Part One: The Crime
To invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. - Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex that authorized the conquest and genocide of the non-Catholic world (1455)
Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of an entire nation ... It is rather a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. – Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944)
The culture that made the Nazi death camps possible was not only indigenous to the West but was an outcome of its fundamental religious traditions that insist upon a dichotomous division of mankind into the elect and the reprobate. - Richard Rubenstein, The Cunning of History (1978)
Colonization is civilization. If we, the superior race, take the land of other races, we must utterly destroy
the previous inhabitants ... The disappearance of our local Indians is of little consequence.
- Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, co-founder of British Columbia and Member of the Legislative Assembly,
1868
I just got a blanket well-infected with smallpox and put it between my saddle blanket and a sweat pad. I
went into all their villages with it and I succeeded. All of the savages died of smallpox.
- John McLain, Hudson's Bay company trader and land speculator, on his sojourn among the
Chilcotins of British Columbia, Only in Nazko (1908)
I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian schools to spread infectious diseases. The death rate often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime. - Dr. Peter Bryce to Indian Affairs Deputy Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott, April 12, 1907, prior to his dismissal by Scott.
It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did
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not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein. - Indian Affairs Deputy Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott in 1913 referring to the mortality in Indian residential schools, 1913 (CBC news, June 3, 2015)
If I were to choose to kill off half the Indian children under our care, there is no better instrument to use than your typical residential school. - Neil Parker, Indian Affairs Superintendent, 1949
The fact that European powers deliberately exterminated millions of non-Christian indigenous people in the New World is historically undeniable, constituting as it does the numerically largest genocide in world history. (7) The participation of Canadian church and state in the same crime has been and continues to be denied, especially by Canadians, despite overwhelming evidence.
Broadly speaking, it would be a strange paradox indeed for Euro-Canadians not to have conquered, de-populated, legally constrained and eradicated the Indian nations they encountered after 1497, operating as they were from precisely the same mentality and practice of “Superior Christian Dominion” (8) that animated every other Vatican-authorized nation. Those who would claim a “Canadian exceptionalism” to the norm of European genocide have yet to produce any evidence to show that indigenous nations somehow fared better under Canadian rule.
On the contrary, a simple peeling back of the Great Canadian Myth of benevolence towards Indians reveals a rancid, hidden history of war crimes and mass murder on par with any criminal regime in the world. The outcome for native nations has been the same, whether in Canada, America or Brazil. And yet the process of extermination played out differently in Canada.
The sheer vastness of the country, for one thing, and the slower, more gradual colonization process, meant that the usual genocidal sequence of Conquest, Containment and Long term Annihilation took place over more than four centuries, making its reality less obvious in any given generation.
From the first Labrador landfall of Cabot and his slaughter of the Beothuk people around 1500 to the final smallpox wars that decimated most west coast Indian tribes by 1920, British and French imperialism employed a mixture of strategies of how to eliminate indigenous nations. The economic
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importance of eastern woodland tribes like the Huron and Iroquois to the Canadian fur trade and their usefulness as military allies ruled out a Spanish Solution of outright extermination of these Indians. But when such usefulness passed, their eradication proceeded just as thoroughly.
The very fact that the conquering Europeans had to be more circumspect and strategic in their treatment of their brown skinned targets made the role of religion all that more crucial to the success of the Canadian genocide, which can truthfully be described as a religious enterprise from start to finish. Indeed, the predominance of the churches in forming and operating colonial policy towards Indians, and in establishing and maintaining, against periodic government opposition, the murderous Indian residential school system for over a century, is unique when compared to most other nations' genocide track record. (9)
The fact that the Canadian Holocaust occurred in prolonged waves under the leadership of Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism – and their offshoots – and did so under “benevolent” guises of education and missionary proselytizing, has done much to fog and camouflage the reality of Genocide in Canada, and not accidentally. British imperialism always presented itself as a “civilizing” force wherever it exterminated local populations, a “hammer in a velvet glove” approach epitomized by General George Maitland, who in 1843 described British treatment of African tribes as “A good thrashing followed by great kindness”. (10)
That said, the sheer vastness of the western half of Canada placed the occupying power at a real disadvantage, making it much harder for Indian nations to be physically corralled and snuffed out. Force alone wouldn't work on the prairie expanse, as was proven by the nearly-successful Metis and Cree guerrilla war of 1885 against a bumbling Canadian militia. Even with the linking of the country by the Canadian Pacific Railway the next year, many western tribes, especially on the west coast, evaded reservations and “assimilation” for decades afterward. And even the early Indian residential schools, devised by Jesuit missionaries as the “final solution” of the predominantly western Indian Problem, failed for many years to attract and hold very many children. (11)
The solution to this impasse was a simple one: church missionaries were to be armed with the full powers of the state and the law, and given an absolutely free hand in their task of subverting, containing and de-populating the untamed tribes west of the Lake Head: a job they enshrined with a
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halo of religious legitimating that made genocide seem like a charity mission. (12) And they and their church sponsors achieved this eradication with remarkable ruthlessness and efficiency by first going after the aboriginal children.
“Give us a child for seven years and he will be ours for life” said the 16th century Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola – and it should be added, in the Canadian context, “at least, the few who survive.”
The full gamut of genocidal crime in Canada is outside the scope of this report. Instead, we are scrutinizing that specific Group Crime called the Indian residential school system – again, a term designed to deceive – by which all of the indigenous nations in Canada were finally brought down and decimated; and how their church, state and their corporate sponsors.
A) Understanding the Killing Machine
As with the concept and application of Genocide itself, the Indian residential school system has been so falsely framed and misunderstood that we must return to the source of what that arrangement was, including its foundational purpose.
The idea behind it all is very old, harking back to the late Roman Empire and its Byzantine counterpart, which was simply to conquer an enemy by kidnapping and re-educating their own children to destroy their former nation, as the programmed mercenaries of the conquering power. In effect, the “salvageable” young ones among the enemy would be saved and assimilated into the Empire, and used to infiltrate and annihilate the rest in a form of “selective redemption”.
The system always worked, since it struck unexpectedly at the Achilles' heel and vital, vulnerable center of any culture: its next generation. (13)
With the incorporation of the Roman Imperium into the Roman Catholic Church, this practice of Selective Redemption became a religious dogma and an institutionalized part of the foreign policy of the Vatican and every European nation.
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Since non-Catholics anywhere in the world were deemed to have no souls or rights of any kind, they had to be conquered and destroyed for their own good. But these non-people could avoid slaughter and acquire a limited slave status by being baptized. In this way, the conquest of the world by the Catholic Imperium could proceed on both an efficient and a “morally legitimate” basis – especially since in the Papal doctrine of Indulgence, Holy Warriors killing on behalf of Rome were spiritually cleansed into a state of original grace. (14)
Genocide, in short, was good for both conquered and the conqueror alike: an idea that became deeply imbedded in the psyche of the western world.
In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Jesuit Order was established in 1543 as a secret military order to crush all opposition to the Pope. It refined this system of Conquest through Salvation by creating a model for sabotaging an enemy culture from within. The Jesuits did so through the classic divide and conquer method of winning over a few leaders and provoking internecine tribal warfare, like they did in Canada among the Hurons by arming Catholic chiefs with muskets and smallpox blankets to wipe out their “pagan” brothers.
Key to the success of this strategy was the re-education of the children of those converted chiefs in special Jesuit-run “schools”, from where the next generation of brainwashed Holy Papal Warriors could complete the destruction of their former nation. (15) Obvious present day analogies come to mind.
This Jesuit weapon was often used successfully on any monarch or government that opposed or dissented from papal rule. But to see its particular efficacy in the New World we must jump forward to the mid 19th century on Canada's west coast, still largely unsettled by Europeans save for Catholic missionaries; usually Jesuit-trained ones, like a priest named Paul Durieu.
In his work among the coastal Salish Indians, Durieu came up with the prototype for what would become the Indian residential school system in Canada. Using the time honored system of converting and then inciting aboriginals against each other, Durieu targeted youths and relocated them into church-run camps where as “Watchmen” they would spy on one another and punish any backsliding
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“heathens” in their ranks, as in any Inquisition.
“It is remarkable how soon our young acolytes have learned to root out heresy and impiety within their
own families and discipline the recalcitrant” wrote Durieu to his superiors in Montreal in 1868.
Not coincidentally, the same year witnessed the first major smallpox outbreak among the traditional Indians in the lower Fraser river region where Durieu worked: a plague assisted by Church of England missionary John Sheepshanks during 1864 when he infected the Chilcotin Indians with smallpox using inoculations, depopulating over 90% of them. (16)
Durieu's approach seemed to impress his Oblate missionary bosses. Soon, they adopted his work as the basis for the first Catholic Indian residential schools, which institutionalized Durieu's method of pitting of children against each other to weed out and destroy the “heathens”. By 1889, this system spawned similar efforts by Protestant missionaries and eventually, the government of Canada itself, which formally sanctioned the Durieu-like “Watchmen” camps that would be eventually called “Indian residential schools”. (17)
Significantly, over one half of the children began dying in these “schools” the very first year they were opened: especially in areas like the Prairies where traditional indigenous identity remained strong. For example, in the Fort Qu'appelle Catholic Indian school that opened in 1896, seven of the thirteen students were either dead or dying after one year; in another school in Regina, eight out of twelve died. In comparison, the average mortality on the surrounding prairie Indian reservations in the same period was barely 5%. (Figures 57, 58, 59 and 60) (18)
These facts suggest that, in keeping with papal ideology, killing off non-Christian, unassimilable Indians was an accepted part and parcel of the residential schools project.
The instantly high death rate at the very inception of the Indian residential school system in areas targeted for ethnic cleansing is a fact never mentioned in official historical accounts like the government's TRC report, since this one fact goes far to prove a genocidal intent behind the “schools” and thereby undermine the mainstream position that the system was a basically
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benevolent effort gone wrong. In the same way, the fact that this mortality level stayed constant for over a half century – between at least 1889 and 1949 – without any action to reduce it by either church or state, irrefutably points to the conclusion that Indian residential schools were a deliberate killing machine from their inception. (19) Their primary and unstated aim was to de-populate “untamed” indigenous nations by at least one half: an aim proven in the result. (See the enormous death rates in western Indian schools documented following, in Figures 61 and 62).
By 1909, nearly half of the children in Indian schools were dying from deliberately introduced diseases like tuberculosis, according to DIA Medical inspector Dr. Peter Bryce who had conducted an exhaustive study of health conditions in the schools. (Figures 61 and 62) This mortality rate stayed at the same level for decades thereafter because of a routine practice by staff of infecting healthy children through forced contact with children dying of tuberculosis, and then denying them care. This practice was done by all of the churches that ran the schools, according to Bryce.
Between 1907 and 1909, Dr. Bryce made two separate tours of nearly every Indian school in the west. Bryce continually found that school staff and their church bosses were routinely concealing the enormous number of deaths among children caused by their disease-spreading practices. He also documented how children consistently died at a much higher rate after entering residential schools, and that no effort was made to separate healthy children from the infected ones.
Bryce did not mince his words: “I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian schools to spread infectious disease. The death rate often exceeds fifty percent ... This is a national crime.” (20)
Bryce was not alone in identifying the deadly environment being maintained in the residential
schools. Indian Agent A.W. Neill of the West Coast Agency wrote to Indian Affairs less than a year
after Bryce's final report describing conditions in Vancouver Island residential schools.
“These people have lived for centuries in the open air. A child is taken into a school at 8, spends ten years
in the school. After that its constitution is so weakened that it has no vitality to withstand disease.”
(Figure 63; April 25, 1910 Letter to Duncan Campbell Scott)
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Both Bryce and Neill were ignored by the government, the good doctor being dismissed and blacklisted for his report, which called among other things for the churches to be removed from operating the residential schools because of their “manslaughter” of the children.
In fact, after firing Dr. Bryce and burying his report, Indian Affairs responded to his expose by actually institutionalizing church control over Indian children, making it mandatory for every Indian child to be incarcerated in the deadly schools, and taking many other steps to increase the death rate. These measures included:
1. November 1910: The government signs a formal contract with the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches giving them full operation of all Indian schools. (21)
2. January 1911: The government stops publishing any follow-up reports on the health and death rate of children after leaving the schools, implementing a 1903 recommendation.
3. 1914-1918: War time emergency powers grants to residential school Principals the power to impress Indian children of any age into “labor battalions” and be shipped as unpaid workers anywhere in Canada to do heavy manual labor.
4. March 11, 1919: Despite soaring death rates in the schools, an Order in Council abolishes all medical inspection therein. (See Figure 5)
5. April 1920: An Act of Parliament makes it mandatory for every Indian child seven or old to be interned in a residential school, on pain of fines and imprisonment. (See Figure 8)
6. Spring 1926: Governments in Alberta and British Columbia – where nearly half of the schools are concentrated – pass laws denying Indians the right to appear in court, file petitions or hire a lawyer. 7. December 1929: The federal government relinquishes its traditional role and makes the churches and residential school Principal the legal guardian of all children therein. (See Figure 10, above)
8. 1929-1933: Alberta and British Columbia governments pass Sexual Sterilization laws allowing any Indian school inmate to be involuntarily sterilized at the whim of the Principal. (Figures 64, 65, 66,
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66a)
The devastating impact of the residential schools on all native people is testified by the demographic records of the Canadian government itself, which shows that during the two decades after the residential schools were first launched and after these special measures were adopted, the net population of Indians across Canada actually declined: by over 20% from 1901-1911, and by almost 5% from 1931-1941. (See Figure 4, above)
The residential schools not only targeted their imprisoned children for germ warfare and de- population, but the surrounding native communities as well, using the schools and special Indian hospitals as breeding grounds for communicable disease. For it was also a standard practice for children sick with tuberculosis or smallpox to be sent back to their homes to infect their families.
Such a case occurred in October 1919, at a Catholic Indian school in central British Columbia, where the local Indian Agent, H. Graham, wrote to Indian Affairs,
“I herewith beg to submit a report upon the outbreak of smallpox in this Agency, which started by girls being sent home from St. Mary's Mission school suffering from the disease. These were practically all sent into the lower portion of this Agency with the result that I had no less than twenty-seven cases of smallpox ... Owing to these cases there were no less than fifty five who were in these quarantine camps ...” (See Figure 6)
This deliberate infecting of the healthy by the sick never abated. Thirty years later, a petition from aboriginal parents reported that children at the Lejac Catholic School were not kept separate from the sick. (Figure 67) Later, an Indian Agent from the same area admitted that during any epidemic in the same Lejac school, “it is impossible to segregate the pupils.” (Figure 68)
The earlier records from the residential schools show clearly that children sick with tuberculosis were being admitted to the school. (Figures 69 and 70)
This germ warfare carried on to modern times. As Delmar Johnny, a survivor of the Catholic Kuper Island residential school relates from his experience as a boy there in 1961, “They made us sleep and play with all the kids who were sick with T.B. They never tried to separate us.” (22)
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This kind of institutionalized biological genocide is rooted in a “two standards of care” system that allows a certain “tolerable” level of death among the targeted group.
“If we are to operate these schools, we must accept the fact that an inordinate number of Indian children will die within them” declared Deputy Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott in response to Dr. Bryce's damning report of 1909. In this way, the top civil servant in Indian Affairs legitimated the death rate and even encouraged it by offering a shield of justification over the disease-breeding schools. This same attitude was voiced by other Indian Affairs officials. (Figures 71 and 72)
That this double standard thinking and practice was a structural part of the residential school system was revealed in October 1935 by Dr. C. Pitts, who treated children at the Lejac Catholic school in British Columbia. In a letter to the local Indian Agent, R.H. Moore, in which he explained why he hadn’t made a complete medical examination of the Indian children at Lejac, Pitts wrote,
“Where is the point of this, when I know that, were I to apply the standards of health to them that is applied to children of the white schools, that I should have to discharge 90% of them and there would be no school left ...” (Figure 73)
This acknowledgment of a practice of accepting a lower standard of health care for Indian children is a sure indication of a genocidal intent, and calls into question every official announcement, whether then or now, that residential school children were “generally healthy and well fed” - a phrase often repeated in school correspondence and Indian Agent reports. “Healthy”, that is, according to the standards applied to Indians, which was a far lower standard than the norm, and allowed countless children to suffer and die at an “acceptable” level that was not considered worthy of reporting.
This illuminating strand in the genocide web is never mentioned in the government's TRC report, which operates under the false assumption that official correspondence is reflecting the truth of what was being done to generations of Indian children. On the contrary: rather than mere duplicity, the automatic cover up of the residential schools genocide was structurally integral to the entire system at work simply because no-one causing the crime considered it to be a crime.
This sort of systemic genocide is a killing machine that is unlikely to be turned off while the system
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that spawned it endures, since it reflects the values and interests of that system. The continued routine killing of aboriginal people at the hands of Canadian police who are never reprimanded is but the most obvious aspect of this grisly historical reality of “acceptable Indian deaths”.
B) How many Children Died?
It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education, which they had received therein. - DIA Deputy Superintendent D.C. Scott, July 1913 (CBC News, June 3, 2015)
We couldn't begin an investigation of deaths in the residential schools. It would be too huge an investigation. - Constable Gerry Peters, RCMP “E” Division, Vancouver, July 9, 1997
The odds of a residential school student dying in the early years of the program were one in two. So okay, fifty percent is a fair estimate of the mortality. - Murray Sinclair, TRC Chairman, March 3, 2011
Long before the Canadian government was forced to begin closing Indian residential schools in the early 1970's, it commissioned special “document destruction teams” to gather and shred any files related to the deaths, accidents or registration of students, according to the Canadian press and Member of Parliament Gary Merasty. (23) Conveniently, the same government and its handpicked TRC spokesmen can now claim ignorance of the total number of deaths in the schools over more than a century: inevitably, perhaps, when the perpetrator of the crime is still in power.
While it is true that no reliable figure of total deaths can be deduced from the archival records alone – especially since even the documents not destroyed never accurately report and usually censor accounts of the death of children – the extensive record of death rates from the early reports of Indian Affairs doctors like George Orton and Peter Bryce does provide a foundation for an informed and extrapolated estimate.
Our research team calculated a total figure for deaths in the residential school system, based on records, government statistics, conditions in the schools and extensive testimonies. We initially
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attained a low figure of 32,000 deaths and a high figure of 73,000 out of 150,000 total attendees in the schools over 107 years (1889-1996), or a death rate of somewhere around 30%. But since these estimates are based on the government's conservative figure of 150,000 students, rather than the more likely figure of 250,000, the number of dead was probably much higher. (24)
Our final calculations are based on examining the following factors: 1. the total number of Indian residential schools, 2. the average number of students in each school, and the length of their stay, and 3. the average mortality rate in each school by decade, commencing 1890-1900 and continuing to 1990-2000, since the last school closed in 1996.
Factor 1: The number of schools across Canada varied from 77 during the period 1900-1930, to a maximum of 130 by 1950 and declining to less than 50 by 1975, giving an average for the century of 103 schools across Canada.
Factor 2: Calculating the average turnover rates and class sizes across all of the schools, the average residential school had 65 students each year attending for an average 6.8 years, causing between 11 and 14 separate “generations” of attendees.
Factor 3: The average mortality rate in the schools varied between four different time periods, being highest in the early years (1889-1929) and lowest in the final (1975-1996). The mortality rate averaging in each period was calculated as follows: Period 1 (1889-1929): 55% ; Period 2 (1929-1949): 39% ; Period 3 (1950-1975): 25% ; Period 4 (1975-1996): 10%. The total average mortality rate over the entire period was therefore calculated to be 32.2%, or almost exactly one third of all students.
Since the total number of attendees was likely about 200,000 students, (say one third higher than the official count of 150,000), a simple calculation of the total number of dead comes to 66,600 children over 107 years, or 650 deaths per year, or ten deaths per school every year. But even this figure is still a conservative one, considering that several school records show that far more than ten children had died there in less than one year.
Nevertheless, 66,000 deaths far exceeds the absurdly low level cited by the government's TRC, of no more than 3,200 total deaths, or less than 5% of the actual likely number. Defying both the archival
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record and simple logic, the TRC would have us believe that only thirty or so children died every year in the schools, or one child every year in every third residential school, for a mortality rate of barely 1.5% - even when the government's own records cite an average death rate of 30% to 50% for many decades! (See Figures 61 and 62)
Sixty six thousand unsolved deaths are tantamount to purposeful genocide, while 3,200 deaths can be rationalized as mere negligence and human error. If you were a guilty nation seeking to avoid exposure and prosecution, which figure would you prefer? And yet the truth has no room for expediency or vested interest. The dead require only the truth.
C) The issue of Intentionality, and the exceptional case of Group Crime
The Canadian government and churches, like all parties caught in their own crime, have relied on the “loophole” provision inserted into Section Two of the United Nations Genocide Convention that states that genocide is intent to commit the crime, not the crime itself. This loop hole has allowed regimes guilty of genocide to evade prosecution, Canada included, since it is nearly impossible to uncover a specific intent behind an array of historical actions by a state power.
Fortunately, as early as the publishing of Raphael Lemkin’s seminal work on Genocide, in which the term was first coined – “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” (1944) – it has been recognized that the normal legal criteria pertaining to criminal acts by individuals do not apply to such acts that emerge from Group Crime, as in the case of a genocidal regime and culture.
In particular, the normal common law judicial requirement of proving both an act and a preceding intent to commit the act does not apply when entire groups of people are engaged in systemic and habitual crime against another group.
Accordingly, Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of Genocide made no mention of “intentionality” regarding this crime. For him, intent was not a factor; genocide meant simply an action - “the destruction of a group” - and that act of destruction by itself demonstrated and implied the intent to commit the crime simply because so many people engaged in it so consistently, and with an obvious
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murderous result.
Ironically, such a clear and uncompromising understanding of Group Crime indicted not only the Nazis after the war, but also those western powers that committed genocide against their own indigenous peoples, including the governments and churches of Canada and the USA. This was recognized by the future Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who stated in 1952,
“If the original draft definition of genocide introduced in the (U.N.) General Assembly had have remained, we in Canada would have had to close every Indian school in our country, and since that was an impossibility, the Genocide Convention had to be modified.” (Report to the House of Commons, August 12, 1952)
Both the Canadian and American governments worked hard to revise Lemkin’s original definition to protect themselves for prosecution for their own home grown war crimes. The main way they accomplished this was by inserting the following phrase into the draft definition of Genocide:
“Genocide means the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, any national, ethnic, racial or religious group ...”(our emphasis)
In short, genocide was re-translated to mean not an action, but an intention: a position as absurd and legally unsupportable as to claim that when a man kills someone and then robs them, the crime wasn’t the killing but the man’s intent to kill.
This self-serving re-definition was adopted in the final United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide (1948). Ever since then, governments and churches implicated in genocide have heavily relied on the “intent loophole” as a safeguard against their own prosecution: especially in North America. Suddenly, the act of genocide itself was not necessarily a crime, and not one that could be prosecuted, unless it could be proven beyond any doubt that the intent to commit these acts was also present. But how does one prove intent by entire institutions?
Proving intent, as any lawyer knows, is always difficult, since it requires inferences about a person’s state of mind, something that is to some degree always speculative, and shrouded in doubt and
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ambiguity: a doubt that allows guilty parties to often walk away free. Nevertheless, when it comes to Group Crime and Genocide in particular, intent is much easier to discern because it is contained within and inherent in every aspect of the Group’s laws, treatment and habits regarding those meant for destruction.
That is, intent is not necessary to prove when it comes to systemic genocide; for such intent can be assumed on the basis of the act itself because of the legitimacy of the act within the genocidal culture. In this regard, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials Robert Jackson, observed,
No regime that wages wars and crimes against entire peoples can be relied on to record their aims in any detail, since the purpose of what they did is inherent in the murderous acts themselves and is demonstrated by the daily operation of their regime. Mass murder requires no justification or rationale by a nation committed to it. For the defense counsel to demand proof of intent in regard to the actions of the defendants is spurious and misleading, since intent is a mental attitude by which an individual acts, and therefore cannot be directly proved but must be inferred from the circumstances. These criteria do not apply to criminal regimes bent on mass murder. In the latter case, the proof of their crime lies not in assumed attitudes or motives, but in the corpses and ruination caused by the daily operation of the regime itself, its laws, and the behavior of its citizenry. (September 30, 1946)
In summary, the entire issue of intentionality in relation to Group Crime and Genocide is a politically
motivated issue arising from the need of guilty powers to find legal loopholes through which they
can avoid not just prosecution but their lawful disestablishment as criminal regimes.
The bare existence of genocidal crimes indicates an inherent intentionality which is proven in the
legal protection, consistency and institutional complicity associated with the crimes.
Echoing the Nuremberg precedent, then, it is not necessary today to prove the intent behind the Canadian Genocide, since by its very nature such a crime intends to exterminate inassimilable indigenous people. This crime has not emerged from random acts by individuals but rather from carefully planned programs and their underlying ideologies basic to Christian Canada. For any such Group Crime proves its own intent, and can and must be prosecuted on that basis.
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