Be very careful when using emotive words like "genocide"

Back from vacation, and not much has changed: Canada is still mired in soul-searching and recriminations. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) finally released its long-awaited 1,200-page report and, as expected, there is a lengthy shopping list of "calls to justice" that the government has vowed to take seriously and act upon.

The report put the cat among the pigeons on one score, though, by baldly stating that it was an "inescapable conclusion" that the Canadian government's actions over the years amount to "genocide". Now, the G-word is used very sparingly and with a great deal of caution for good reasons. It is an extremely emotive word that immediately conjures up comparisons with the Holocaust in Europe, the Hutu mass slaughter of Tsutsis in Rwanda, Pol Pot's massacres in Cambodia, and the Soviet-made famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan (each of which resulted in literally millions of casualties), as well as many other deliberate decimations around the world and throughout history with casualties numbering in the hundred of thousands. Bad as the Canadian problem may be, 1,200 Indigenous women hardly registers compared to these. Which is not to say that 1,200 Indigenous women do not matter - far from it - but we should be wary of using language for sensationalist purposes.

The word "genocide" literally means the deliberate killing off of a race or whole peoples (national, ethnical, racial or religious) and it is carefully defined by the United Nations in its Genocide Convention. You invoke it with great caution. Now, over the decades, the Canadian government has certainly presided over a pretty raw deal for the Indigenous peoples of the country. The residential school system and the 60s Scoop were iniquitous and inexcusable, and, despite the off-loading of shovel-loads of money to northern communities, it is incontrovertible that many reserves do not have adequate education, healthcare or infrastructure (although I sincerely believe that this is mainly due to the remoteness of many Indigenous communities, and not the result of some nefarious plot to kill them off as a race). All of this, though, does NOT mean that the Canadian government (or any previous Canadian government, for that matter, at least in the last century or so) has been guilty of, and indeed continues to be guilty of, a concerted campaign to rid the country of its Indigenous population - to "eradicate their existence" as Chief Commissioner Marion Buller clarified in her press interview - which is essentially what the MMIWG reports suggests.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, quite rightly in my opinion, was leery of using the "genocide" label in his initial public response to the report, despite pressure from hecklers in the audience, although he did carefully use it in a subsequent speech. It is clearly a big deal for many indigenous people that the word be used, and they seem to be getting some kind of validation from it. Indeed, they cheered when Marion Buller used it in her speech, which was a little bizarre, and the term is used with gay and unapologetic abandon in the actual report, including in the opening paragraph:."This report is about deliberate race-, identity-, and gender-based genocide".

The Canadian state may be guilty of many things: of failing to protect Indigenous people from exploitation, trafficking and killing; from physical, sexual and mental abuse in state institutions; from coerced sterilizations, forced relocations and the removal of children; and from a lack of funding for social services and the necessities of life. But they do not go out, as a state, with the intention of killing off whole segments of Canadian society. Indigenous women do disappear and die with disproportionate frequency, this much is clearly true, but it seems to me that this is at least partly a function of the disproportionate numbers of Indigenous women who choose, or who are forced into, marginalized lives, including prostitution and living on the street (and the systemic problems that have given rise to this situation). And, of course, the elephant in the room is that most deaths, rapes and abuses of Indigenous women tend to come at the hands of Indigenous men, and the MMIWG report does not even touch on the toxic cult of masculinity at the heart of much of Indigenous life. But that is a whole other can of worms.
Some say that focussing on the semantics of a particular word is missing the point and is detracting from the real issues. But that word was put there very deliberately by the report and, as a Globe and Mail editorial points out, " Words matter, especially when spoken by a judge". This is not mere semantics and pedantry. I don't mean any of this as a diatribe against the First Nations, Métis and Inuit of this country. I just don't like to see language abused for political ends. If we do that, then we are no better than Donald Trump, and who want that to be said about them?

UPDATE
An article by respected author and indigenous  advocate Erna Paris, entitled "The national inquiry report was marred only by its inaccurate genocide charge", makes my points much more eloquently than I ever could.
Just a few excerpts will serve here:

• "The commissioners' otherwise excellent report was marred by the gratuitous charge that Canada has committed, and continues to commit, genocide against its Indigenous populations. Not cultural genocide, a concept that is broadly accepted today...but all-out genocide - without qualification."
• "The men who killed Indigenous women were not génocidaires, intent on destroying a group. They were commonplace domestic criminals - murderers and predators who ought not to have been elevated to fit a paradigm."
• "Genocide, as opposed to cultural genocide, is the planned extermination of peoples. It is not, as asserted by the inquiry, 'the sum of the social practices, assumptions, and actions detailed within this report'."
• "The inquiry's conclusion that Canada is a genocidal state lines up with the distortion of language characterizing much of contemporary political discourse... shock and awe language may be seen as a way of propelling one's words above the din."