The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation by David B. MacDonald

Reviewed by: The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation by David B. MacDonald Jarvis Brownlie The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation. By David B. MacDonald. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xii + 240 pp. Notes, index. $17.52 cloth. In The Sleeping Giant Awakens, political scientist David B. MacDonald offers a thoughtful and detailed analysis of the intent and impacts of Indian residential schools (IRS), focusing on an important question: Should Canada acknowledge the schools and other Canadian policies as genocide? His answer is yes: “[T]here is a growing body of evidence that genocide was committed in the IRS system and during the Sixties Scoop through forcible transfer” (5). Article 2(e) of the United Nations Genocide Convention declares that “[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is an act of genocide when committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” MacDonald shows that actions deemed [End Page 178] to be genocidal in other places have, for instance, affected similar proportions of targeted groups and have proved that, while intent to destroy a group “as such” must be present, it need not be the key motivation. He argues that Canada violated the Genocide Convention, but he also supports expanding the concept’s definition to account for “the fuller magnitude of what has been done to Indigenous peoples” (5–6, emphasis in original), including not only state actions but also the wider activities and practices of Canadian settler society. MacDonald sets out to address widespread ignorance about the residential school system, and the Sixties Scoop, by clarifying the extent of the harms they caused. He hopes to contribute to Canada’s prospects for “conciliation,” with conciliation defined as a rebuilding of Indigenous–settler relations based on justice and respect, including concrete actions such as returning enough land to sustain Indigenous self-determination. He also aims to advance the conversation about genocide, using the term as “a carefully considered analytical tool to better make sense of Canada’s past and aspects of its ongoing actions into the present” (22–23). While he cites and discusses the work of many scholars, the book is notable for its extensive engagement with Indigenous scholars, making use of concepts and approaches proposed by such leading thinkers as Glenn Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson, and Kiera Ladner. The book would be stronger with a fuller historical contextualization of Canadian policy toward First Nations. The centerpiece of his analysis is a close engagement with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): MacDonald interviewed the commissioners and survivors, attended TRC national events, and wrote a draft chapter on genocide for the commission. While he discusses policy statements of key architects of the IRS system, he makes little use of other records or secondary literature revealing the state’s broader and longer-term policy goals and actions. A fuller history of Canada’s long-term treatment of Indigenous peoples would have shown how closely Lemkin’s account of the essential elements of genocide matched Canada’s policies and actions. Lemkin wrote that genocide was “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” More specifically, “[t]he objectives . . . would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.” Residential schools were avowedly designed to accomplish everything on that first list of “disintegrations,” while settler society, the Indian department system, and institutions such as the police did much to undermine Indigenous people’s personal security, liberty, health, and dignity. I was somewhat surprised, too, that MacDonald did not make use of Patrick Wolfe’s highly relevant concept of the “logic of elimination” within settler colonialism, the set of beliefs, ideas, and practices that underlie the genocidal activities of settler societies. These omissions noted, the book makes a significant contribution to...

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