Suffer The Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State

Tamara Starblanket

Originally approved as a master of laws thesis by a respected Canadian university, this book tackles one of the most compelling issues of our time—the crime of genocide—and whether in fact it can be said to have occurred in relation to the many Original Nations on Great Turtle Island now claimed by a state called Canada. It has been hailed as groundbreaking by many Indigenous and other scholars engaged with this issue, impacting not just Canada but states worldwide where entrapped Indigenous nations face absorption by a dominating colonial state. Starblanket unpacks Canada’s role in the removal of cultural genocide from the Genocide Convention, though the disappearance of an Original Nation by forced assimilation was regarded by many states as equally genocidal as destruction by slaughter. Did Canada seek totailor the definition of genocide to escape its owncrimes which were then even ongoing? Thecrime of genocide, to be held as such undercurrent international law, must address thecomplicated issue of mens rea (not just thecommission of a crime, but the specific intent todo so). This book permits readers to make ajudgment on whether or not this was the case.Starblanket examines how genocide wasoperationalized in Canada, focused primarily onbreaking the intergenerational transmission ofculture from parents to children. Seeking toabsorb the new generations into a differentcultural identity—English-speaking, Christian,Anglo-Saxon, termed Canadian—Canada seizedchildren from their parents, and oversaw andenforced the stripping of their cultural beliefs,languages and traditions, replacing them bythose still in process of being established by theemerging Canadian state.