Dozens of academics pen open letter, countering claims that genocide was 'abundantly clear' in residential schools

A group of Canadian historians responded to an open letter accusing Canada of genocide. They said the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) could not convey only one view of history to the public.

A July 1 letter by the CHA said it's "abundantly clear" that Canada is guilty of genocide, reported the National Post.

Some 50 historians and academics responded in kind: "There are no grounds for such a claim that purports to represent the views of all of Canada’s professional historians. With this coercive tactic, the CHA Council acts as an activist organization and not as a professional body of scholars."

The CHA previously claimed "broad consensus" among academics of "genocidal intent" in most government policies towards Canada's Indigenous people. "Settler governments, whether they be colonial, imperial, federal, or provincial, have worked, and arguably still work, towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples as both a distinct culture and physical group," it wrote.

They also accused historians of being "reticent to acknowledge this history as genocide" and accused them of helping to "perpetuate the violence” of colonization.

The open letter said the CHA "has a duty to represent the ethics and values of historical scholarship." The signatories added that the body was "insulting the basic standards of good scholarly conduct" and "violating the expectations that Canadians have of academia to engage in substantive, evidence-based debate."

"CHA's current leadership has fundamentally broken the norms and expectations of professional scholarship."

CHA president Steven High did not have an official response to Tuesday's open letter except to counter that claim. He said there is a "broad consensus within the discipline on this interpretation."

In a 2014 paper entitled “Genocide, Indian Policy, and the Legislated Elimination of Indians in Canada,” Ryerson University professor Pamela Palmater argued the Indian Act intended to destroy Indigenous culture and people.

"The Act was never designed to create a group (of) Indians for their own cultural protection; it was intended to identify and eliminate the ‘problem’ — i.e., those standing in the way of accessing the vast lands and resources in Canada," she said.

"Today’s racist government laws, policies and actions have proven to be just as deadly for Indigenous peoples as the genocidal acts of the past," said Palmater in the 2019 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report.

The United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention does not solely define genocide as murder. It also includes policies that prevent births within a targeted group or that remove them from their children. The genocidaire can also inflict conditions on a people "calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

The recent discovery of graves near former Indigenous residential schools is "tragic evidence" of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) documented in Volume 4 of its final report," read the open letter, which encouraged Canadians to read the report.

"We also encourage further research into gravesites across Canada and support the completion of a register of children who died at these schools," it wrote, adding: "Our commitment to interrogate the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools and other forms of attempted assimilation is unshaken."

James R. Miller, a signatory to the open letter and one of the first to thoroughly investigate the destructive intent of residential schools, contends that Canada does not qualify for the UN definition. Miller previously cited a shocking Senate Committee assertion that claimed "[its] objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic."

Miller referenced US documents indicating their willingness to wipe first peoples from the map but said the same could not be said of Canada. "No Canadian government statement or unpublished government document has ever been produced that contains evidence of an 'intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,'" he wrote.

Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, used “cultural genocide” to characterize the residential school system. In 2015, he said that the system "amounts to nothing short of cultural genocide — a systematic and concerted attempt to extinguish the spirit of Aboriginal peoples."

The open letter concludes: "We know we also speak for a multitude who fear to support this open letter for fear of endangering their tenure and promotions or who occupy official positions that prevent them from speaking out."

"As the CHA celebrates its hundredth anniversary, it should honour its best traditions and act as a truly professional organization that stands unreservedly for the protection of objectivity, doubt, debate and unfettered access to the resources that will help historians shine a light on even the darkest corners of Canada’s past."