Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America ed. by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, Alexander Laban Hinton (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America ed. by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, Alexander Laban Hinton James Daschuk Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America Edited by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton with a Foreword by Theodore Fontaine. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. It is a sign of the times that in the months this thought-provoking book has been on my desk writing this review has become easier. Easier, because the term “cultural genocide,” or at least a qualified version of it, entered mainstream Canadian political discourse. In May 2015, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada made headlines when she used “cultural genocide” to describe the effects of the Indian Residential School system. Days later, in its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) described the legacy of the residential school system in Canada as “cultural genocide.” In the wake of the TRC Report, the media spent weeks debating the appropriateness of categorizing part of Canada’s past as having been akin to genocide. Some, like former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, speaking of cultural genocide in the context of the residential school system, challenged would-be critics with the assertion “let’s call a spade a spade, that is what it was.” During its hearings, the TRC heard testimony from hundreds of those affected by the residential school system; the survivors’ graphic, often horrific, testimony was reported widely. As a nation, we are now reconsidering our collective view that Canada has always been a fundamentally fair and decent country; the facts of Canada’s terrible relationship with its indigenous population are not in dispute. But, was it genocide? That is the fundamental question explored and contested in this challenging and timely anthology regarding the question of colonial genocide in a North American context. Not so long ago, many mainstream historians would have dismissed colleagues who introduced genocide as a legitimate line of critical inquiry as radical lefties or kooks. This collection of measured, well-researched papers puts such notions to rest. In a sense, this volume deepens our understanding of the role genocide may or may not have played in our past by bringing the concept out into the light of reasoned historical discourse. For those who know only the broad strokes of the process of Indigenous subjugation in North America and remain unsure if the term genocide truly applies, this book offers some much needed context. To their credit, the editors have chosen a wide range of approaches that posit more than a singular or simplistic conclusion to the central questions around genocide and its applicability to North American history. The book’s contributors present us with a wide range of opinions on the issue. On one hand, Indigenous psychologist Joseph P. Gone cautions against “the casual overgeneralization of the term… beyond distorting the historical record and perhaps diminishing the ethical enormity of group-based mass murder [that] threatens to undermine the possibility for Native and non-Native reconciliation” (284–85). Using physical extermination as his baseline for the term, Gone asserts “cultural genocide is not genocide” and likens the former to murder without death (284), arguing that, “understatement will serve indigenous interests more effectively that hyperbole” (287). Contributions by Benjamin Madley and Gray H. Whaley discuss the violence associated with America’s expansion into the California and Oregon territories in the mid-nineteenth century and describe in horrific detail the extermination campaigns against the region’s Indigenous nations, and in doing so make a compelling argument for invoking genocide as a legitimate historical construct and interpretative framework that clearly meets the standard set by Professor Gone (95–148). Madley’s recounting of the so-called Modoc “wars” where mass slaughter was the goal (95–96) and the legislative appropriations of hundreds of thousands of dollars for settler directed Indian-hunting operations was the reality. Madley relays how an Indigenous population of some 2,000 on the Oregon-California frontier was reduced to barely 250 between 1850 and 1870. No biological accident, Madley makes the case the settler campaign’s aim was physical extermination (96–100, 111). Likewise, Whaley’s use of archival sources to describe the formation...

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