FORSETH: We also lost the richness of what their lives, should they have been different, would have contributed to society
Today's commentary
will likely stir up strong emotions ... heated disagreement ... and more. I hope however you will take the time to read
this through to the end.
CBC NEWS ... After more than three years, dozens of community meetings
and testimony from well over 2,000 Canadians, the
missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls inquiry delivered its
final report to the federal government ... "This report is
about deliberate race, identity and gender-based genocide.”
... the thousands of Indigenous women and
girls who were murdered or disappeared across the country in recent decades are
victims
of a "Canadian genocide," says the final report of the national
inquiry created to probe the ongoing tragedy.
YOU WILL NOT FIND ME
arguing that hundreds and hundreds of Indigenous women of all aged were raped,
murdered, beaten, and subjected to all kinds of indignities. That said, I will argue that what happened to
these women was NOT ‘genocide’. And
remarkably, it seems neither does Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In a CTV
News story ... Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday that violence
against indigenous women and girls is sadly not a relic of Canada’s past, and
the justice system has failed them. But
he stopped short of calling the damage genocide – despite being called out to
do so – when he spoke after accepting the report
That IS fitting given
the very description of several terms of killings and mass murder which follow:
Ethnic Cleansing ... the
mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group
in a society
Killing fields ... a place where a heavy loss of life has occurred, typically
as the result of massacre or genocide during a time of warfare or violent civil
unrest.
Final Solution ... the Nazi policy of
exterminating European Jews
Mass murder ... the act of murdering
a number of people, typically simultaneously or over a relatively short period
of time and in close geographic proximity
Democide ... the intentional
killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their
authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command"
The Holocaust ... destruction or
slaughter on a mass scale
Mass killing ... the killing
members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group, or
killing large numbers of people without a precise definition of group
membership. In a mass killing the number of people killed is usually smaller
than in genocide
AND THEN, there is Genocide ... the intentional action to destroy a people (usually
defined as an ethnic, national, racial or religious group) in whole or in part.
The word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word for
"race, people") and the Latin word
for "act of killing".
For thousands of years governments,
guerilla movements, and humankind have found multiple reasons to murder one and
other ... these are just a few examples:
CAMBODIA ... an attempt by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot to form a
Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the
country's population from starvation, overwork and executions.
SOVIET UNION / RUSSIA
... while exact numbers will never be certain, the Communist
leaders of the Soviet Union were responsible for no fewer than 15 million
deaths
CHINA ... there is general consensus among historians that after Mao Zedong seized
power, his policies and political purges directly or indirectly caused the
deaths of tens of millions of people
NORTH KOREA ... estimates indicate 100,000 executions ... 1.5 million
deaths through concentration camps and slave labor ... and 500,000 deaths from
famine
ETHIOPIA ... Amnesty International estimates that half a million people
were killed during the Ethiopian Red Terror of 1977 and 1978
RWANDA ... during the Rwandan
genocide of 1994, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority.
EUROPE (World War 2) ... in Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators in several
adjoining countries, murdered 6 million Jews—around two-thirds of the Jewish
population of Europe —between 1941 and 1944
UKRAINE ... genocide of Ukrainians,
through artificial starvation by the Soviet regime between 1932 and 1933, saw
at least 10% of Ukraine's population killed
DARFUR / SUDAN ... estimates of genocide on the low side indicate 100,000
people killed, to half a million on the high side
IRAQ ... the genocide of Kurdish people in Iraq saw 8% of their
population killed between 1986 and 1989
The list just goes on and on .... dozens and dozens of countries all around the
world ... all guilty of the final solution, ethnic cleansing, democide. It doesn’t matter what it’s called ... it all
ends up as genocide.
Memorial to the Missing
and Murdered
Indigenous Woman and Girls |
For those innocent Indigenous lives
that were taken – flesh and blood human being just the same as any of you now
ready this – their deaths fall on the shoulders of many.
We were indifferent to what was going
on around us ... many were ignorant in their feelings of superiority ... many
held long dispensed views of First Nations People ... and far too many were
indifferent.
Still ... what happened to these women
was NOT genocide. It was rape ... murder
... beating ... humiliation ... dishonouring ... humiliation – and we will
never know the terror these women went thorough.
But again – it was NOT genocide.
As the final report from the National
Inquiry’s states ... persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights
violations and abuses are the root cause behind Canada’s staggering rates of
violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people.
And it also calls for ... transformative
legal and social changes to resolve the crisis that has devastated Indigenous
communities across the country.
The Final Report also spoke about ... a
surrounding context marked by multigenerational and intergenerational trauma
and marginalization in the form of poverty, insecure housing or homelessness
and barriers to education, employment, health care and cultural support ... and
...
... specific colonial and patriarchal policies
that displaced women from their traditional roles in communities and governance
and diminished their status in society, leaving them vulnerable to violence.
That last on, I believe, likely became the greatest reason that saw these women end up in situations where they were murdered and / or went missing.
That last on, I believe, likely became the greatest reason that saw these women end up in situations where they were murdered and / or went missing.
Using the term genocide, in my opinion,
takes away from the causes that brought about their deaths, to which I spoke to
just a few paragraphs above.
They left behind families bewildered by
their disappearance ... grief stricken when their murdered and beaten bodies
were found ... children who would never again see their mothers ... and families
that would never again see their child again.
We also lost the richness of what their lives,
should they have been different, would have contributed to society
What it is ... and what it was ... was a
national tragedy; one which should never again be repeated.
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