation policies purposefully
implemented under Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and their toll on prairie-
region indigenous peoples.19 These ongoing discussions took place alongside
the debate about the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which has
decided not to employ the term ‘settler colonial genocide’ when discussing resi-
dential schools and other destructive Canadian policies used against indigenous
peoples but rather to raise questions about whether or not genocide occurred.20
In such instances, the discussion has moved beyond whether or not the IRS
system met the criteria of the UNGC, and in particular Section II(e) on the forcible
transfer of children.21 Instead, scholarly discourse is considering how policies of

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land appropriation, starvation and disease, combined with residential schooling,

stoke indigenous fears of social and political death, an idea discussed in
Matthew Wildcat’s review essay in this issue.
Despite these developments, there has been a paucity of attention towards
Canada in genocide studies for a number of reasons. Although the field has under-
gone a ‘colonial turn’ since the 2000s, scholars of other geographical contexts
have taken the lead. In particular, Australian scholars have been ahead in advan-
cing colonial genocide studies, and Canadian scholars have been slow off the mark
for a number of reasons.22 First of all, it is possible that patterns of denial and dis-
avowal deeply embedded in the Canadian mythology of the ‘peaceful frontier’
have been difficult to overcome, a point noted by Tricia Logan both here and else-
where.23 Moreover, perceptions of history frame conceptions of genocide, and the
mythology of the ‘peaceful frontier’ dovetails with the idea of genocide proto-
typed on the Holocaust.24 As such, the culturally oriented forms of indigenous
group destruction that characterize Canadian colonialism challenge entrenched
colloquial and scholarly understandings of genocide as nothing more than mass
murder.
A second possible reason for the relative lack of attention to colonial genocide
and Canada is that the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Canadian case are
not obvious, as demonstrated in Wildcat’s review of recent literature on the late
nineteenth-century Northern Plains. If Canadian settler colonialism was genoci-
dal, where exactly did it occur and when did it begin? And considering the inter-
generational effects at stake, as well as the perpetuation of settler colonial
practices, can we say for sure whether genocide has even ended? In addition,
why did colonial expansion and group destruction take multiple forms and
achieve varying levels of intensity in different regions over time? The very
word ‘case’ threatens to flatten the uneven and diverse character of settler coloni-
alism on Turtle Island (a geographical conception of the North American conti-
nent rooted in certain indigenous worldviews). Much nuance is lost by force
fitting it into a traditional comparative genocide studies paradigm that defines
cases on national rather than regional or international levels of analysis.25
The unsteady temporal and spatial boundaries of settler colonialism in Canada
also have problematic implications for the third issue posed by this so-called case.
Settler colonialism persists as a particular social formation in Canada, and this
means that mechanisms of redress risk perpetuating settler colonialism simply
by operating under (and potentially legitimating) the authority of the colonial
sovereign. In this issue, Robyn Green illustrates how ostensibly well-meaning dis-
courses and practices of reconciliation can effectively become exercises in settler
nation-building.26
Finally, Canada raises familiar but still troubling questions with respect to
scholarly engagement and the politics of identity. In particular, it challenges
scholars situated within the Canadian settler colonial complex to consider how
they might ‘unsettle’ or ‘decolonize’ their genocide research. Before addressing
these issues in turn, a brief historiography is needed to situate the present collection
of articles.

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ANDREW WOOLFORD AND JEFF BENVENUTO

Canada and the genocide studies canon

No single genocide reader or book can be expected to cover every genocidal
moment in world history. However, a quick survey of the literature demonstrates
how Canada is situated outside the genocide studies canon.27 Canada receives
brief mention in Leo Kuper’s Genocide: its political use in the twentieth
century, where he reviews the relationship between colonialism and genocide,
noting the distinct character of settler societies in terms of the conditions for gen-
erating genocide and genocidal massacre.28 Likewise, in Chalk and Jonassohn’s
The history and sociology of genocide, Canada as a perpetrator of genocide
receives only sanitized coverage, most of which occurs during the seventeenth
century in relation to colonial wars over the continent and the fur trade. The
massive loss of life in indigenous North America is accounted for in their work
primarily through reference to disease, the spread of which is treated as a
largely natural and inevitable process. It is loss of individual lives that matters
most for Chalk and Jonassohn, who have been strong proponents of the categorical
separation between cultural and physical forms of destruction.29 One also con-
fronts Chalk’s more benign view of colonialism in Canada in an earlier Holocaust
and Genocide Studies article, where he argues in response to those, such as Tony
Barta,30 who advance structuralist perspectives for understanding colonial genoci-
dal relations: ‘why did the native peoples of Canada fare so much better during the
invasion by Europeans than the original inhabitants of the United States or Tasma-
nia’?31 Because incidents of massacre were less prominent in Canada, indigenous
peoples within this colonial state are seemingly considered to be the beneficiaries
of settlement, thereby perpetuating the Canadian myth of the peaceful frontier.
In general, for the ‘pioneers’ of genocide studies,32 Canada was not a primary
case in their comparative approaches. But current scholarship has not made
Canada any more central. It is absent in Martin Shaw’s recent monograph on
the relationship between genocide and the international system, a study which
nevertheless draws significantly from colonial genocide studies.33 Mark
Levene’s survey of colonial genocide since the early modern era includes only
a few scattered and tangential references to Canada, mostly in the geopolitical
context of the British Empire.34 In The dark side of democracy, Michael Mann
also makes little reference to Canada, although he does examine the murderous
potential of settler democracies as these societies seek control of indigenous
lands without a desire to access indigenous labour. Even then, Mann is quite
blasé on the topic of forced assimilation as a mode of genocidal destruction. He
refers to it as a ‘lesser’ form of ‘cleansing’, adding further that assimilation
cleanses ‘culture, not lives’.35 Dirk Moses’s important edited volume, Empire,
colony, genocide, features one essay on Canada, though it suggests that Canadian
efforts to eradicate Blackfoot religious practices in the late nineteenth century did
not amount to ‘cultural genocide’.36 Finally, Adam Jones dedicates little more
than a single page to Canada in the revised second edition of his seminal text-
book.37
Canada has also not found much discussion in major genocide studies journals.
Between 1999 and the present, of the dozens of articles published in this journal

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that make some mention of Canada, we are aware of none that focus on Canada as
a case study. Only two articles—Dirk Moses’s critique of the Canadian Museum
for Human Rights38 and Christopher Powell’s ‘What do genocides kill’?39—
mention settler colonial genocide in Canada, though the editors’ invitation for
us to create this special issue is clear recognition of their interest in this region.
Canada is equally absent from other major genocide studies journals. Genocide
Studies and Prevention has since 2006 featured one article focused on Canada,
Andrew Woolford’s ‘Ontological destruction: genocide and Canadian aboriginal
peoples’.40 No such articles could be found in the venerable Holocaust and Gen-
ocide Studies.
We note the Canadian lacuna in the genocide studies literature neither to
condemn these publications, nor to demand all scholars share our research
focus. Key to Canada’s absence is the fact that scholars with regional expertise
have failed to critically assess genocide in Canada and have thereby contributed
to its peripheral status in the genocide studies canon. Whereas some of these scho-
lars have blithely accepted the myth of the peaceful frontier, or wilted under com-
parisons to a Holocaust prototype,41 those of a more critical ilk have too often
produced largely polemical works that do not easily mesh with the publication cri-
teria of scholarly journals.42 The activist tenor of some of the latter works makes
them bedfellows to the quincentennial works that appeared during the American
‘history wars’, in particular the controversial contributions by Churchill and
David Stannard.43 But, as noted in this issue by David MacDonald, who compares
the public discourse in Canada to the settler colonial ‘history wars’ in Australia
and America, even on a strictly activist basis this Canadian genocide literature
has failed to spark the same level of fervour that arose in these other settler
societies.
But times are changing, for as the public debate over genocide in Canada picks
up, scholars of Canadian genocide are responding. There have recently been a
number of relevant publications directly situated in the field, including an
edited volume, Colonial genocide in indigenous North America, which has signifi-
cant emphasis on Canada.44 The 2014 conference of the International Association
of Genocide Scholars met in Winnipeg, Manitoba and featured several scholars
presenting on Canadian settler colonialism and indigenous issues. And of
course, this special issue in the Journal of Genocide Research is further evidence
of growing scholarly work on Canada.

Modes of group destruction

The absence of Canada from genocide studies is notable because the study of gen-
ocide in this context can contribute to other emerging developments in the field,
for example by highlighting the many different modes of group destruction. A
multifaceted conception of genocide goes back to Raphael Lemkin’s original
intervention, and it is becoming increasingly appreciated that group destruction
can be attempted through many different forms with varying degrees of lethality.
To be sure, there were cases of mass murder in Canadian history, as with the

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frontier warfare against the Mi’kmaq people during the mid eighteenth century or
the 1873 Cypress Hills massacre of at least two dozen Nakoda people.45 However,
in terms of the contemporary debate over genocide in Canada, attention has
largely centred on the forcible removal of children. David MacDonald notes else-
where that this particular act has a strong basis in customary international law,
rooted in Article 2(e) of the UNGC. In this context, indigenous child removal pol-
icies in Canada provide a comparable case to that of Australia, where discussion of
the ‘stolen generations’ precipitated the ‘colonial turn’ in genocide studies nearly
two decades ago.46
When discussing residential schools, historiographies of Canadian settler colo-
nialism have tended towards the qualified language of ‘cultural genocide’. For
example, in the introduction to Shingwauk’s Vision, J. R. Miller describes the
schools as ‘an instrument of attempted cultural genocide’.47 The phrase is striking
in its caution, and raises a contentious point about definitionalism, one that not
only helps explain why Canadian scholars have been hesitant to engage in discus-
sion of genocide but also raises a larger conceptual issue about unnecessarily qua-
lifying certain forms of group destruction as distinct from genocide, per se.
Indeed, given that the UNGC refers to genocide as the attempt to destroy a
group ‘in whole or in part’, is Miller’s use of the word ‘attempted’ here not redun-
dant? And why is it that we so often feel required to place the qualifier ‘cultural’
before the word ‘genocide’? Although Lemkin distinguished between cultural,
biological, physical and other patterns of genocide,48 we seldom find it necessary
to specify when we speak of physical or biological genocide. So what value is
there in conjoining the ‘cultural’ qualifier to the concept of genocide?
In the passage cited above, Miller is likely responding to common mispercep-
tions about genocide rooted in the iconography of the Holocaust rather than its
legal or social scientific definitions. Miller tells us this was ‘attempted’ because
genocide tends to suggest a sense of finality, of complete and utter annihilation.49
Such a view of genocide as connoting an explicit termination of life, when
directed towards indigenous peoples, would ignore their perseverance, resurgence
and adaptive resourcefulness in the face of perennial destructive pressures.50 Like-
wise, one assumes that the term ‘cultural’ is not intended to mark indigenous
boarding schools as a lesser genocide, since Miller is well aware of the suffering
and intergenerational effects of these schools. Instead, the word ‘cultural’ reminds
the reader that there are methods of group destruction other than those that charac-
terize the most known and iconic of genocides: the Holocaust. Holocaust con-
sciousness continues to prevail when considering the destructiveness of
assimilative schooling in Canada, putting those who make genocide claims in
danger of appearing extreme or radical for presumably using the term in a polem-
ical and political rather than scholarly fashion. For example, Scott Trevithick
expresses his concern for the use of the term ‘genocide’ when discussing indigen-
ous boarding schools, because he associates use of the term with the pollution of
scholarly research by moral sentiment, as well as with a tendency towards sweep-
ing claims and oversimplification.51 In criticizing the work of Agnes Grant,52 Tre-
vithick charges that her use of the term genocide is ‘inappropriate’ and that she

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manipulates evidence to fit the UNGC. Moreover, he claims, ‘by inferring that the
Native residential experience was in the order of the Nazi Holocaust she perverts
the concept of genocide and does a grave injustice to these highly distinct histori-
cal phenomena’.53 Here, the Holocaust overshadows the discussion and becomes
conflated with the concept of genocide. Consequently, when writing for a general
audience, one often needs to provide the reminder that a people can be placed in
precarious conditions that threaten its survival as a group without gas chambers or
concentration camps.
That other indirectly lethal techniques of genocide are also implicated by the
situation in Canada must not be ignored amidst all of the debate about residential
schools. For instance, Kristin Burnett and her co-authors have demonstrated else-
where how hunger and malnutrition have been effected by federal government
food policies in the post-World War II era, thereby alluding to the oft-neglected
idea of ‘genocide by attrition’.54 The ecological dimensions to genocide have
also too often been ignored, as climate change and intensive resource extraction
threaten the vitality of indigenous communities. Jennifer Huseman and Damien
Short, for instance, have shown how the tar sands operations negatively impact
the indigenous peoples of northern Alberta in terms of genocide.55
What Canada presents to genocide studies is an example of multiple indigenous
peoples caught within a diverse web of Canadian settler colonial policies, the gen-
ocidal force of which varies across time and space. The move towards more pro-
cessual or diachronic accounts of the formation and intensification of genocidal
moments can be enriched by grappling with the complexity of colonial relations
in Canada.56 From this perspective, Canada is a space of multiple and intersecting
colonialisms with divergent lines of force. This colonial space is predominantly
that of the settler, in that the settlers have ‘come to stay’ and have established
sovereign political orders, but it is at times and in some places extractive, a key
distinction that will be elaborated below.57 Canada is also a space where both
anthropophagic strategies of forced assimilation and absorption and anthropemic
strategies of physical and biological annihilation are present.58 This is not to
suggest that Canada is somehow unique or exceptional; more modestly, we
present Canada as representative of many of the challenges that have long
befuddled genocide studies. It is thus time for scholars to step forward and untan-
gle the complexities of settler colonial destruction in Canada and to contribute
more forcefully to the colonial turn in genocide studies.

Temporalization and spatial boundaries

A key question in the analysis of any zone of genocide is when does it end?59 In
instances of genocide tied to war, like the canonical cases of the Holocaust and
Rwanda, answering this question seems rather straightforward, insofar as mass
killings appear to have ceased with the conclusion of hostilities. Of course,
such a suggestion overlooks the reverberations of mass violence even after
these wars, such as with the anti-Jewish pogroms in post-war Poland or the
pursuit of ethnic Hutus into Zaire following the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic

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Front. The lethal effects of genocide persist well after the conclusion of the armed
conflicts that precipitated them. Moreover, considering the intergenerational
effects of genocide, whereby the progeny of survivors also endure the sufferings
caused by mass violence which they did not directly experience, the question of
when genocide ends is not as simple as it seems.
This question is equally complex in settler colonial figurations like Canada,
where the destructive consequences of colonial expansion and appropriation
cannot be consigned to history.60 As with similar countries, such as Australia or
the United States, Canada exists within the ‘settler colonial present’.61 Patrick
Wolfe has long emphasized that settler colonialism ‘is a structure not an
event’.62 While we have certain misgivings concerning the growing casual use
of settler colonialism as a catch-all category, as elaborated momentarily, we
appreciate Wolfe’s conceptualization of settler colonialism as a specific social for-
mation that is continuous and involves processes of invasion, dispossession and
settlement that are ongoing. We concur that settler colonialism is not temporally
bound and certainly not an event.
For all its heuristic advantages, the settler colonial analytic can flatten our
understanding of colonization in a large and diverse space such as Canada
when it is facilely embraced. Although the intention of scholars such as Wolfe
and Veracini is to require scholars of regions with high levels of settlement to con-
sider the specificity of such colonial projects, as well as their adaptability and
shape-shifting character, 63 in common use the term is in danger of becoming a
reductive shorthand that leads us to overlook other elements of the Canadian colo-
nial experience. Settlement and land dispossession largely define Canadian colo-
nialism, particularly in the Canadian south, but there has always been an extractive
colonialism operative in Canada, and terminology should reflect this fact. Extrac-
tive colonialism was true not just of the fur trade era; it also describes ongoing
colonial relations in parts of the north where non-indigenous sojourners and ‘mid-
dleman minorities’ rather than settlers participate in extracting oil, minerals and
trees from indigenous territories. Do we truly expect that those following jobs
into Alberta’s oil sands will ‘settle’ there when the oil is gone and the decimation
of the territory is complete?64 Moreover, indigenous labour has in periods been a
key component of colonial extractive operations,65 necessitating in the eyes of
colonial powers the ‘pacification’ of subject populations rather than strictly
their replacement.66
We must also be careful that our embrace of the term settler colonialism does
not suggest an opposition between those who settle and those who do not, reinfor-
cing colonial stereotypes of indigenous peoples as nomadic and therefore lacking
any real territorial claim under Lockean terms of settlement.67 Wolfe and Veracini
understandably focus their critical sites on the settler colonial consciousness and
its logic of elimination, and are therefore reluctant to venture any representation of
indigeneity, refusing to ‘ventriloquise’ on behalf of indigenous peoples.68 None-
theless, their bivalent terminology does provoke the question: if the settler settles,
does the native of necessity move? Anti-nomadism and desire to sedentarize have
been longstanding fixations of colonial modernity,69 and these tendencies are

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evident in Canada. For example, when first confronted with indigenous claims to
their territory, British Columbia’s Premier Smithe chided the Nisga’a’ and Tsim-
shian leadership, who had made a long journey by canoe to speak with him in
1887. ‘When the whites first came among you,’ he said to them, ‘you were
little better than the wild beasts of the field.’70 Such reasoning was part of the
assumption of terra nullius in the province that allowed colonizers to assert
their claims for both settlement and extraction. But indigenous peoples in the pro-
vince had long been settled there—some in quite permanent town sites and others
in different areas depending on harvesting patterns, seasonal changes and cultural
practices. Like settlers, indigenous peoples also changed locations when the com-
munity was confronted by new challenges or changes in environment. To this
extent, the language of settler colonialism does not go far enough in providing
a language beyond settler binaries for the purposes of explaining complex
relations across colonial time and space.
Finally, perhaps more worrisome to genocide scholars familiar with Mahmood
Mamdani’s work on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is how terms such as settler and
indigenous can become essentialized and politicized.71 The starkness of Wolfe’s
thesis, which is also its elegance—that settler colonialism is premised on a ‘winner
take all’, zero-sum contest of native removal and replacement by settlers—can
leave one with the despairing sense that the settler will always be a settler.72 To
be fair, neither Wolfe nor Veracini assume that the seemingly inexorable logic
of elimination is a fait accompli.73 Nevertheless, such identitarian fixity of the
settler risks narrowing the options for structural transformation.74 Such fixity is
also contrary to the cultural hybridity and fluidity that often characterized relations
between indigenous communities,75 and even some early indigenous/non-indigen-
ous relations, like those that found expression in the Métis. As Tricia Logan notes
in her contribution to this special issue, the attempted destruction of the Métis was
also an assault upon this very notion of hybridity. This is not to suggest, as does
John Ralston Saul, that Canada is somehow a ‘Métis nation’, or to try to use
hybridity to re-subjectify indigenous peoples underneath a unified Canada.76
Rather, the point is to leave room in our theorization for rigorous processes of
unsettling, making possible transformations in settler/indigenous relations
beyond those suggested by their binary formulation.
In this manner, we use the term settler colonialism with both qualification and
admiration. Most valuable from Wolfe’s work is not how it has become con-
venient shorthand, but rather how it frequently reminds us that, amidst all the
unevenness of settler colonialism, there is a very basic relation of dispossession,
elimination and replacement.77 We also have great appreciation for the nuance
and complexity one witnesses in Wolfe’s historical analysis.78 We draw from
his work, and that of settler colonial scholars like Veracini, our understanding
of genocidal mutations, a term we use to reflect the adaptability and mutability
of genocide in the face of resistance and social change.79 Here, we also borrow
from Aihwa Ong, who has articulated the shape-shifting character of neoliberal-
ism(s) to articulate how this technology of governance morphs in accordance
with local social, cultural and political conditions and therefore exists in a

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persistent state of exception.80 Similarly, genocide is not simply an intentional

policy, but also a disposition inculcated within the settler colonial habitus.81 It
is continually reproduced, appearing to bend and curve to some indigenous
demands, while never conceding the originary violence of the settler colonial
practices of dispossession and elimination on Turtle Island.

Reparative justice?
Such genocidal mutations find their way into the politics of redress. Canada raises
distinct challenges with respect to arriving at a post-genocidal, decolonized
moment. The politics of redress in Canada have, in some ways, advanced
further than those in other settler colonial nations, depending on one’s rubric of
measurement. And yet settler colonialism is as entrenched as ever and, as men-
tioned above, several scholars worry that the politics of redress amount to little
more than a mutation in the policies of dispossession, assimilation and margina-
lization, meant as much to pacify indigenous peoples as they are to truly transform
a structured set of unequal relations.82 Robyn Green’s article in this special issue
shows how forms of reconciliation cloaked in the language of investment effec-
tively become tools for coercive assimilation, especially as they are used to
create new economic opportunities for the settler state in an increasingly competi-
tive global economy. In a neoliberal world system, she argues, the notion of
healing is defined in terms of economic viability. Along these lines, environmen-
tally destructive industrial projects that undermine the ecological bases of many
indigenous group identities are recast as positive opportunities for development.
Movements such as Idle No More have arisen and assert indigenous resurgence
in this context, refusing to let the ‘gift’ of colonial redress restrict their demands
related to territory, rights and culture. In an ongoing settler colonial context, the
‘gift’ of reconciliation appears quite hollow to many indigenous scholars and acti-
vists. They see the Canadian government with one hand offer reconciliation and
reparation, while with the other it violates historic and contemporary treaty and
Aboriginal rights, intensifies extractive activities that threaten life in indigenous
territories, ignores the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women,
creates minimum sentencing laws that are only likely to increase indigenous
over-incarceration, continues to try to impose private property regimes on indi-
genous communities and is the source of many other ongoing indigenous grie-
vances. For these reasons, Taiaiake Alfred, Glen Coulthard and Jeff Corntassel,
among other prominent indigenous intellectuals, have excoriated the liberal
notion of reconciliation as yet another weapon in the Canadian assimilative
arsenal.83
The mutability of settler colonialism, and the threat of its continuation through
liberal discourses of repair, restoration and reconciliation, has led scholars Eve
Tuck and K. Wayne Wang to declare that ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’ in
an effort to remind us that decolonization is a material process that will not
simply be achieved through symbolic gestures.84 One also sees in the Canadian
literature a return to the work of Frantz Fanon to demand that indigenous

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peoples assert decolonization rather than passively await ‘recognition’ from the
colonizer.85 In Canada, where the citizenry has at times appeared prone to passiv-
ity, this radicalization of the discourse is not unwelcome. To shake Canadian com-
placency, it is necessary to unsettle some of the taken-for-granted dimensions of
Canadian identity, and in particular the shaky foundation upon which Canadian
settler colonialism has been established. In such an atmosphere, however, we
may not be able to sit back and engage in ‘objective’ scholarship. We will be chal-
lenged to take action to transform ourselves, our scholarship and our social world.

Politics of knowledge and decolonizing genocide studies

As noted, there is an activist underpinning to the study of genocide in the Canadian
context, as charges of genocide are often used to justify or reaffirm Aboriginal and
indigenous rights. For example, Seth Adema’s notion of ‘genocide-as-story’,
referring to the rhetorical usage of ‘genocide’ in narratives produced by Aborigi-
nal prison populations, shows how this keyword not only connects individual
experiences to the structured realities of colonialism, but also charges a political
critique of the settler state in ways that motivate resistance and survival. Such
proximity of politics to the rhetoric of genocide may discomfort those who
have moved away from activist-oriented genocide scholarship, particularly that
of a hawkish variety that promotes ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the name of pre-
vention.86 We do not disagree with this suspicion of politicized scholarship. In the
words of Raymond Evans, for example, ‘[t]he essential question, to put it bluntly,
ought to be: “Are you catching a crook or writing a book?”’.87 Be that as it may,
we still face questions as to what sort of scholarly engagement and solidarity we
might aspire. The challenge for those studying genocide in Canada is: what are the
politics of such engagements and how do we address them from within current
relations of privilege and power?
This challenge became very apparent when organizing this special issue. We
encouraged our authors to ‘avoid a prosecutorial tone’, sending them the following
quotation from Donald Bloxham as a source of inspiration: ‘recognizing this fact
[genocide] should be a “by-product” of the historian’s work, not its ultimate aim or
underpinning’.88 But one author pushed back against this limitation: how could we
as settler scholars ask an indigenous scholar to assume a particular tone? In the
end, we lost this scholar’s contribution to the special issue. Habituated to the scho-
larly review processes, we failed to consider how the readers’ comments were not
simply experienced by this author as constructive criticism, but rather as a dilution
of the author’s voice. In this instance, Mi’kmaw scholar Bonita Lawrence’s state-
ment rang true: ‘a crucial part of the silencing of indigenous voices is the demand
that indigenous scholars attempting to write about their histories conform to aca-
demic discourses that have already staked a claim to expertise about our past’.89
Though our intention was to highlight rather than to silence, and we subsequently
sought to address the author’s concerns, the article was unfortunately withdrawn.
Because Canada still exists within the settler colonial present, and practices of
indigenous dispossession are ongoing rather than temporally bound, our

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editorship was experienced by this author as a continuation of the policing of indi-

genous knowledge rather than as collegial support. We had good intentions, but as
de Leeuw, Greenwood and Lindsay note, a decolonizing approach cannot come
through good intentions alone, especially when power imbalances between indi-
genous and non-indigenous peoples in Canada remain so pronounced.90
In this regard, we have no claim to being pure or righteous settlers, and the call
we have made elsewhere towards decolonizing genocide studies does not derive
from a position of salvation.91 Nor is it intended to suggest that all works
within genocide studies are somehow suspect or inherently colonial. Decolonizing
genocide studies simply speaks to the ongoing need to open space for alternative
epistemological and ontological frameworks with which to conceive and explain
genocide, as well as to maintain a critical reflexivity towards our theory and prac-
tice as it is positioned within a settler colonial context. It demands that we reflect
upon and be discomforted by experiences like the one described above, and
through that discomfort explore avenues for change. In addition, drawing from
critical indigenous methodologies and postcolonial theory,92 as well as those gen-
ocide scholars who critically interrogate the presumptive universe of early geno-
cide studies,93 this approach challenges the narrow legalism, liberal individualism,
human-centric modernism and other persistent tendencies that continue to creep
into genocide scholarship and push indigenous experiences of group life and
destruction to the margins. The articles within this special issue are contributions
to the important and ongoing work of unsettling the field of genocide studies.
Other decolonizing efforts will wait for future research. Methodologically
speaking, we still confront the problem of how settlers (i.e. non-indigenous sub-
jects) can engage in discussions of group destruction without appropriating or
erasing the voices of indigenous peoples.94 Likewise, we must ask: what are the
potentials for community-based genocide research that respects indigenous own-
ership, control, access and partnership in the knowledge-making process?95 And
how does our research contribute to decolonizing transformation and not solely
our own scholarly profit in an academic marketplace that encourages its own
forms of colonization?
Scholars of indigenous– settler relations in Canada have been slow to contribute
to the study of genocide studies, and hesitant to critically assess how our scholar-
ship might implicate both intellectually and politically the ‘relations of genocide’
still evident in our midst.96 The lines of destruction we trace through Canadian
history should allow us to engage in discussions on how to subvert or even trans-
form such genocidal relations. Scholars of Canada too must be ‘idle no more’. The
goal, however, is not to be prescriptive or to become the organic intellectuals of a
new vanguard. Instead, the goal is to contribute to the opening of space for new
voices and fresh ideas to be heard and to challenge destructive processes in all
of their mutations, so that our critical and decolonizing efforts can flourish. The
authors presented in this issue contribute to this task by rejecting both the
comfort of the peaceful frontier and the easy satisfaction of polemics. Their
articles open new vistas into the study of settler colonial genocide in Canada,
and through their scholarship these authors move the conversation beyond

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asking ‘was it or wasn’t it genocide?’ to highlight the urgency of addressing the

durability and persistence of Canadian patterns of indigenous destruction.

Acknowledgements
The authors thank Tricia Logan, David MacDonald, Matthew Wildcat, Kristin
Burnett, Travis Hay, Alex Hinton and Dirk Moses.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Endnotes
1 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: summary of
the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada, 2015), available at: http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/
Exec_Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf. The full report is expected in the autumn of 2015.
2 J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s vision: a history of native residential schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1996); John S. Milloy, A national crime: the Canadian government and the residential school system, 1879 to
1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999); Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada,
Honouring the truth; and Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Truth and reconciliation of
Canada: interim report (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2012). On the goals,
design and intentionality of residential schools, see Andrew Woolford, This benevolent experiment: indigen-
ous boarding schools, genocide and redress in Canada and the United States (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press and University of Manitoba Press, 2015).
3 For the number of living survivors, see Camile Callison, ‘Honouring Indian residential school archives’, paper
presented at the Eleventh Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Winnipeg,
Manitoba, 18 July 2014. For the thousands of deaths in the schools, see ‘Residential school deaths’, CBC
News, 7 January 2014, available at: http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Politics/Power+&+Politics/ID/
2428753310/. The term ‘survivors’ also has obvious yet tacit associations with the Holocaust, although
such an association in this context is controversial. See Ronald Niezen, Truth and indignation: Canada’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2013), pp. 18– 20.
4 Adam Muller, ‘Will truth set us free?’, Winnipeg Free Press, 4 June 2015; John Ralston Saul, ‘Truth and
reconciliation is Canada’s last chance to get it right’, The Globe and Mail, 5 June 2015; and Jesse Staniforth,
‘“Cultural genocide?”; there was nothing cultural about it’, Toronto Star, 11 June 2015.
5 Sean Fine, ‘Chief Justice says Canada attempted “cultural genocide” on Aboriginals’, Globe and Mail, 28
May 2015.
6 Harold Cardinal, The unjust society (Edmonton: M. G. Hurtig, 1969), p. 1; and the remarks of Ed Bernstick
(Cree), in Official Report by the International Indian Treaty Council, ‘International NGO conference on dis-
crimination against indigenous population in the Americas, 20–23 September 1977’, Treaty Council News,
Vol. 1, No. 7, 1977, p. 11.
7 Dale Turner, This is not a peace pipe: towards a critical indigenous philosophy (Buffalo, NY: University of
Toronto Press, 2006); John Borrows, Canada’s indigenous constitution (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto
Press, 2010); Peter Kulchyski, ‘Aboriginal rights are not human rights’, Prairie Forum, Vol. 36, 2011,
pp. 33–53; and Michael Asch, On being here to stay: treaties and aboriginal rights in Canada (Buffalo,
NY: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
8 Rolf Knight, Indians at work: an informal history of native labour in British Columbia 1858–1930 (Vancou-
ver: New Star Books, 1978); and W. Hildebrandt and B. Hubner, The Cypress Hills: the land and its people
(Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 1994).
9 Anastasia M. Shkilnyk, A poison stronger than love: the destruction of an Ojibwa community (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
10 Such was the case when Aboriginal persons gathered around Fort Victoria in 1862 were shown to have signs
of smallpox infection. A public uproar arose to call upon the government to evict them. Rather than quarantine
or treat the infected, a gunboat was ordered to escort these Aboriginal persons back to their home

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communities, ensuring the transmission of smallpox up and down the northwest coast and into the interior.
See Barry M. Gough, Gunboat frontier: British maritime authority and northwest coast Indians, 1846–
1890 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).
11 Christopher Bracken, The potlatch papers: a colonial case history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997).
12 Margaret D. Jacobs, A generation removed: the fostering and adoption of indigenous children in the postwar
world (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
13 Karen Stole, An act of genocide: colonialism and the sterilization of Aboriginal women (Winnipeg: Fernwood
Publishing, 2015).
14 Jennifer Huseman and Damien Short, ‘“A slow industrial genocide”: tar sands and the indigenous peoples of
northern Alberta’, International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2012, pp. 216 –237.
15 Zia Akhtar, ‘Canadian genocide and official culpability’, International Criminal Law Review, Vol. 10, No. 1,
2010, pp. 111– 135; Kevin Annett, Hidden from history: the Canadian holocaust (Vancouver: Truth Commis-
sion into Genocide in Canada, 2001); Katherine Bischoping and Natalie Fingerhut, ‘Border lines: indigenous
peoples in genocide studies’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 33, No. 4, 1996,
pp. 481– 506; Roland D. Chrisjohn and Sherri L. Young, The circle game: shadows and substance in the
Indian residential school experience in Canada (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 2006); Ward Churchill, ‘For-
bidding the “g-word”: Holocaust denial as judicial doctrine in Canada’, Other Voices, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2000,
available at: http://www.othervoices.org/2.1/churchill/denial.php; Robert Davis and Mark Zannis, The gen-
ocide machine in Canada: the pacification of the north (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973); Agnes Grant, No
end of grief: Indian residential schools in Canada (Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1996); David B. MacDonald and
Graham Hudson, ‘The genocide question and Indian residential schools in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Pol-
itical Science, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2012, pp. 427– 449; Sam McKegney, Magic weapons: Aboriginal writers
remaking community after residential school (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2007); David
W. Neu and Richard Therrien, Accounting for genocide: Canada’s bureaucratic assault on aboriginal
people (Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2003); and Andrew Woolford, ‘Ontological destruction: genocide and
Canadian Aboriginal peoples’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2009, pp. 81–97.
16 Indian residential school settlement agreement (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2006).
17 Bischoping and Fingerhut, ‘Border lines’; Christopher Powell and Julia Peristerakis, ‘Genocide in Canada: a
relational view’, in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton (eds.), Colonial genocide
in indigenous North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 70– 92; Jeremy Patzer, ‘Resi-
dential school harm and colonial dispossession: what’s the connection’, in Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton,
Colonial genocide in indigenous North America, pp. 166 –185; and Woolford, ‘Ontological destruction’.
18 Ian Mosby, ‘Administering colonial science: nutrition research and human biomedical experimentation in
Aboriginal communities and residential schools, 1942–1952’, Historie Sociale/Social History, Vol. 46,
No. 91, 2013, pp. 145– 172.
19 James Daschuk, Clearing the plains: disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of Aboriginal life (Regina:
University of Regina Press, 2013); and Daschuk, ‘When Canada used hunger to clear the west’, The Globe
and Mail, 19 July 2013.
20 See Mary Agnes Welch, ‘CMHR rejects “genocide” for native policies: debate is still underway’, Winnipeg
Free Press, 26 July 2013.
21 See David B. MacDonald, ‘Genocide in the Indian residential schools: Canadian history through the lens of
the UN Genocide Convention’, in Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton, Colonial genocide in indigenous North
America, pp. 306–324.
22 See, for example, Tony Barta, ‘Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia’, in Isidor
Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (eds.), Genocide and the modern age: etiology and case studies of
mass death, rev. edn. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000 [1987]), pp. 237– 251; A. Dirk
Moses, ‘Empire, colony, genocide: keywords and the philosophy of history’, in Moses (ed.), Empire,
colony, genocide: conquest, occupation, and subaltern resistance in world history (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2008), pp. 3 –54; Moses, ‘Genocide and settler society in Australian history’, in Moses (ed.), Genocide
and settler society: frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in Australian history (New York: Ber-
ghahn Books, 2004), pp. 3 –48; Moses, ‘An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in
the colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2000, pp. 89–107.
23 Tricia Logan, ‘National memory and museums: remembering settler colonial genocide of indigenous peoples
in Canada’, in Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean (eds.), Remembering genocide (New York: Routledge,
2014), pp. 112– 130.
24 David Moshman, ‘Conceptions of genocide and perceptions of history’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The historiogra-
phy of genocide (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 71–92.

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25 For previous criticism of ‘comparative’ genocide studies centred on the nation-state, see Mark Levene,
‘Creating a modern “zone of genocide”: the impact of nation- and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia,
1878– 1923’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1998, pp. 393–433; A. Dirk Moses,
‘Toward a theory of critical genocide studies’, Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 18 April 2008, avail-
able at: http://www.massviolence.org/Toward-a-Theory-of-Critical-Genocide-Studies; Martin Shaw, Geno-
cide and international relations: changing patterns in the transitions of the late modern world (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Adam Jones, ‘The Great Lakes genocides: hidden histories,
hidden precedents’, in Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe and Douglas Irvin-Erickson (eds.),
Hidden genocides: power, knowledge, memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014),
pp. 129–148.
26 James Tully, ‘The struggles of indigenous peoples for and of freedom’, in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and
Will Sanders (eds.), Political theory and the rights of indigenous peoples (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), pp. 36– 59; Damien Short, Reconciliation and colonial power: indigenous rights in Australia
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler colonialism: a theoretical overview
(New York: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 50 and 109; and Andrew Woolford, ‘Nodal repair and networks of destruc-
tion: residential schools, colonial genocide, and redress in Canada’, Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1,
2013, pp. 65–81.
27 Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Critical genocide studies’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2012,
pp. 4 –15; and Hinton, ‘Colonial genocide and indigenous North America: a view from critical genocide
studies’, in Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton, Colonial genocide in indigenous North America, pp. 325– 332.
28 Leo Kuper, Genocide: its political use in the twentieth century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1982), p. 59.
29 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The history and sociology of genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1990), p. 23.
30 Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’.
31 Frank Chalk, ‘“Genocide in the twentieth century”: definitions of genocide and their implications for predic-
tion and prevention’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1989, p. 156.
32 Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs (eds.), Pioneers of genocide studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
2002).
33 Shaw, Genocide and international relations, pp. 48–64.
34 Mark Levene, Genocide in the age of the nation state. Vol. II: the rise of the west and the coming of genocide
(New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 69, 78 and 81.
35 Michael Mann, The dark side of democracy: explaining ethnic cleansing (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), pp. 72 and 75.
36 Blanca Tovias, ‘Navigating the cultural encounter: Blackfoot religious resistance in Canada (c. 1870–1930)’,
in Moses, Empire, colony, genocide, pp. 271–295.
37 Adam Jones, Genocide: a comprehensive introduction, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 2011 [2008]),
pp. 117–118.
38 A. Dirk Moses, ‘The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: the “uniqueness of the Holocaust” and the ques-
tion of genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2012, pp. 215– 238.
39 Christopher Powell, ‘What do genocides kill? A relational conception of genocide’, Journal of Genocide
Research, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2007, pp. 527–547.
40 Woolford, ‘Ontological destruction’.
41 Chalk, ‘“Genocide in the twentieth century”’; and Scott Trevithick, ‘Native residential schooling in Canada: a
review of literature’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1998, pp. 49– 86.
42 Davis and Zannis, The genocide machine in Canada; Churchill, ‘Forbidding the “g-word”’; Churchill, Kill the
Indian, save the man: the genocidal impact of American Indian residential schools (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 2004); Chrisjohn and Young, The circle game; and Neu and Therrien, Accounting for genocide.
43 David E. Stannard, American holocaust: Columbus and the conquest of the new world (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992); and Ward Churchill, A little matter of genocide: holocaust and denial in the Amer-
icas, 1492 to the present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997).
44 Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton, Colonial genocide in indigenous North America. See also Leslia Thielen-
Wilson, ‘Troubling the path to decolonization: Indian residential school case law, genocide, and settler ille-
gitimacy’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014,
pp. 181– 197; Pamela Palmater, ‘Genocide, Indian policy, and legislated elimination of Indians in Canada’,
Aboriginal Policy Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2014, pp. 27–54; and Sidney L. Harring, ‘Dispossession, ecocide,
genocide: cattle ranching and agriculture in the destruction of hunting cultures on the Canadian prairies’, in
Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Genocide on settler frontiers: when hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers
clash (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 259 –285.

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45 Hildebrandt and Hubner, The Cypress Hills. See also Daniel N. Paul, We were not the savages: collision
between European and Native American civilizations, 3rd edn. (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2006 [1993]).
46 MacDonald, ‘Genocide in the Indian residential schools’.
47 Miller, Shingwauk’s vision, p. 10.
48 Raphael Lemkin, Axis rule in occupied Europe: laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for
redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law,
1944), pp. 79–95.
49 Rowan Savage, ‘The political uses of death-as-finality in genocide denial: the Stolen Generations and the
Holocaust’, borderlands e-journal, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2013, pp. 1 –22.
50 Jeff Benvenuto, ‘Revisiting Choctaw ethnocide and ethnogenesis: the creative destruction of colonial geno-
cide’, in Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton, Colonial genocide in indigenous North America, pp. 208–225.
51 Trevithick, ‘Native residential schooling in Canada’.
52 Grant, No end of grief.
53 Trevithick, ‘Native residential schooling in Canada’, p. 68.
54 Kristin Burnett, Travis Hay and Lori Chambers, ‘Settling the table: northern food subsidy programs and the
(re)colonisation of Indigenous bodies’, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2015, available at
http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/254Burnettetal2015111.pdf.
55 Huseman and Short, ‘“A slow industrial genocide”’; and Warren Cariou, ‘Going to Canada’, in Nigaanwe-
widam James Sinclair and Warren Cariou (eds.), Manitowapow: Aboriginal writings from the land of
water (Winnipeg: Highwater, 2011), pp. 326– 328.
56 Woolford, ‘Nodal repair and networks of destruction’; and Andrew Woolford, ‘Discipline, territory, and the
colonial mesh: Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada’, in Woolford, Benvenuto and
Hinton, Colonial genocide in indigenous North America, pp. 29–48.
57 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8,
No. 4, 2006, p. 387–409.
58 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Making and unmaking of strangers’, Thesis Eleven, Vol. 43, No. 1, 1995, p. 2.
59 Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich and Bridget Conley-Zilkic, ‘How mass atrocities end: an evidence-based
counter-narrative’, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2012, pp. 15–31.
60 On the notion of genocide as a ‘figuration’, see Christopher Powell, Barbaric civilization: a critical sociology
of genocide (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).
61 Lorenzo Veracini, The settler colonial present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
62 Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, p. 388; and Wolfe, ‘Structure and event: settler
colonialism, time, and the question of genocide’, in Moses, Empire, colony, genocide, p. 123.
63 Patrick Wolfe, Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: the politics and poetics of an eth-
nographic event (New York: Cassell, 1999); and Veracini, Settler colonialism.
64 Cf. Jen Preston, ‘Neoliberal settler colonialism, Canada and the tar sands’, Race and Class, Vol. 55, No. 2,
2013, pp. 42– 59.
65 Knight, Indians at work.
66 Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos (eds.), Anti-security (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2011).
67 Thanks to Tricia Logan for this insight. Emma Laroque also raised this point to Woolford when he used the
term settler colonialism as they were preparing to present on a public panel.
68 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Should the subaltern dream? Australian Aborigines and the problem of ethnographic ventri-
loquism’, in S. C. Humphreys (ed.), Cultures of scholarship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997),
pp. 57– 96; Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Defending settler colonial studies’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 45, No.
3, 2014, pp. 311– 316.
69 James C. Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
70 Quoted in Daniel Raunet, Without surrender, without consent: a history of the Nisga’s land claims (Vancou-
ver: Douglas and MacIntyre, 1996), p. 156, as well as Paul Tennant, Aboriginal peoples and politics (Van-
couver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990), p. 58.
71 Mahmood Mamdani, When victims become killers: colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda (Prin-
ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
72 Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2014, p. 300; Alissa
Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘The ethical demands of settler colonial theory’, Settler Colonial
Studies, Vol. 3, Nos. 3 –4, 2013, p. 435; and Corey Snelgrove, Rita Kaur Dhamoon and Jeff Corntassel,
‘Unsettling settler colonialism: the discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with indigenous
nations’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2014, pp. 8 –9.

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73 Patrick Wolfe, ‘From Patrick Wolfe’, Tequila Sovereign Blog, 27 April 2011, available at
https://tequilasovereign.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/from-patrick-wolfe/; and Veracini, ‘Defending settler col
onial studies’.
74 Though in ‘Defending settler colonial studies’ Veracini argues that the objective of settler colonial studies is
to interpret the world, rather than change it. This is a point upon which we also disagree with settler colonial
studies, as we suggest in the closing section of this introduction.
75 Brian Thom, ‘The paradox of boundaries in Coast Salish Territories’, paper presented at Indigenous Cartogra-
phies and Representational Politics: An International Conference Dedicated to the Critical Examination of Indi-
genous Mapping and Geographic Information Systems, Ithaca, New York, 3–5 March 2006; Patricia Monture-
Angus, Journeying forward: dreaming First Nations’ independence (Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2000); and Scott
Richard Lyons, X-marks: native signatures of assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p.
157.
76 John Ralston Saul, A fair country: telling truths about Canada (Viking: Toronto, 2008); and Adam Gaudry,
‘The Métis-ization of Canada: the process of claiming Louis Riel, Métissage, and the Métis people as
Canada’s mythical origin’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2013, pp. 64–87.
77 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Recuperating binarism: a heretical introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 3, Nos. 3 –4,
2013, pp. 257–279.
78 See, for example, Patrick Wolfe, ‘Against the intentional fallacy: legocentricism and continuity in the rhetoric
of Indian dispossession’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2012, pp. 3 –46.
79 See also Henry C. Therieault, ‘Genocidal mutation and the challenge of definition’, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 41,
No. 4, 2010, pp. 481 –524.
80 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006).
81 On the ‘habitus’, see Pierre Bourdieu, The logic of practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990). This point is well captured by Margaret D. Jacobs, ‘The habit of elimination: indi-
genous child removal in settler colonial nations in the twentieth century’, in Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton,
Colonial genocide in indigenous North America, pp. 189–207.
82 Roland Chrisjohn and Tanya Wasacase, ‘Half-truths and whole lies: rhetoric in the “apology” and the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission’, in Gregory Younging, Jonathan Dewar and Mike DeGagné (eds.),
Response, responsibility, and renewal: Canada’s truth and reconciliation journey (Ottawa: Aboriginal
Healing Foundation, 2009), pp. 217–229; Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, ‘Colonial reckoning,
national reconciliation? Aboriginal peoples and the culture of redress in Canada’, ESC: English Studies in
Canada, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2009, pp. 1– 26; Patzer, ‘Residential school harm and colonial dispossession’; and
Glen Sean Coulthard, Red skins, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
83 Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, ‘Restitution is the real pathway to justice for indigenous peoples’, in Younging,
Dewar and DeGagné, Response, responsibility and renewal, pp. 179– 190; Jeff Corntassel, ‘Indigenous story-
telling, truth-telling, and community approaches to reconciliation’, ESC: English Studies in Canada, Vol. 35,
No. 1, 2009, pp 137– 159; Glen Coulthard, ‘Subjects of empire: Indigenous peoples and the “politics of rec-
ognition” in Canada’, Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2007, pp. 437– 460; and Coulthard, Red
skins, white masks.
84 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education &
Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1 –40.
85 Coulthard, ‘Subjects of empire’, and Coulthard, Red skins, white masks. See also the special issue on ‘Law and
decolonization’ in Canadian Journal of Law and Society/La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société, Vol. 29, No.
2, 2014, pp. 141–252.
86 A. Dirk Moses, ‘The field of genocide studies’, in Moses (ed.), Genocide: critical concepts in historical
studies. Vol. I: the discipline of genocide studies (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 4 –13.
87 Raymond Evans, ‘“Crime without a name”: colonialism and the case for “indigenocide”’, in Moses, Empire,
colony, genocide, p. 138.
88 Donald Bloxham, The great game of genocide: imperialism, nationalism, and the destruction of the Ottoman
Armenians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 95.
89 Bonita Lawrence, ‘Rewriting histories of the land: colonization and indigenous resistance in Eastern Canada’,
in Sherene H. Razack (ed.), Race, space, and the law: unmapping a white settler society (Toronto: Between
the Lines, 2002), p. 24. Thanks to Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay for sharing this point.
90 Sara de Leeuw, Margo Greenwood and Nicole Lindsay, ‘Troubling good intentions’, Settler Colonial Studies,
Vol. 3, Nos. 3 –4, 2013, pp. 381–394.

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91 Jeff Benvenuto, Andrew Woolford and Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Introduction: colonial genocide and
indigenous North America’, in Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton, Colonial genocide in indigenous North
America, pp. 12– 13.
92 Linda Thuiwai Smith, Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (New York: Zed Books,
1999).
93 Moses, ‘Toward a theory of critical genocide studies’; Hinton, ‘Critical genocide studies’; Powell, Barbaric
civilization.
94 See the special issue on ‘Collaborative struggles in Australia and Israel– Palestine’ in Settler Colonial Studies,
Vol. 4, No. 4, 2014, pp. 327– 449.
95 See First Nations Centre, OCAP: ownership, control, access and possession. Sanctioned by the First Nations
Information Governance Committee, Assembly of First Nations (Ottawa: National Aboriginal Health Organ-
ization, 2007). See also the 2nd edition of the Tri-council policy statement: ethical conduct for research invol-
ving humans, and in particular, ‘Chapter 9: research involving the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples of
Canada’ (Ottawa: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2010); Smith, Decolonizing
methodologies; Margaret Kovach, Indigenous methodologies: characteristics, conversations, and contexts
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
96 Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’.

Notes on contributors
Andrew Woolford is professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba and
current president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is
author of This benevolent experiment: indigenous boarding schools, genocide
and redress in the United States and Canada (2015), as well as The politics of
restorative justice: a critical introduction (2009) and Between justice and cer-
tainty: treaty-making in British Columbia (2005). He is co-author of Informal
reckonings: conflict resolution in mediation, restorative justice and reparations
(2007). He is co-editor of Colonial genocide in indigenous North America
(2014) and The idea of a human rights museum (2015). His current project,
Embodying empathy: fostering historical knowledge and caring through a
virtual Indian residential school, is a community-based project to design, build
and test the efficacy of new digital technologies for connecting people emotionally
and intellectually to residential school history.
Jeff Benvenuto is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University, where he is completing
a dissertation on indigenous peoples, cultural rights and assimilation. He is also a
co-editor of Colonial genocide in indigenous North America.

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