Contextualizing Aboriginal Residential Schools in Canada: How International and Domestic Law Can Help US Interpret Genocide Claims
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 19th and 20th century Canada, indigenous residential schooling formed part of a government-sponsored policy of forced assimilation. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the 1948 UN Genocide Convention (hereafter the UNGC) is applicable to the study of Aboriginal residential schooling in Canada. We begin with a short history of the residential schools and contemporary debates about their negative impact. We then turn briefly to some claims by academics and activists (Chrisjohn and Young, Therrien and Neu, Cardinal), who have argued that the federal government and subsidiary institutions, together with the four mainline Christian churches, intentionally committed genocide. The Jewish Holocaust is often invoked (inappropriately we argue) in this literature. After this background, we proceed to a larger theoretical discussion concerning the difficulty of defining genocide and applying that definition in any meaningful legal way in Canada. We argue that the question of whether “genocide” was committed in Canada cannot be definitively settled. In part this has to do with conflicting and polyvalent interpretations of the term. First, Raphael Lemkin’s original broad definition (1944) has been used by many indigenous people to interpret cultural, religious, linguistic, and other forms of collective suffering. The case might be made that a “Lemkinian” form of genocide did take place in Canada. This however, would be an academic argument, not a legal one. Second, genocide is defined in international law through the UNGC and later interpretations at the ICTY and ICTR. Our interpretation of international law, conventions, and legal precedents indicates that genocide has not been committed in Canada. Third, genocide is more narrowly defined in Canadian domestic law, and in domestic legal proceedings. Here too, genocide seems inapplicable as a means of understanding indigenous experiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".