Last month, the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) issued a public “Canada Day Statement” — described as having been “unanimously approved” by the group’s governing council — declaring that “existing historical scholarship” makes it “abundantly clear” that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples amounts to “genocide”. The authors also claimed that there is a “broad consensus” among historians on the existence of Canadian “genocidal intent” (also described elsewhere in the statement as “genocidal policies” and “genocidal systems”) — an alleged consensus that is “evidenced by the unanimous vote of our governing Council to make this Canada Day Statement”.
The authors went further by arguing that both federal and provincial governments in Canada “have worked, and arguably still work, towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples as both a distinct culture and physical group” (my emphasis); thereby suggesting that there is “arguably” an ongoing genocide going on, to this day, on Canadian soil.
The idea that Canada is currently waging a campaign of mass extermination against Indigenous people may sound like something emitted by Russian social-media bots or Chinese state media. But no, this is an official statement from the CHA, a body that describes itself as “the only organization representing the interests of all historians in Canada” — presumably including me.
In fact, there is no “broad consensus” for the proposition that Canadian authorities committed genocide, let alone for the completely bizarre idea that a genocide is unfolding on Canadian soil even as you read these words. And while many of us have become used to such plainly dilatory claims being circulated by individual Canadian academics in recent years, the CHA’s use of its institutional stature in this way was so shocking that it caused dozens of historians to affix their names to a letter of protest.
Notwithstanding what this (or any other) official body claims, the question of whether Canada committed genocide is not a settled issue among scholars. Canada is a relatively small country, home to only a small number of professional historians. And so even this modest-seeming collection of names suffices to disprove the CHA’s claim that it speaks for the entire profession. Moreover, many of those who have signed the letter are senior scholars giving voice to younger colleagues who (rightly) fear that speaking out publicly will hurt their careers.
I am not writing here to defend the actions of Canadian governments toward Indigenous populations. As most Canadians have known for decades, the policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools led to horrendous cases of sexual and physical abuse. There was also a long history in many schools of refusing to let children speak their native languages or continue their cultural traditions. These were assimilatory, underfunded institutions created and run by people who typically believed that they were doing Indigenous people a favour by “civilizing” them.
What I am addressing, rather, is (a) the question of whether these actions are correctly described with the word “genocide”, and (b) the CHA’s false claim that there is “broad consensus” on the answer to that question. As the letter of protest states:
The recent discovery of graves near former Indigenous residential schools is tragic evidence of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) documented in Volume 4 of its final report — a report that we encourage all Canadians to read. We also encourage further research into gravesites across Canada and support the completion of a register of children who died at these schools. Our commitment to interrogate the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools and other forms of attempted assimilation is unshaken. However, the CHA exists to represent professional historians and, as such, has a duty to represent the ethics and values of historical scholarship. In making an announcement in support of a particular interpretation of history, and in insisting that there is only one valid interpretation, the CHA’s current leadership has fundamentally broken the norms and expectations of professional scholarship. With this coercive tactic, the CHA Council is acting as an activist organization and not as a professional body of scholars. This turn is unacceptable to us.
Historians are taught to approach their study of the past with humility, on the understanding that the emergence of new documents and perspectives may require us to revise our assessments. Moreover, even if an individual scholar might have strong opinions about a particular historical subject — having become certain that his or her interpretation represents the truth — the community of historians exists in a state of debate and disagreement. We are always aware that two historians sifting through the same archival box of documents can develop very different theories about what those documents mean.
It is true that there are some areas of history that might be fairly labelled as definitively “settled”. But these are few. And even in these cases, consensus typically arises organically, through the accumulated weight of scholarship — not, as in the case of the CHA’s Canada Day stunt, through ideologically charged public statements that seek to intimidate dissenting academics into silence.
