Human rights museum refuses to use genocide to describe First Nations experience in Canada
Manitoba First Nation organization slams human rights museum over 'genocide' exclusion
31. JUL, 2013 BY APTN NATIONAL NEWS
APTN National News
WINNIPEG-A Manitoba First Nation organization is slamming the Canadian Museum of Human Rights for refusing to use the term "genocide" in the title of an exhibit on Canada's policies toward Indigenous people over the past century.
In a widely distributed letter to Stuart Murray, the head of the museum, the grand chief of the Southern Chiefs Organization calls the museum's decision "disturbing." The letter also notes that the museum received a $1 million donation in 2009 by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs.
"Your museum's decision not to identify the shameful deceit, marginalization and ongoing attempts to assimilate and eradicate the original peoples of this country is a huge slap in the face for First Nations," states Grand Chief Murray Clearsky, in the July 31 dated letter.
The letter then compares the recent revelation that federal officials were involved in conducting tuberculosis vaccine and nutritional experiments on First Nations people in the 1930s and 1940s with Nazi experiments during the Holocaust.
"While thousands of First Nation men were overseas in Europe fighting the Nazis...Canada was quietly and simultaneously conducting similar inhumane experiments on the families, relatives and community members of the very soldiers who were putting their lives on the line for Canada," states Clearsky. "Many of the First Nations men, women and children who were test subjects in these atrocious nutrition and TB vaccine experiments were left forever scarred by the trauma and effects of drug testing and many were left with little hope of acknowledgement, remorse or legal recourse from the atrocities perpetrated by Canada."
Last week, museum released a statement explaining why it would not be using the word genocide in Indigenous peoples exhibit.
"In the museum, we will examine the gross and systemic human rights violation of Indigenous peoples," said the statement. "We have chosen, at present, not to use the word 'genocide' in the title for one of the exhibits about this experience, but will be using the term in the exhibit itself when describing community efforts for this recognition."
Former Assembly of First Nations national chief Phil Fontaine, along with Bernie Farber, the former executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress and Michael Dan, a philanthropist, have begun campaigning to have Canada's treatment of Indigenous peoples labeled as genocide.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created to delve into the dark history of residential schools, has so far refrained from using the word in its description of Canada's treatment of First Nation people.
Recent academic studies have found that Canada's actions over the past century meet the definition of genocide under the UN Convention.
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Using the right word -- genocide -- to describe Canada's treatment of Aboriginal peoples
BY ROCHELLE JOHNSTON | JULY 31, 2013
While riding the elevator together, our Canada Post mail carrier peered over my shoulder at the front page of my newspaper. Pointing to the article on Aboriginal children being starved in government research experiments, in a strong Eastern European accent he exclaimed, "Shameful! Just like what the Nazis and then the Soviets did to us. And here in Canada we let them get away with it?"
According to Raphael Lemkin, the inventor of the term genocide and the reason we now consider it a crime, genocide is a coordinated plan aimed at destroying a group. Despite popular misconceptions, it doesn't require killing all, or even some of the members of the group.
While there may not have been a master plan to execute every Aboriginal person in Canada, throughout much of our history there has been a deeply and widely held belief that First Nations, Metis and Inuit, as groups, should cease to exist. Reducing the number of Aboriginal people and eliminating those who weren't willing to assimilate into Euro-Canadian society was helpful to this cause. Evidence of genocidal desires can be found in any number of government documents and public statements, and when the conditions were right, Canadians, whether bureaucrats, researchers, doctors, missionaries, social workers or entrepreneurs, felt justified in carrying out a range of genocidal acts.
The time has come for non-Aboriginal Canadians to wake up and stop hiding behind words like cultural genocide and convoluted legal defenses. Forcibly transferring children from one group of people to another, like in the Indian Residential School System and the "Sixties Scoop" which adopted out Aboriginal children to white families, is explicitly forbidden in article 2e of the UN Genocide Convention. Deliberately starving children is too according to articles 2b and 2c.
If it wasn't for Canada, and a contingent of colonizing nations who in 1948 gutted a whole section of the UN Genocide Convention, the other "kinder" and "gentler" techniques of genocide we were and are still using against Aboriginal peoples would also be crimes. As historical research like Dr. Ian Mosby's is beginning to show us non-Aboriginal Canadians -- it's not news to our Aboriginal neighbours -- we used biological and physical techniques of genocide when we could get away with it.
If we really want to move ahead as a nation, reconcile with Aboriginal peoples, and ensure "Never again!" then an apology for their inhumane treatment in state sanctioned research experiments is not enough. Our government needs to put the pieces together and acknowledge that we did try to eliminate First Nations, Metis and Inuit as groups. Thank the Creator that we mostly failed.
Rochelle Johnston is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto on bystanding behavior in the context of colonial genocides. She has also worked for over a decade in various capacities as an advocate for the rights of young people in Canada and Sudan.