Why did Canada commit genocide against Indigenous peoples? What are the meanings of this violence for the pursuit of justice and the achievement of conciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler populations? These fundamental questions are critically addressed in David B. MacDonald's study of intentional, genocidal settler-colonial violence against Indigenous peoples.
The Sleeping Giant Awakens guides readers through complex histories of Indigenous–settler relationships and asymmetric violence. MacDonald poignantly paints a vivid story of escalating and contingent settler-colonial atrocity that is path dependent, interconnected, ongoing and genocidal in genesis and operation. Relying on extensive archival research, interviews with Indigenous peoples and settlers, governmental and religious policies, legal and nonlegal perspectives, and academic insights, MacDonald ties violent events and processes together into a cohesive framework, highlighting linkages and legacies in anti-Indigenous policies that vary across temporal and spatial boundaries. This cohesive view of imposed colonial violence helps to illuminate socio-political hegemonies that settlers have created to gain and retain control over lands and Indigenous lives.
MacDonald powerfully constructs a charge of genocide in relation to the Indian Residential School (IRS) system and Sixties and Seventies Scoop era, demonstrating that Canada's pathologies of genocide fixated on the elimination and erasure of Indigenous peoples and Indigeneity. MacDonald augments recent trends in Indigenous and genocide studies by conceptualizing Canadian colonial genocide in a pluralistic manner. This approach incorporates elements of both legalism and institutionalism to understand genocide as both a crime and a concept, respectively.
As a legal crime, genocide is narrowly defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (December 9, 1948), which largely focuses on biological destruction. However, the original understandings of genocide by Raphaël Lemkin—the creator of the concept, whose work is critically assessed by MacDonald—would have codified acts designed to destroy groups biologically and culturally as genocide. This legacy is reduced to Article 2(e) of the Genocide Convention: “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Despite the narrow nature of genocide law, MacDonald persuasively and cogently applies Article 2(e) to the IRS system and Sixties Scoop. In addition, MacDonald articulates that by working with other countries to exclude cultural annihilation as a (legal) form of genocide and failing to ratify the full Genocide Convention, Canada's settler government attempted to narrow its scope of responsibility in its treatment of Indigenous peoples, undermine efforts to recognize colonial genocide and corrode justice efforts.
MacDonald illustrates the deep roots and long shadows of genocide as a concept in Canada. His presentations and understandings of the IRS system are dynamic and help readers understand complex interrelationships among hegemonic violent structures, actors who populated powerful institutions, specific decisions on the twisted road to genocide, and lived experiences of Indigenous children who were targeted for identity annihilation. The inclusion of the Sixties and Seventies Scoop era as a constitutive element in a structural pattern of colonial violence reinforces the convincing assertion that Canada committed genocide. The Sleeping Giant Awakens urges readers to create new understandings of the “crime of crimes,” incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and more accurately depict and dissect colonial genocides. Effectively, MacDonald asks readers to understand systems of repression and genocide in Canada from Indigenous and settler perspectives. This integrated and bridge-building framework is a welcome addition to Indigenous studies, Canadian studies, comparative politics and genocide studies.
Lastly, MacDonald provides helpful new meanings about the politics of memory, recognition and change, with insightful analyses of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). His gripping discussion of the TRC's mandate, operations, findings and politics illuminates otherwise hidden processes of transitional justice in Canada. He notes that the Government of Canada disallowed the TRC from finding a legal crime of genocide in the IRS system, necessitating the use of a nonlegal concept to explain that era: cultural genocide. This concept has been contorted by some commentators, policy makers and scholars to undermine efforts to recognize genocide in Canada. For some, this cultural genocide is not real genocide, though MacDonald's potent pluralistic arguments help overcome doubting and denialist tactics.
One of the key strengths of The Sleeping Giant Awakens is MacDonald's style and prose. He writes this book in a way that is understandable and directly relatable to academics, practitioners, policy makers and interested readers. The Sleeping Giant Awakens invites readers to become engaged in finding ways of creating conciliation—that is, creating meaningful, lasting, honest and positive relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers for the first time. The logical next step now is for more devoted inquiry interrogating how to make change real though reconciliactions.
MacDonald's arguments about the need to recognize genocide in Canada, new and detailed information about TRC processes, and the complexities of creating new Indigenous–settler relationships make The Sleeping Giant Awakens a standard for anyone interested in understanding Canada's past, present, and future and in the politics of [re]conciliation—as we all should be.
