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"While it is crucial to better understand how Indigenous peoples were affected by these genocidai systems, over the course of more than a century, it is also essential to acknowledge that settler Canadians have benefited from these colonial policies. We are all embedded in the structures of Indigenous dispossession in what is now known as Canada and we understand that while these tough conversations need to be had, it will be our actions that define who we are and what kind of communities we want to build and strengthen and what kinds of histories we research."
- Canadian Historical Association, "The History of Violence Against Indigenous Peoples Fully Warrants the Use of the Word 'Genocide," (1 July 2021).1
When I was asked to contribute to this special edition of Canadian Issues on "Reconciliation and Reckoning: Contesting Canada's Past, Framing Its Future", it was suggested that a "notable manifestation" of these debates was the Canadian Historical Association's 2021 recognition of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada: mainly because it resulted in a "high profile dispute among scholars." It therefore seemed to dovetail other recent controversies over the toppling of old statues, the renaming of streets or schools, and the ongoing debate about how history should be taught in our schools. History wars are essentially debates over public memory: the past, like the present, divides us as well as unites.2
I think the CHA statement from our governing council is crystal clear, grounded as it is in recent historical scholarship as well as the definition of genocide found in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Nor were we the first to draw this conclusion. The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls as well as Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools both concluded that genocide occurred, though the TRC couched this in terms of "cultural genocide" - a distinction that does not exist under the UN definition.
Even so, it is no easy thing to recognize genocide in one's own country. It is far easier to recognize it in some distant place, historically perpetrated by somebody else. Nobody here batted an eye a year earlier when the CHA wrote a...