page_title: Genocide of indigenous peoples
section_title: Canada
hierarchical_section_title: Genocide of indigenous peoples / Indigenous peoples of the Americas (pre-1948) / Canada
caption_attribution_description: English: A miniature portrait titled "A female Red Indian of Newfoundland" which some sources date to 1841. It is believed to be a portrait of Shanawdithit, a Beothuk woman. Most likely a painted copy of Portrait of Demasduit (Mary March), by Lady Henrietta Hamilton (1819, see File:Demasduit.jpg). Although sometimes attributed to William Gosse, the painter was more likely naturalist Philip Henry Gosse (see also Mullen, Gary R., "Philip Henry Gosse," Encyclopedia of Alabama, 26 August 2008, retrieved 9 September 2011)
context_page_description: The genocide of indigenous peoples is the mass destruction of entire communities of indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples are understood to be people whose historical and current territory has become occupied by colonial expansion, or the formation of a state by a dominant group such as a colonial power.
  While the concept of genocide was formulated by Raphael Lemkin in the mid-20th century, the expansion of various European colonial powers such as the British and Spanish empires and the subsequent establishment of colonies on indigenous territory frequently involved acts of genocidal violence against indigenous groups in the Americas, Australia, Africa and Asia. According to Lemkin, colonization was in itself "intrinsically genocidal". He saw this genocide as a two-stage process, the first being the destruction of the indigenous population's way of life. In the second stage, the newcomers impose their way of life on the indigenous group.
context_section_description: On 13 April 1709, New France intendant Jacques Raudot passed the Ordinance Rendered on the Subject of the Negroes and the Savages Called Panis, legalizing the purchase and possession of indigenous slaves in New France. When Raudot pronounced indigenous slavery to be legal in New France, the practice had already been well established in the Native and French alliances throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the 1709 Ordinance came into effect, slavery in the colony grew exponentially. Natives flooded the slave market in the course of intense diplomacy with the French to prevent colonial encroachment of Native land. Therefore, the flood of Native slaves in the St. Lawrence largely came from their Western counterparts. According to Rushforth, “by narrowing the target to a specific set of victims known as the ‘Panis nation,’ Raudot and his successors created a North American counterpart to the African kingdom of Nigritie: a distant and populous nation at war with more proximate allies, poorly understood but clearly identified as legally and morally enslavable". Effectively, this meant Western Natives were strengthening future adversaries in the east, with their own slaves, in a struggle to preserve their land.
  Although not without conflict, French Canadians' early interactions with Canada's indigenous populations  were relatively peaceful in comparison to the expansionist and aggressive policies of British North America. First Nations and Métis peoples played a critical part in the development of French colonies in Canada, particularly for their role in assisting French coureur des bois and voyageurs in the exploration of the continent during the North American fur trade. Nevertheless, by 1829, with the death of Shanawdithit, the Beothuk people, the indigenous people of Newfoundland were officially declared extinct after suffering epidemics, starvation, loss of access to food sources, and displacement by English and French fishermen and traders. Scholars disagree in their definition of genocide in relation to the Beothuk, and the parties have differing political agendas. While some scholars believe that the Beothuk died out due to the elements noted above, another theory is that Europeans conducted a sustained campaign of genocide against them.
  More recent understandings of the concept of "cultural genocide" and its relation to settler colonialism have led modern scholars to a renewed discussion of the genocidal aspects of the Canadian states' role in producing and legitimating the process of physical and cultural destruction of Indigenous people. In the 1990s some scholars began pushing for Canada to recognize the Canadian Indian residential school system as a genocidal process rooted in colonialism. This public debate led to the formation of the  Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was formed in 2008.
  The residential school system was established following the passage of the Indian Act in 1876. The system was designed to remove children from the influence of their families and culture with the aim of assimilating them into the dominant Canadian culture. The final school closed in 1996. Over the course of the system's existence, about 30% of native children, or roughly 150,000, were placed in residential schools nationally; at least 6,000 of these students died while in attendance. The system has been described as cultural genocide: "killing the Indian in the child." Part of this process during the 1960s through the 1980s, dubbed the Sixties Scoop, was investigated and the child seizures deemed genocidal by Judge Edwin Kimelman, who wrote: "You took a child from his or her specific culture and you placed him into a foreign culture without any [counselling] assistance to the family which had the child.  There is something dramatically and basically wrong with that." another aspect of the residential school systems was its use of forced sterilization of Indigenous women who chose not to follow the schools advice of marrying non-Indigenous men. Indigenous women made up only 2.5% of the Canadia
caption: Officially, the last of the Beothuks, Shanawdithit (ca. 1801 – 6 June 1829)
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