I’m not understanding why it’s a genocide. It’s not one entity performing these killings and it’s not organized; lots of indigenous women are just in shitty situations, that doesn’t make it a genocide. We’re talking about ~100 deaths a year here, that’s the equivalent of gang violence in some run down American cities and we don’t call that a genocide.
It's a word used to put the 'blame' so to speak on external entities, effectively the Canadian government, historically.
Given that the vast majority of the violence is perpetuated within the community itself, and the nature of the crimes ... of course it doesn't remotely fit the term 'genocide'. Obviously historical factors are relevant, but the situation is being weaponized for political reasons.
Even call out the governments officials maligned use of the term will get you in trouble, as the previous governments MP for Aboriginal affairs faced pillorying after he did the same, literally today.
The real tragedy is that $100M can go a long way to helping communities move forward and address root causes, as opposed to being used in international political fights over words and ideology.
Yeah, I feared it was a politicized term. I guess my real thought here is, what is the end goal?
So you call it a genocide and give a lump sum of money to the indigenous populations. Now what? The government already admits guilt time and time again for the indigenous problems. We already fund and subsidize their way of life. What else do they want? How many more ways do they want us to skin this cat?
There is no 'end goal' because nobody is in charge.
It's a various group of political entities.
Many people of the current political regime probably would not agree with the term 'genocide' but they're not going to speak out against it for fear of retribution.
My wild guess is that whoever's in charge wants to use the word to make a point. I'll bet there was pushback from certain quarters, but they got their way. Certainly there would have been many pushing for the use of the term.
The outcome will be totally ambiguous - it will provide political cover for more spending on reserves, but it doesn't have to mean anything specific.
As a Canadian, I'll bet that the vast majority of Canadians are perfectly fine with big investment on reserves, so long as it's fruitful. The hockey programs seem to be working well in Quebec for example, with some hiccups. But sending very expensive gear up to Iqaluit in perpetuity may not bode very well. That's a tricky one. There are remote aboriginal communities a zillion miles from anywhere - no roads - nothing. There is no economic activity. That's a tough problem to solve. But there are low hanging fruit we could work on.
Some of those issues are issues that all populations face (death from disease, government bureaucracy, policing, destruction of environment). I don't think its fair to claim that these are intentional parts of a genocide.
There definitely were some bad policies in the past (residential schools, no oversight on medical care, lack of diversity in policing), but the rest is just a culture clash between two completely incompatible cultures. That's not a genocide, it's just a shitty side effect of two cultures trying to find a way to be compatible with one another.
It's not one sided though. The colonists who brought disease over were also dying from the disease (and they didn't bring it over to explicitly wipe out the indigenous population). The destruction of the environment affects everyone, we pull our food from the same land as the indigenous peoples. And again, we didn't destroy the environment to explicitly wipe out indigenous populations. Indigenous people aren't alone in experiencing these issues, you can't just add them to your list to give weight to the "genocide".
It's extremely one-sided. Europeans showed up and assumed the land was unoccupied because the people already here related to it differently. This is the most even-handed, compassionate for both sides approach I can think of for explaining how things went so very wrong without assuming the settlers were being intentionally malicious(and I happened to write it): https://1001histories.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-little-known-...
But there comes a point past which the callous indifference that goes on to this very day, where Indigenous women are raped and murdered at some crazy high rate, like 10 or 12 times as much as other women, cannot be excused as some sort of innocent faux pas where whites, ever so sadly, simply had no idea.
Crimes do not only occur because someone did a bad thing. Crimes can also occur because people said "Eh, not my problem." and did nothing to prevent it. Criminal negligence, felony manslaughter -- these are concepts and legal standards we already have. No one needs to invent them whole cloth to talk about what is wrong with Indigenous peoples continuing to suffer so very much while so many people say "Not my problem."
I've said my piece. I don't plan to engage this further. I don't believe you really want to take the issue seriously.
