This is probably not the best place to put this. I’m not sure DrDeth was wrong, just where he brought it up was. I’m no expert on either Genocide or what has happened to the Native populations in Canada.
I know overall genocide was committed to natives of North America by the Europeans. But is the kidnapping and shameful horrific schools a part of that overall genocide or an additional one?
If so do the number come up to what is general regarded as genocide? Should genocide have numbers?
I consider the Trail of Tears to be genocidal. That resulted in 2500-6000 deaths. Was the Canadian atrocity what we generally consider a Genocide?
The California Genocide wasn’t systematic and affected dozens of tribes but added up to well over 100,000 and maybe as high as 300,000. That to me is a Genocide, seperate from the earlier genocide of North American Natives.
I don’t know if the question of what is and isn’t a genocide is all that clear.
So what is the straight dope on what qualifies as a genocide.
It does look like the UN definition fits what happened in Canada, but I wasn’t aware of that until a few minutes ago.
The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such” including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to “bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. Victims have to be deliberately, not randomly, targeted because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups outlined in the above definition.
Oddly this seems to leave The Trail of Tears as a genocide but the far larger in numbers California Genocide might not fit that definition. Though I would have thought it clearly was one.
Should I split this off to its own thread?