Mount Royal University, the Conceit of Genocide and the Condemnation of Canada

And The Cancellation Of Frances Widdowson

Mount Royal University

This is a guest post by Michael Melanson.

The cancelation of Frances Widdowson was months in the making and while the slow gnawing of the ankle biters denies any surprise at the tawdry outcome, her expulsion from MRU is nonetheless disgusting. Below is an essay I wrote months ago on her travails at MRU and unsuccessfully solicited for publication. Now that Frances has been canceled I am posting it in its entirety.

Mount Royal University, the Conceit of Genocide and the Condemnation of Canada

This past Fall some students at Mount Royal University started a petition to have Frances Widdowson fired from her position as an Associate Professor because she challenged the popular narrative that the Indian Residential Schools constituted a genocide. In a paper Widdowson submitted for the 2017 Canadian Political Science Association Conference ("The Political Economy of 'Truth and Reconciliation': Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy"), she wrote:

"It is sentimentally felt that an acknowledgement of aboriginal perspectives, including deferring to the ideology of parallelism and the related idea that the residential schools were genocidal, is a way of supporting their political aspirations and righting past wrongs. There is another, more hidden, reason for supporting these assertions, however. This is that the allegations of 'cultural genocide' have been very effective in accelerating neotribal rentierist processes. Seeing the residential schools as a crime against humanity increases the amount of rent that can be extracted."

Frances Widdowson

When Justice Sinclair submitted his Truth And Reconciliation Commission report, he characterized the schools as a 'cultural genocide'. Aboriginal critics were quick to declare it was an unqualified genocide and indeed, according to a motion passed by MRU's General Faculties Council this past September, the residential schools are to be officially regarded as a genocide:

"THAT Mount Royal University acknowledges the genocide done to indigenous peoples by colonization and the trauma inflicted by that ..."

In her paper Widdowson showed how efforts to advance the genocide narrative of the schools are primarily motivated by rentierism. The intent to leverage material gain from claiming the schools were genocidal partly explains why the qualification of 'cultural' was discarded. A cultural genocide necessarily invites equivocation; an unqualified genocide prompts unmitigated credulity, unhesitating and arguably unlimited redress.

To be clear, the notion that the residential schools constituted a genocide is a conceit and a dangerous one. Characterizing the schools as a genocide isn't just about rent-seeking; it's also motivated by aboriginal nationalism. Nor is the claim of a Canadian genocide only stated in the past tense.

To aboriginal nationalists, declaring that Canada committed (and is committing) genocide acts as a threshold beyond which Canada has no legitimate existence. However ill-defined or impractical is aboriginal sovereignty, any form of statehood is preferable than one that is trying to kill you. It is trying and not tried because the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry Commission determined that there was an ongoing genocide. If the genocide was over, however much it may be felt due, the rentierism isn't urgent; the danger is over even if the damage lingers. By arguing that the genocide is continuing, aboriginal nationalists attempt to evoke a public imperative to end or evade the genocide.

One thing that is often ignored in these recriminations against Canada and, by extension, western civilization, is that there has been no trial for Canada. No representative of Canada has faced prosecution for the crime of genocide in any court of law yet, as MRU sadly shows, many are willing and some are wishing to judge Canada guilty of the worst of all crimes. Is the sense of guilt or the pitying of Aboriginals so great that due process can be dismissed? Saddest of all, Prime Minister Trudeau collapsed to activist pressure and ultimately agreed with the MMIW Inquiry's conclusion that there is an ongoing genocide. It is not a welcome innovation in the short history of the world's jurisprudence regarding genocide that the leader of a country can confess to being a genocidaire and carry on with business as usual without expecting at the very least to be handed a summons to appear in the International Criminal Court.

But what happens if Canada's perceived past and present genocides aren't duly redressed? For one, a lot of people, aboriginal and not, are going to think the worst of Canada and civically divest from Canada. Borne of arch cynicism, the genocide narrative will be appended with rhetoric of an unpunished genocide, further proof of the injustice, power and perfidy of white/settler supremacy. For militant aboriginal nationalists, it will be a reason to further radicalize. The problem isn't just that Canada hasn't faced trial for its supposed genocide, the problem is that it never will because there is no creditable case for prosecuting Canada that can be made. Educating a people presupposes their continued existence and blaming Canadian governments for the deaths of aboriginal women when individuals have actually been convicted for most of those homicides amounts to a blood libel. The crucial legal factor of proving genocidal intent isn't possible and any responsible prosecutor would recognize that. I suspect Justice Sinclair also recognized that in preparing his final TRC report which is why he chose to qualify the 'genocide'; a cultural genocide isn't defined in law and isn't technically illegal anywhere so the burden of proof customary to a criminal trial is dodged. There is a question of whether the intent all along was to try Canada for genocide in the court of public opinion where all that is required for a conviction is credulity. But if the trial is held in the court of public opinion, so is the sentencing.

The historian Christopher Browning remarked that unlike other genocides, the Nazi Holocaust was conceived in a fantasy of Jewish domination and malice towards Germans and Germany. The Nazis projected upon Jews what they would ultimately do to Jews. That is the terrible danger of a false genocide narrative: it is prescriptive in what must be done against what is believed to be happening and when what is happening is conceived as the worst possible acts, then the worst possible acts in opposition are justifiable. In this regard Trudeau's confession to being a genocidaire recklessly invited rationalizing of what should be done to a genocidaire but it wasn't the only time he was remiss in defending Canada's honour. As the Prime Minister during our sesquicentennial, Trudeau had nothing to say about aboriginal activists marching around an upside-down Canadian flag with "150+ Years of Genocide" scrawled over it. Should any politican be complacent when people start accusing Canada of what amounts to history's longest running genocide? Given the Nuremberg and war crimes trials that ensued after the Holocaust, what would be the proportionate prosecution and punishment for a state borne from genocide 154 years ago and still committing it as I write?

Likewise in MRU's failure to defend Widdowson's academic freedom against efforts to purge her from its campus, MRU flirts with its own demise. The guilty verdict of Canadian genocide is generalized and invariably attached to anyone who looks like they benefitted from colonization. They've come for Widdowson, they'll come for MRU, too, eventually. As they will for me and you. Political leaders and the Prime Minister most of all need to push back against the civilly corrosive narrative of Canada as a genocidal enterprise. They undermine their duty both to Canadians and to humanity by letting the condemnation as genocidaires metastasize in the absence of due process or even critical examination. The virtue of justice as much as that of Canada needs to be defended if the rule of law is to be sustained.