INTRODUCTION
In settler societies like Canada, United States, and Australia, the bourgeoning discourse that frames colonial violence against Indigenous people as genocide rather than past assimilation has been controversial, specifically because there is heated debate about the meaning and applicability of genocide (Barta Reference Barta2008; Benvenuto, Woolford, and Hinton Reference Benvenuto, Woolford, Hinton, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014; Chrisjohn and Young Reference Chrisjohn and Young1997; Churchill Reference Churchill1997; Joseph Reference Joseph, Castellano, Archibald and DeGagne2008; MacDonald Reference MacDonald2003; MacDonald and Hudson Reference MacDonald and Graham2013; Mako Reference Mako2012; Miller Reference Miller1996; Moses Reference Moses2004; Neu and Therrien Reference Neu and Richard2003; Tatz Reference Tatz1999).Footnote 1 On the one hand, state acknowledgement of genocide against Indigenous peoples potentially threatens state sovereignty because it would be official that settler nation-states emerged by violently displacing Indigenous sovereignties and peoples. On the other hand, while the trajectories of colonialism vary across settler nations, the charge of genocide fundamentally challenges narratives of peaceful and lawful origins, and needs to be officially acknowledged in order to build more just relations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples.
While I agree with this latter assessment, my primary goal is not to assess the validity of “genocide” as it relates to Indigenous experiences, but to analyze what is revealed about settler colonialism in debates about the label of genocide. Specifically, in a Foucaultian vein, my argument is that genocide debates related to Indigenous experiences operationalize a range of governing techniques that extend settler colonialism, even as Indigenous peoples confront settler hegemonies. My analysis shows that these techniques include: interpretative denial; promoting an Oppression Olympics, and a politics of distancing; regulating difference through state-based recognition and interference; and depoliticizing claims through a human rights framework that overshadows continuing practices of assimilation, extermination, criminalization, containment, and forced movement of Indigenous peoples. While these inter-related techniques are not unique to settler nation-states or used only in relation to Indigenous peoples, pinpointing them fosters social justice endeavors to disrupt settler colonialism.
Wolfe (Reference Wolfe2006) defines settler-colonialism as a logic and imperative constituted by the extermination of Indigenous peoples. While Wolfe (367) states that the “question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism” and that “settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory,” he also says that settler colonialism is not simply a form of genocide. He argues that settler colonialism deploys the discourses of race, religion, and civilization, but that the primary motivation for elimination of Indigenous peoples in settler colonialism is access to territory and sustained occupancy by settlers (Reference Wolfe2006, 388). As a practice of coming to a land to stay, Wolfe (Reference Wolfe2006, 388) states that settler colonialism is a structure not an event. He goes onto to note that “structural genocide” (403) is naturalized and given legitimacy when European settlers are re-made as the original founders of the land. Rifkin (Reference Rifkin2013) defines settler colonialism in terms of “settler colonial common sense,” namely the everyday mundane practices and processes of lived hegemony, rather than a smooth, consistent, or necessarily intentional structure. In a similar vein, in her analysis of Indigenous experiences of the child welfare system, Jacobs (Reference Jacobs, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014) frames settler colonialism as a “habit of Indigenous elimination.” Such commonsensical and habitual conceptions of settler colonialism complement the emerging consensus among scholars of genocide that genocides and mass killings are mostly perpetrated by ordinary people (see Moshman Reference Moshman2007 for further discussion, 117–18). In these frames of structure, commonsense, and habit, settler colonialism is distinct in that the basis is the attempted/actual eradication of Indigenous ways of self-governing and continuing dispossession of Indigenous land. Indigenous people resisted and continue to resist colonial domination, but the structures, commonsensical practices, and habits of colonialism are continuing in the very nature of settlement and the dominating institutionalization of asymmetrical Euro-legal models of governance on Indigenous lands (Alfred Reference Alfred2001; Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014; Jacobs Reference Jacobs, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014; Watson Reference Watson2011).
Building on Indigenous critiques of colonialism, I seek to show that settler colonial logics not only aim to eliminate Indigenous peoples and sovereignties, but they also have a productive force in legitimating and extending settler colonial sovereignty. To assess the productive techniques of settler colonialism, I examine the controversy surrounding the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) about the label of genocide. The CMHR opened in Winnipeg, Canada, in September 2014, “on Treaty One land at the doorstep of the historical location of Métis occupation,” as “the only museum in the world solely devoted to human rights awareness and education” (CMHR 2014a). One of the 11 core galleries, titled “Indigenous Perspectives,” is dedicated to Indigenous “concepts of rights and responsibilities based on worldviews in which everyone and everything is inter-related” (CMHR 2014b). The controversy about the title of this core gallery arose before the CMHR even opened, especially following a press release on July 26, 2013 by the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the CMHR, Stuart Murray. The press release was entitled “Use of “genocide” in relation to treatment of Indigenous Peoples in Canada,” and stated that while the CMHR would include the word “genocide” when describing “the horrific abuses” faced by Aboriginal peoples, it would not use “genocide” in the title of exhibits with Indigenous content. When it opened, the CMHR did not change its position, but instead advocated the idea of having dialogue about difficult knowledge on genocide.
By “difficult knowledge” I am referencing what educational theorists Pitt and Britzman (Reference Pitt and Britzman2003, 756) call “a crisis of representation, namely the problem of how to narrate or express an experience rather than the experience itself, especially when our own authority over a representation is challenged.” Difficult knowledge arises not just from unsettling facts about violence and human rights violations, but also in terms of how best to re-present encounters with traumatic actions that disrupt our fundamental understandings of the world and ourselves. Lehrer and Milton state, “Difficult knowledge…is knowledge that does not fit. It therefore induces a breakdown in experience, forcing us to confront the possibility that the conditions of our lives and the boundaries of our collective selves may be quite different from how we normally, reassuringly think of them” (Reference Lehrer, Milton, Lehrer, Milton and Patterson2011, 8). As Foucault (Reference Foucault and Gordon1980) demonstrated, all knowledge operates through and as forces of power; difficult knowledge about genocide is distinctive in that it confronts the conditions of settler colonialism, and opens up counter-narratives that put into question settler sovereignties. As a public institution, the CMHR is a particularly relevant case study because “public spaces can become de facto venues for encounter, truth telling, and dialogue, organic means for aggrieved groups to cope with, communicate, or work through the difficult past” (Lehrer and Milton Reference Lehrer, Milton, Lehrer, Milton and Patterson2011, 6). Further, as noted in the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) summary report on the impact of Indian Residential Schools, with specific reference to the CMHR, “Museums have an ethical responsibility to foster national reconciliation, and not simply tell one party's version of the past” (2015, 302). While this paper engages the existing literature on how museums should curate difficult subject matter (Bonnel and Simon Reference Bonnel and Roger2007; Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson Reference Lehrer, Milton and Patterson2011; Simon Reference Simon2011), my main focus is on the settler colonial nexus between difficult knowledge, curatorial decisions, and the label of genocide.
First, through a textual analysis of key CMHR documents, I briefly outline some of the ways in which the CMHR has approached its curatorial decisions and difficult knowledge about genocide. While difficult knowledge has been framed in terms of philosophy, pedagogy, method (Pitt and Britzman Reference Pitt and Britzman2003), curatorial decisions and witnessing (Lehrer and Milton Reference Lehrer, Milton, Lehrer, Milton and Patterson2011), and affect and ethics (Moses Reference Moses, Hinton, La Pointe and Irvin-Erickson2013a; Simon Reference Simon2011), I approach it as political matter. By this I mean that difficult knowledge of genocide is about relations of domination and subordination. Second, and for most of the paper, I deploy discourse analysis to examine CMHR documents and media responses from key stakeholders to assess disputes related to the use of “genocide.” These disputes included: competing definitions of genocide; the primacy assigned to the Holocaust as the foundational genocide; the role of the state in CMHR decisions; and the utility of a human rights lens to frame genocide. Certainly these disputes generated difficult knowledge that varied in character and challenged various stakeholders in different ways. Nonetheless, these disputes also represented and (re)produced settler colonial power, knowledge, and nation building.
There are at least two reasons why this argument is important. First, rather than framing the problem of difficult knowledge about how to re-present Indigenous experiences, I start from the premise the problem is about how institutions of the settler colonial nation interpret injustice. Second, if one of the criteria of success is how well the CMHR partners with Indigenous communities, as stated by the CMHR (Murray Reference Murray2013), it may well be sowing the seeds of its own failure as a public institution; this is specifically because some Survivors of Indian Residential Schools and leading Indigenous actors—including the Chair of the Canadian TRC Justice Murray Sinclair, past president of the Assembly of First Nations Phil Fontaine, and Idle No More spokesperson Pam Palmeter—use and insist on the language of genocide. As the CMHR website information states, “Words are powerful” (CMHR 2014b, core gallery “Speaking out on human rights violations”).
GENOCIDE AS DIFFICULT KNOWLEDGE FOR THE CMHR
The CMHR has clearly struggled with how to re-present violence affecting Indigenous peoples, evident in its own material about the use of “genocide.” Even before the 2013 press statement by the President and CEO, the CMHR struggled with how to curate Indigenous histories, evident in the 2010 Content Advisory Committee (CAC) Final Report to the CMHR. The Final Report recommendations included the need to “develop an appreciation of the variety of Indigenous identities and experiences,” and “recognize that colonialism, both within Canada and beyond, is a historic and present assault on the human rights of Indigenous Peoples” (CAC 2010, 61). The Report went on to acknowledge that steps should be taken to include Indigenous artist–writer–scholars in residence programs in the Museum, make connections between treaty rights and human rights, have exhibits on Aboriginal languages and territory, and develop a mentoring and outreach program for Indigenous youth.
The Report also acknowledged “The theft of land and resources by settler communities from Indigenous nations” and “The destruction of languages, cultures, spiritualties, and families as generations of Indigenous children were forcibly detained in Indian residential schools” (CAC 2010, 70). Moreover, there was a self-reflective tone in the Report about the limitations of the consultation process and the approach taken by the Advisory Committee towards stories, which have different meanings for Indigenous peoples (see page 31 of the CAC Report as an example) and that carry fraught emotions. The Report suggests that CMHR officials were aware that “exhibitions may be judged as difficult if they evoke the heightened anxiety (and the potential for secondary traumatization) that accompanies feelings of identification with either the victims of violence, the perpetrators of such violence or those identified as bystanders passively acquiescent in regard to scenes of brutalization” (Simon Reference Simon2011, 433).
However, the report also stated that “Although the record is full of incidents of the wrongful taking of land and resources as well as Aboriginal lives, it is not the ethnocide and genocide of Indigenous nations that must ground the work of respectfully including the First Peoples in the Museum” (2010, 72 emphasis mine). Thus, the report acknowledged that genocide of Indigenous peoples happened, but then pushed it into the background, a systemic pattern noted in other contexts by Moses (Reference Moses2004) and Churchill (Reference Churchill1997). The Report did reference historical examples such as “the slaughter of the Beothuk in Newfoundland, and the bounty placed on Mi'kmaq scalps by Governor Cornwallis in Nova Scotia” (CAC 2010, 40), but importantly did not describe this as genocide.
The representation of genocidal violence enacted by Europeans against Indigenous peoples was also raised at the 2012 annual public meeting, and reported in the CMHR public meeting notes. For instance, after being asked, “why are the atrocities of our country are being left out?,” the public meeting notes outlined that,
It is essential that visitors are exposed to the dark side of the human-rights story (including our own) in order to understand why taking action is so important…But stories of atrocities will not be our only content. Because the CMHR is intended to educate and inspire action, we must also include examples where action has been successful in promoting human rights (CMHR Annual Public Meeting, 2011, 2012).
The promotion of human rights prompted the CMHR President and CEO, Stuart Murray, to issue his 2013 public statement. The statement is worth citing in full:
In light of recent media reports, I wish to make the following statement to clarify the Museum's position on use of the word “genocide” in relation to treatment of Canada's Aboriginal peoples.
The Museum believes this discussion provides an excellent opportunity to raise awareness about the nature of human rights violations in our own backyard. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, as a venue for education, reflection and dialogue, strongly supports and encourages this conversation.
In the Museum, we will examine the gross and systemic human rights violation of Indigenous peoples. This will include information about the efforts of the Aboriginal community, and others, to gain recognition of these violations as genocide—and we will use that word. We will look at the ways this recognition can occur when people combat denial and work to break the silence surrounding such horrific abuses. In one such exhibit, Residential Schools will serve as the recognizable “entry point” for visitors.
We have chosen, at present, not to use the word “genocide” in the title for one of the exhibits about this experience, but will be using the term in the exhibit itself when describing community efforts for this recognition. Historical fact and emerging information will be presented to help visitors reach their own conclusions.
While a museum does not have the power to make declarations of genocide, we can certainly encourage—through ongoing partnership with the Indigenous community itself—an honest examination of Canada's human rights history, in hopes that respect and reconciliation will prevail. (Murray Reference Murray2013, emphasis added).
Without doubt, the CMHR has genuinely wrestled with its curatorial decisions about how to represent difficult knowledge about genocidal practices against Indigenous peoples in Canada, reflected in an exhibit on “Defining Genocide.” I contend that these dilemmas cannot be avoided, for the very design of teaching and learning from narratives of genocide enacts a crisis of identity and representation for those dominant actors and CMHR agents who are mandated to advance the interests of the nation-state, yet unable to reconcile this mandate with knowledge of the Indigenous genocide.
THE CMHR AND DISPUTES ABOUT THE USE OF “GENOCIDE”
Competing Definitions of Genocide and Interpretive Denials
In the responses from Indigenous actors to President and CEO Murray's press release, the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (UNCG) definition was repeatedly invoked, echoing larger debates about the meaning of genocide. The UNCG specifies a definition of genocide in Article 2:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its d) physical destruction in whole or in part; e) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; f) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
While, as Charny (Reference Charny2001, 6) rightly points out, definitional battles over whether or not a given event really fits into a pure form of genocide, can effectively write that event out of existence and make the event something else, the perspectives of affected groups can also reveal what is at stake in competing definitions of genocide. As I discuss below, Indigenous actors specifically challenged the settler colonial politics of genocide denial.
Drawing on Maori scholar Joseph's (Reference Joseph, Castellano, Archibald and DeGagne2008, 208–11) typology, I contend that the curatorial decision of the CMHR to not use the label of genocide in the title of the core gallery on Indigenous perspectives was specifically a form of interpretive denial; the politics of genocide denial was not so much literal but, instead, the facts were given different meaning from what is apparent to some Indigenous peoples, where for example Indian Residential Schools were deemed assimilative not genocidal. Interpretive denial works in conjunction with what Joseph calls “cultural denial” of genocide, in that the ideological fabric of the nation is layered by the idea that there were no political systems, legal codes, or governance practices before Europeans arrived in United States. According to Moshman (Reference Moshman2007) and Charny (Reference Charny2001), denial of genocide is itself a process of genocide, in that denial desensitizes a nation to mass atrocities.
Murray's statement prompted two kinds of responses from Indigenous actors, both of which confronted interpretive denial. First, some challenged the sanitized narratives of Canadian history in which historic colonial actions aimed to “kill the Indian” were/are denied. For instance, on July 12, 2013, Phil Fontaine, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, co-wrote an article for the Toronto Star newspaper with Dr. Michael Dan and Bernie M. Farber, the president and senior vice-president, respectively, of Gemini Power Corporation, urging the Museum to use the language of genocide.Footnote 2 They argued that under Article 2 of the UNCG, genocide was explicitly carried out against Indigenous people, evident in: the Indian Residential School system that forced children away from their families and culture; the nutrition experiments carried out in the Residential Schools; the practice of forcibly removing Indigenous children from reserves and placing them with adoptive non-Aboriginal families, commonly referred to as the Sixties Scoop; and the decision by the government in the 1900s to allow native children to die of tuberculosis (for similar arguments, also see Chrisjohn and Young Reference Chrisjohn and Young1997; Neu and Therrien Reference Neu and Richard2003). Drawing on the UNCG definition, Fontaine, Dan, and Farber (Reference Fontaine, Dan and Farber2013) concluded that,
The time has come for Canada to formally recognize a sixth genocide, the genocide of its own aboriginal communities; a genocide that began at the time of first contact and that was still very active in our own lifetimes; a genocide currently in search of a name but no longer in search of historical facts.
Here, the challenge to the CMHR and to Canadian institutions more broadly was to apply an interpretation of the international convention definition in order to counter interpretive genocide-denial.
The controversy grew after Chief Clearsky from the Southern Chiefs Organization issued an open letter on August 1, 2013, responding to Murray's (CMHR President and CEO) press release. Excerpts from Clearsky's open letter indicate that he too called for a re-interpretation of history that would show why “genocide” was applicable to Indigenous experiences:
It is disturbing that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has taken the position of sanitizing the true history of Canada's shameful treatment of First Nations people since confederation. Your museum's decision not to identify the shameful deceit, marginalization and ongoing attempts to assimilate and eradicate the original peoples of this country is a huge slap in the face for First Nations and is hypocritical of the formal apology issued by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on June 11, 2008. This is a clear demonstration of the insincerity and populist agenda of the Federal Government of Canada…
…I call on you to exercise your humanity and use the proper term of genocide as this is exactly what has been done and is currently being perpetrated on First Nations through various means. Canada has now abandoned the aggressive genocide process and has now incorporated the passive genocidal agenda through the systemic racism imposed through the Apartheidal Indian Act.
I urge you to research the United Nations definition of genocide and you will be surprised to find that the historical and current processes imposed fit the definition of genocide to a tee and that sanitizing this will only make a festering wound more endemic and will only ensure that racism will be allowed to grow unabated in the most multi-cultural nation on Mother Earth.
I strongly suggest that you reconsider your position and use the proper and fitting title of what has happened and is currently happening in Canada and it is called genocide! (Clearsky Reference Clearsky2013, n.p).
The investment in using “genocide” is to counter what Clearsky refers to as an insincere state agenda that denies attempts of forced assimilation and eradication of Indigenous peoples.
The second narrative of difficult knowledge that arose from competing definitions of genocide was that the CMHR needed to adopt a qualified definition so as to reinterpret the impact on Indigenous communities. In Radia's (Reference Radia2013) news article about CEO and President Murray's 2013 statement, Pamela Palmater, a spokesperson for the Idle No More movement cited the UNCG to argue that the Canadian state and Canadian institutions perpetuated genocide against Indigenous peoples; and Ernie Crey, policy advisor for the Stó:lō Tribal Council, stated that it would be more accurate to refer to “cultural genocide” and attempts at assimilation, while also acknowledging how churches and the government inoculated Aboriginal peoples against communicable diseases and therefore did not necessarily have the intention to annihilate Indigenous peoples. Clearly, the definition of genocide was contested among Indigenous people as well as other actors related to the CMHR, for there was no singular Indigenous perspective.
The distinctions of physical or cultural genocide and intentional or unintentional genocide are not unique to debates about Indigenous experiences. They are nonetheless important in that they do not overtly deny genocide, but instead they interpret state violence in qualified ways that downgrade attempts to replace Indigenous life-worlds with the cultural, economic, material, spatial, temporal, and political patterns of colonizers (Woolford Reference Woolford2009, 92). Like Churchill (Reference Churchill1997), Short (Reference Short2010) and Wolfe (Reference Wolfe2006, 118), Woolford rejects the separation between physical and cultural genocide, which tend to presume physical genocide as the primary real thing; as one example, he rightly notes that the spread of smallpox, tuberculosis, and industrial ailments such as mercury poisoning were not merely natural diseases but the consequences of enforced contact by Europeans with Indigenous peoples. He also concludes that a centrally coordinated intentional strategy of assimilation and elimination is not a requirement for genocide because violence is typically not linear but unevenly practiced (Woolford Reference Woolford2009, 91). Woolford counters the politics of genocide-denial by interpreting the 1948 UNCG as an “ontology of destruction,” rather than a matter of human rights in which only a legal rather than social justice remedy is possible. An ontology of destruction “examines genocide from the perspective of how destruction is experienced and made sense of by targeted collectivities” (Woolford Reference Woolford2009, 82). Centering Indigenous perspectives will of course reveal contestations among Indigenous peoples, but such contestation can delegitimize interpretive denials of genocide while extending alternative accounts of settler colonial actions.
Primacy of the Holocaust: Fostering a Politics of Distance and the Oppression Olympics
The primacy assigned to the Holocaust has perhaps been the major catalyst of academic debate among genocide studies scholars (for example, see Bloxham Reference Bloxham2008; Hinton Reference Hinton2012; Huttenbach Reference Huttenbach1988; MacDonald Reference MacDonald2003; Moses Reference Moses2011; Stannard Reference Stannard and Rosenbaum1998) and, recent public critique against the CMHR (Hankivsky and Dhamoon Reference Hankivsky and Dhamoon2013; Moses Reference Moses2012). This is in part because the primacy assigned to one atrocity eclipses others and replicates the discourse of hidden genocides (Benvenuto, Woolford, and Hinton Reference Benvenuto, Woolford, Hinton, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014; Hinton, La Pointe, and Irvin-Erickson Reference Hinton, Thomas and Douglas2013). Importantly, the CMHR is mandated to give priority to the Holocaust since the legislative summary appended to the federal legislation creating the CMHR states that the institution will “house the largest museum gallery in Canada devoted to the subject of the Holocaust.” As also noted in the 2010 CMHR Final Report,
The Museum should position the Holocaust as a separate zone at the centre of the Museum, showing the centrality of the Holocaust to the overall human rights story and in promoting the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human rights, with its grounding in the idea of common humanity. (CAC 2010, 62)
Before the CMHR opened, officials tried to justify the primacy of the Holocaust, sometimes with mixed messages. On the one hand, as cited in a Globe and Mail article in 2011 (Basen Reference Basen2011), Stuart Murray, president and CEO of the CMHR, stated that “This is not a genocide museum, or a discussion over whose genocide was worse….it's not a tape measure museum about whose area is bigger in terms of square footage. This is about learning about human rights, it's about why did this happen, how can we learn, what can we do?” Yet, on other hand, Murray also stated in the same article that, “The Holocaust is the most thoroughly studied genocide in history and therefore the most useful pedagogically and that justifies its special status within the museum.” When the CMHR opened, the core gallery on “Examining the Holocaust” included a section on the suffering of the Roma, gays, disabled peoples, and Jehovah's Witnesses, but maintained its primary focus on experiences of European Jews so as “to learn to recognize genocide and try to prevent it” (CMHR 2014b).
In locating the Holocaust as unique and the standard by which other atrocities are measured, I contend that the CMHR operationalized two settler colonial techniques. The first was to generate a politics of distancing, whereby the nation-state was framed as a moral agent in contrast to other far away nations who have committed atrocities. Moses (Reference Moses, Hinton, La Pointe and Irvin-Erickson2013a, 23) notes that public frames of uniqueness are ideologically loaded in ways that screen out certain forms of human suffering and loss, while others become nationally recognized and amplified. As he says, “The virtually exclusive attention on the European theater casts most settler Canadians as victims, conveniently hiding the settler-Indigene binary and settler racism toward Aboriginal peoples.” This preoccupation with the European theater is rooted in what Moshman (Reference Moshman2007, 127) refers to as an investment in “our” identity as moral agents. As Moshman states, precisely “because genocide is widely seen as the most terrible of all crimes, and because most of us see ourselves as moral agents within a moral community” (127), no one wants to identify with a nation founded on genocide.
The second settler colonial technique at work in prioritizing the Holocaust was an Oppression Olympics, whereby community stakeholders defaulted to comparing atrocities in a way that reinforced a hierarchy of suffering. As Hankivsky and Dhamoon (Reference Hankivsky and Dhamoon2013) demonstrate, an Oppression Olympics emerged among CMHR community stakeholders, where Jewish, Ukrainian, and Armenian groups competed for the mantle of the most oppressed, and where the only possible outcome was a zero-sum game. While some groups (such as Chinese, Sikh, and Armenian organizations) were appeased by having their histories included in various exhibits, a public battle emerged about whether the Nazi genocide of Jews was the unique lens and template through which all other genocides and human rights violations should be understood. While Indigenous perspectives were not absent from this debate, the central players for the most part were the Canadian Jewish Congress who wanted a separate and permanent gallery on the Holocaust; the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC 2008) who wanted a Holodomar gallery like the Holocaust one; and the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association which called for more thematic galleries. Moses notes that lesser heard voices included the Canadians for Genocide Education, who argued that the atrocities against Indigenous peoples warranted a privileged position because “this genocide happened in Canada and is a defining aspect of all that Canada is today. Our prosperity is premised on the resources taken from and then denied to our First Nations and Inuit. In addition, this human rights museum is to be built on their stolen land” (cited in Moses Reference Moses, Hinton, La Pointe and Irvin-Erickson2013a, 39). Yet, this anticolonial position did not garner the same public attention as did the tensions between Ukrainian, Jewish, and Armenian community groups about the primacy assigned to the Holocaust.
The uniqueness controversy necessarily produced difficult knowledge about how the Holocaust and Indigenous genocide compared in degree and form, where historical atrocities “here” (in Canada) had to be measured in equivalency to “over there” (in Europe). I am not suggesting that knowledge about the Holocaust or Holodomar is easier to comprehend than that of violence against Indigenous people or vice versa; rather, a public institution of the settler state was invested in downplaying the state's role in genocidal violence in Canada, and foregrounding instead its recognition of historical atrocities in Europe as a marker of its supposed humanitarian commitments. As well, when non-Indigenous community organizations engaged in an Oppression Olympics, they upheld the idea, even if not intentionally, that violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada was somehow less significant than violence against those who arrived from elsewhere. The goal is not to produce a better hierarchy of oppressions, where Indigenous experiences are deemed primary, but to relate this founding violence to other atrocities. This is because any form of Oppression Olympics presumes the legitimacy of settler state sovereignty in mediating competing claims of recognition. An ethical response, as Moses (Reference Moses, Hinton, La Pointe and Irvin-Erickson2013a, 41) states, must challenge the primacy of any one genocide, and necessitates recognized suffering and mutual empathy across the experiences of First Peoples and the Jewish Holocaust, as well as gays and lesbians, Muslims and other people of color who are also targeted by those who hate difference.
The Role of the State: The Politics of Recognition and Interference
As a public institution under the Canadian Museums Act, the CMHR is constrained by federal law, and as such the federal mandate circumscribes curatorial decisions. On this basis, it is not surprising that the CMHR chose not to use the label of genocide in the title of its exhibit, for this label is not mentioned in the mandate of the TRC on Indian Residential Schools, the 2006 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, or the Canadian Governments 2008 apology to Residential School Survivors (Benvenuto, Woolford, and Hinton Reference Benvenuto, Woolford, Hinton, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014, 1). This absence is assigned legitimacy by narrowing the scope of state-sanctioned difference, where the settler state can effectively write out difficult knowledge about genocide according to its own standards of recognition. This is reflected in the CMHR's own notes on the 2012 annual meeting, which specified “The five genocides that are officially recognized as such by the Government of Canada [the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian genocide, the atrocities in Rwanda and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica] will be featured,” and because the Indigenous genocide is not recognized by the federal government it cannot be featured in the same way as the other five genocides.
In the same week Murray's (Reference Murray2013) statement about the use of “genocide” was released, a spokesperson for the CMHR told the Winnipeg Free Press that as a crown corporation it was important the museum's wording aligned with the federal government's position, where five genocides are formally acknowledged by Parliament, but where the Canadian government has not recognized its Indigenous policies as genocide. As such, when it opened, the CMHR core gallery entitled “Breaking the Silence” focused only on the federally recognized genocides. While some Indigenous actors, including Fontaine and Crey, found value in state recognition of Indigenous experiences, others have argued that official state recognition is itself a colonial manifestation of power and knowledge (Andersen Reference Andersen2014; Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014; Jacobs Reference Jacobs, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014), because the State determines which group experiences are validated and foregrounded within the nation's history and identity, and how these experiences are made knowable to the public through its institutions.
How to re-present difficult knowledge about the genocide against Indigenous peoples in a settler society has also been shaped by the Museum's funding structure, which is regulated in part by agents of the settler state. As noted in the 2011–2012 Annual Report (CMHR 2012), the CMHR is a product of both private and public funding. Public funding has been provided by the Government of Canada, Province of Manitoba, and City of Winnipeg, and has flagged questions about whether the Museum or government-appointed Board members are making content decisions. As well, the Museum has substantial funding from the Forks Renewal Corporation, and has a “Friends of the CMHR” program, which had raised a total of $136 million as of the end of July 2014 (Friends of the CMHR 2014). Included in this private funding tally was a contribution of $1,000,000 made by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs in 2009, a donation noted in Chief Clearsky's (Reference Clearsky2013) public response to the 2013 statement by CMHR CEO and President Murray about the use of “genocide.” Chief Clearsky stated:
In April, 2009, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs gave a $1,000,000.00 donation to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights with the understanding that a true history of the treatment of First Nations people would be on exhibit. It is now abundantly clear that Canada again is choosing to sanitize the true truth and continue with their agenda of minimizing the many attempts of genocide perpetrated against the original peoples of this land.
This section of his letter received considerable media attention, including a headline of “Can't buy ‘genocide’ label, chiefs told” (Paul Reference Paul2013), and a quote by a Museum spokesperson, Maureen Fitzhenry who stated: “Donations are not one of the criteria the museum uses to select and develop its content.” Significantly, while CMHR officials focused on the relationship between donations and curatorial decisions, it did not directly address Clearsky's points about genocide.
Moreover, despite statements from CMHR officials that “the [federal Heritage] minister is not in a position to direct museum content” (cited in Welch Reference Welch2014), media reports repeatedly highlighted that the Museum faced persistent allegations of making curatorial decisions on the basis of pressure from senior political staff in the federal government. This perhaps was not surprising because Stuart Murray's appointment as President and CEO of the CMHR in 2009 was seen as a political appointment; from 2000 to 2006, he was head of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party, and had publicly supported the federal Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, prior to his appointment. Again, in late 2012, it was reported that a wave of employees left the CMHR because “they were frustrated by a directive from the museum's federally appointed board to feature more ‘positive Canadian stories’” (Welch Reference Welch2014). As noted in the Winnipeg Free Press, “Underlying the genocide question are persistent allegations—some made by former museum staff—[that] the CMHR's federally appointed board routinely interferes in content decisions in an effort to tell more “positive,” politically palatable stories” (Welch Reference Welch2013). Then again in September 2014, despite legislation that mandates a hands-off approach to exhibits and programs in federally funded museums, senior government staff “asked for a list of all exhibits that refer to the Government of Canada…The list would include dozens of text panels, personal stories and digital content covering sensitive topics for Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government such as aboriginal land rights, abortion and missing and slain indigenous women” (Welch Reference Welch2014).
Whether or not the allegations of government interference were accurate, the CMHR was plagued by the sense that stories that narrated Canada's genocidal structure were contrary to telling more palatable stories of the nation as innocent and postcolonial. This is especially telling when its own material in one of its core galleries described colonial injustice as “missteps on the road to greater rights for everyone in Canada” (CMHR 2014a, gallery “Countless Stories, Countless Journeys,” emphasis mine) rather than as genocide. Canadian officials further promote such myths of innocence in other contexts; perhaps the most infamous statement came from the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, in 2009 at the G20 summit, when he claimed that Canada “has no history of colonialism.”
An Ideas Museum: Celebrating Human Rights, Depoliticizing Genocide?
In presenting itself as an “ideas museum” for human rights rather than an institution of artifacts or commemoration, the CMHR's core gallery “What are Human Rights?” presents its organizing idea. In the first year, the web description of this gallery stated that “Today, the term ‘human rights’ generally refers to the rights and freedoms we have, simply because we are human. It's an idea thousands of years in the making.” The gallery presented a multimedia presentation of people speaking about their perspectives on human rights, and a timeline of 100 selected moments in human rights history around the world. The CMHR incorporated educational programming and kiosks throughout other galleries, with the aim to prompt dialog on the idea of human rights, including a family friendly short film on Indigenous concepts of rights and responsibilities in the “Indigenous Perspectives” gallery. In addition, the CMHR titled one of the core galleries “Collective Action and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” in which visitors were invited to explore how people work together to gain new human rights protections at the global level.
The framework of human rights is clearly overarching for Museum curatorial decisions. But, as noted by the CMHR, the commitment to human rights itself is a contested framework by some Indigenous peoples (CAC 2010, 72). This became evident in the same month as the CMHR opened, when the First Nations community of Shoal Lake 40, who live just outside of Winnipeg, launched what they called the “Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations” (CBC 2014). This alternative museum was set up as a living museum to highlight the serious health problems that have arisen from the 17-year-old boil water advisory and inadequate sewage and garbage disposal. While a spokesperson from the community noted that CMHR officials had been receptive to their concerns and had visited, the “slow death” of Indigenous peoples prompted questions about the adequacy of a human rights lens in assessing difficult knowledge about genocide against Indigenous peoples.
In particular, I contend that a human rights lens risks depoliticizing Indigenous concerns. One technique of depoliticization is to disregard or minimize local concerns and worldviews by deploying a universal rights discourse (as adopted by the CMHR) that diminishes Indigenous struggles about water rights and access, land, sovereignty, and nationhood, while extending minimal material or symbolic tokens of reconciliation. This critique against human rights exists at the international level as well as nationally. In a special journal issue edited by Watson (Reference Watson2011), authors Ward Churchill, Sharon Venne, and Aileen Moreton Robinson all demonstrate that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) watered down Indigenous rights from the original intentions of Indigenous actors who wanted to empower Indigenous peoples to be self-determining in relation to their lands. In particular, the question of Indigenous sovereignty is put to rest by the UNDRIP because Indigenous peoples are defined as “domesticated subjects contained by the international identity and power assumed by the colonizing state” (Watson Reference Watson2011, 511). The effect is that the genocidal impact of state policies targeting Indigenous nations are put into relief rather than contested. Kulchyski (Reference Kulchyski2013) further contends that while international instruments can be useful in articulating Indigenous demands, the UNDRIP privileges Eurocentric rights over Indigenous customary rights.
Conceptualizing “genocide” within a human rights framework may well be limited in confronting colonial violence against Indigenous peoples because this framework originates in western liberal discourse. As Moses (Reference Moses2013b, 24) states, “Because humanitarian intervention focuses mainly on Western powers preventing or stopping genocide in other countries in the future, it screens out the violence it took (and takes) to establish these liberal democracies in the first place.” Furthermore, the humanitarian and welfare-oriented concerns of colonial governments in the 1800s and 1900s justified the forced removal of Indigenous from their families and communities (see Jacobs Reference Jacobs, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014; Woolford Reference Woolford2009, 86). At the international level too, critics such as Meister (Reference Meister2010) compellingly argue that “humanitarianism” often acts as a vehicle for imperial domination. It is worth adding that Eurocentric projects of civilization separate out human dignity from that of non-human animals and the natural environment (see Hubbard Reference Hubbard, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014; Watson Reference Watson2011, 509), a separation that is false in many Indigenous worldviews but central to a human rights lens. Indeed, it has been argued that ecological destruction experienced by Indigenous peoples is itself genocidal (see Neu and Therrien Reference Neu and Richard2003).
One further issue arises in debates about a human rights lens, namely how Indigenous communities become totalized, even within a settler nation. Restrictions imposed by a human rights framework, including the UNCG, require Indigenous peoples to present themselves as bounded groups seeking rights in ways that conflates various experiences of colonialism, and fails to account for kinship networks and multi-community usage of lands (see Andersen Reference Andersen2014). Moreover, Indigenous peoples are not passive victims of colonialism and genocide, but actors who variously refuse to relinquish their worldviews, such that colonization is not wholesale.
As a way to counter settler colonial depoliticization, my preference is to use “genocidal” rather than “genocide,” to signify enduring living violence against Indigenous peoples. In the same vein that Jacobs, Rifkin, and Wolfe conceptualize settler colonialism as ongoing systemic domination, my preference is to use the term “genocidal” because it indicates that violence against Indigenous peoples is not bound by a beginning and end, or organized centrally and uniformly; instead it is ongoing and foundational to the settler nation-state. It is this way of knowing the nation-state as intrinsically genocidal that underlies the difficulty for the CMHR in making curatorial decisions as a public institution committed to human rights, for the settler nation cannot escape its own investment in the logic of elimination without dismantling itself.
Indeed, while manifestations of settler colonialism vary across time and space, a number of inter-related techniques that advance settler colonial interests continue to operate, even as a human rights framework is celebrated. First, historically, the tactic of forcibly assimilating Indigenous peoples was deployed through colonial accounting techniques and bureaucratic financial mechanisms (Neu and Therrien Reference Neu and Richard2003), and institutions like the Indian Residential School system. Today, while some First Nations view the treaty process as a mechanism of self-government, others contend that it subsumes Indigenous peoples into the existing settler colonial polity and sidelines their sovereignty (Alfred Reference Alfred2001; Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014). Samson (Reference Samson, Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton2014) goes further to argue that the contemporary land claims process is also designed to formalize land dispossession and destroy Indigenous cultures such that this process is a form of genocide.
Second, since the mid-eighteenth century, state tactics of exterminating Indigenous bodies and cultures included deliberately spreading diseases such as smallpox (Lawrence Reference Lawrence and Razack2002); the forced sterilization of Indian and Métis women between the 1920 and 1970s (Stote Reference Stote2012); and imposing European values through Indian Residential Schools. In the contemporary era, deaths of Indigenous peoples may or may not be deliberate but the alarming high numbers and repeated devaluation of Indigenous lives is evident in systemic police and government neglect of violence against hundreds of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls (Jacobs and Williams Reference Jacobs, Williams, Castellano, Archibald and DeGagne2008); the abandonment and death of Indigenous men dismissed by police authorities as drunken-Indians (Razack Reference Razack2012); and the environmental damage from industrialization and resource extraction that has led to mercury poisoning and cancer (Murdocca Reference Murdocca2010).
Third, historically, Indigenous peoples were criminalized for practicing such traditions as potlatch that had been outlawed by the Indian Act, and now some Indigenous peoples are criminalized when protesting against state assertions over traditional Indigenous lands, and deemed to be extremists under the Canadian “Emergency & Issue Management Directorate” which tracks “hotspots” of Indigenous protests and blockades (Crosby and Monaghan Reference Crosby and Jeffrey2012). Fourth, whereas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Indigenous peoples required permission from a colonial Indian agent to leave the reserve, containment continues through the prison system, where there are disproportionately higher rates of Indigenous peoples incarcerated and fewer Indigenous peoples being granted early parole compared with other groups (Corrado Reference Corrado2014; Owusu-Bempah et al. Reference Owusu-Bempah, Steve Kanters, Kabirraaj Toor, Farquhar and Mills2014).
Finally, forced movement of Indigenous peoples historically occurred in part because of wars between Europeans vying for colonial dominance (Lawrence Reference Lawrence and Razack2002); the reserve system; sexist membership codes that forced some Indigenous women to leave their traditional territory (Jacobs and Williams Reference Jacobs, Williams, Castellano, Archibald and DeGagne2008); and racializing some groups as legally “Indian” and others as mixed raced peoples without national status (Andersen Reference Andersen2014). Now, movement is forced as an effect of urbanization (Short Reference Short2010, 60), as a consequence of flooding and other forms of environmental damage that arise because of corporate resource extraction that is supported by state-led neo-liberal initiatives (Altamirano-Jimenez Reference Altamirano-Jimenez2013; Murdocca Reference Murdocca2010), and it is estimated that there are now more Indigenous children being removed from their families through the child welfare system than the 150,000 children forced into Indian Residential Schools.
These are just some examples of the ontology of destruction that Woolford describes. Genocidal structures seek to: reduce the number of Indigenous people who can make legal claims as descendants of a nation; eliminate the social and economic relations that constitute the basis of Indigenous lives; make life as difficult as possible for those who assert Indigenous identity; and make integration into white society as easy and safe as possible (Chrisjohn and Young Reference Chrisjohn and Young1997). Knowledge of ongoing genocidal settler colonialism makes it more difficult to settle on meanings about Canada and Canadian identity because it implicates Canadians in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and undermines the CMHR's goal to celebrate a national commitment to human rights.
CONCLUSION
Effectively, state actors, CMHR officials, and community institutions and actors have crafted the CMHR in ways that generate and also contest settler colonial dominion. While contested by some Indigenous actors, the debate about how to characterize violence against Indigenous peoples was interpreted as a failure to adequately apply human rights, rather than a problem intrinsic to the genocidal structure of settler nations; and the presumption of state sovereignty remained fundamentally unquestionable even as Indigenous peoples contested it. In other words, difficult knowledge was both rooted in and reproduced through the nexus of colonizing knowledge-power-nation.
Public institutions, governments, and the general public cannot avoid this nexus such that the CMHR can adopt some ideal (complete and universal) characterization of genocide or Indigenous experiences. Instead I suggest three counter-strategies: first, following Woolford, difficult knowledge about settler colonial violence should be framed as an ontology of genocide that starts from the perspectives of Indigenous peoples; second, it is essential to confront the temporality of settler colonialism and genocidal continuation; and third, it is not “just” knowledge and empathy about different genocides that should be fostered, but also collective action across political struggles that confront historical and contemporary systemic violence against Jews, the Roma, Ukrainians, Indigenous peoples, Blacks, Muslims and Arabs, LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer] peoples, people with disabilities, etc. Since there is no ideal/neutral epistemological vantage point for assessing rival frames of genocide it is necessary not only to center “the initial object of discourses about humanity in Canada” (Moses Reference Moses, Hinton, La Pointe and Irvin-Erickson2013a, 24)—namely Indigenous experiences—but also assess complex connections and differences across a range of group experiences. As Simon (Reference Simon2011) notes, complexity can generate degrees of anxiety, anger, and disappointment for museum visitors because their affective response is not limited to one meaning within an exhibition to difficult knowledge. But, he continues, when “difficult knowledge” is approached in a manner that is open to the prospect of transforming an understanding of our world, the affective force of an exhibit opens rather than predetermines other possible narratives and meanings (Reference Simon2011, 446–47). It is this possibility of altering colonial and colonizing ways of knowing the nation that, I contend, can help disrupt relations of power in settler colonial contexts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to Olena Hankivsky who first got me interested in the politics surrounding the CMHR. It was with her that I first presented an earlier version of the arguments in this paper at the workshop on “Caring for Difficult Knowledge: Prospects for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,” organized by the University of Winnipeg's Cultural Studies Research Group in September 2013. Special thanks go to Angela Failler for the workshop invitation, and for providing the framework of “difficult knowledge.” The discussion at the workshop importantly informed my thinking about public institutions, state nationalism, and the label of genocide. I also appreciate the generous support provided by Roshni Narain, and the time she took to do the editing work for this paper. Finally, my gratitude to the Reviewers whose insights and thoughtful suggestions helped me reframe and refine my arguments; their comments were crucial to the final version of this paper.
