On 2 June 2015, the commissioners of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission unveiled the summary of its final report. The first page of the report made it clear that, for over a century, the Canadian settler state had sought the elimination of Aboriginal peoples through methods that amounted to cultural genocide.

MacDonald's book is a response to this finding, and while it ranges across a number of key issues related to Indigenous justice, it is the question of genocide that sits at the heart of the project. MacDonald makes a forensic case that the targeting and forcible transfer of Indigenous children into the Indian Residential School system amounts to genocide (and not just of the cultural variant) as defined in the United Nations Genocide Convention. That the lives of many of these children were subsequently tormented by physical and sexual abuse and that an unknown number died as a result of these abuses lends weight to this claim. And yet, as MacDonald also acknowledges, the conclusion that Indigenous peoples in Canada were subjected to genocide remains unpopular. What this means for the “reconciliation” in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's mandate and the possibility of any future (re)conciliation between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian settler state is hard to determine. As MacDonald argues, many settlers struggle not only to recognize policies such as the Indian Residential School system as genocidal, but to acknowledge that genocide has been intrinsic to the settler colonial project.

The first half of MacDonald's book engages directly with debates about whether or not the IRS system and the Sixties Scoop can be considered a genocide. Approximately 150,000 Indigenous children were subjected to forcible transfer into the system, which operated as a partnership between the federal government and Christian churches as part of the larger colonial project of elimination through dispossession, starvation, and brute violence. MacDonald outlines the factors common to child removal policies in British colonies—language repression, banning of cultural dress, name changing, and of course physical and sexual abuse. He makes a persuasive case that describing the role of the Indian Residential School system in this colonial project as genocidal is “neither hyperbole nor an unwarranted accusation” (22) but is instead intended to challenge legalist understandings that view genocide only through the “Holocaust paradigm” (25). These understandings, for MacDonald, are too narrow given that Indigenous genocides in settler colonial states “do not always fit this standard view of what ‘real’ genocide should look like” (26). At least one explicit aim of the book, then, is to broaden understandings of genocide and invite readers to think more critically about the ways in which these institutions and practices remain structured into contemporary settler societies.

In the second half of the book, MacDonald centers his analysis on the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its finding of cultural genocide. As with all such (re)conciliatory processes, the commission was an imperfect institution that worked under a number of constraints, including restricted access to information on the Indian Residential School system and a general lack of interest in and support for the process from the settler population. MacDonald argues that, under these conditions, the “success” of the commission “is a testament to the tenacity of the Survivors and the Commission employees and volunteers” (115). Nevertheless, it is not surprising that a settler institution like the commission would supposedly “retreat from genocide” (125) not because there was insufficient evidence but because it operated within a post-judicial mandate that excluded such an investigation. This is despite the fact that the commission “repeatedly heard survivors describe their experiences as genocide” (124).

In the book's final chapter MacDonald turns his attention to the problem of settler denialism and the ways in which the settler state “distracts” the mainstream population by presenting “ways of being Canadian outside of any relationship with Indigenous peoples,” (164) as though that could ever be possible. In large part, MacDonald intends that this book should confront this denialism among settlers, including among other scholars. Indeed, if I had a criticism of this volume it would be that, at times, I found myself wondering who it is that MacDonald was trying to convince. I wondered, for example, whether there are many Indigenous people in Canada who lived through the period of the Indian Residential School system and its cascading intergenerational traumas who do not know in their marrow that they were being targeted for elimination. I wonder, too, how many have faith in the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to attend to these harms.

How, then, might genocide recognition support a decolonial, conciliatory relationship? As MacDonald acknowledges, genocide recognition can only ever be one small part of conciliation across Indigenous-settler relationships. The eliminatory logic that informed policies such as the Indian Residential School system inevitably continues in the present and, as MacDonald notes, contemporary settler colonial societies like Canada are “still marked by structural violence and the attrition of Indigenous rights” (182). Genocide recognition, then, might be “one means” (183) by which Canada can attempt to conciliate colonial relations, but it must be accompanied by structural reforms including the return of land and other efforts to support Indigenous self-government. MacDonald's argument that the harms of forcible transfer are genocidal is compelling and well made. As he also acknowledges, however, the settler state cannot resolve or fully address these harms unless it is prepared to enter into a new relationship with First Nations on profoundly different terms.