Forcible
Sterilization of Indigenous Women: One More Act of Genocide
In November 2018 it was reported that a group of
Indigenous women in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan had brought a
class-action suit against the Saskatoon Health Authority, the provincial and
federal governments, and some medical professionals. These women complained
that they had been forcibly sterilized, or tricked into giving consent for
sterilization when they were under stress or heavily drugged. They claimed that
doctors did this over several decades, as late as the 2000s.
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| Saskatoon |
The UN Committee on Torture has become interested in
this suit, recommending in late 2018 that the Canadian government investigate all
allegations of enforced sterilization and adopt legislation criminalizing it. Indigenous
activists want a new law specifically outlawing forced sterilization, but the
federal government argues it’s already illegal.
Canada doesn’t have a good history with regard to
forced sterilization. The provinces of Albert and British Columbia forcibly
sterilized people from the 1930s to the 1970s. Authorities were responding to
the eugenics movement, popular among many influential Canadians. Eugenicists
wanted to keep the Canadian “race” pure by sterilizing “unfit” people, which
usually meant poor people, immigrants, and people with disabilities. Indigenous
peoples were at disproportionate risk of sterilization. During the last few years
of forcible sterilization in Alberta, Indigenous and Metis people constituted
2.5 per cent of the population but twenty-five per cent of the people
sterilized.
Forced sterilizations are an aspect of genocide. We
tend to think of genocide as the mass, deliberate murder of large numbers of
people. But when the United Nations formulated its Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, it defined five ways genocide could
be committed.
Only one of the five means defined in the Genocide
Convention is mass murder. The others are “causing serious bodily or mental
harm to members of the group,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,”
“imposing measures intended to prevent births with the group,” and “forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group.”
Forced sterilization is a means to impose measures
to prevent births. The “Sixties Scoop” (in the 1960s) removing thousands of
Indigenous children from their families and communities, ostensibly to protect
the children from abusive situations, is an example of forcibly transferring children
from one group to another.
Forcible deportations are a way to deliberately
inflict conditions calculated to bring about a group’s physical destruction.
Canada deported several indigenous groups in the far north from their homelands
to various other locations, sometimes without any food or shelter, forcing them
to live “off the land” in conditions so difficult as to cause many deaths from
starvation, exposure and disease. (See my post of June 18, 2018: “Genocide in
the Far North: Canada 1950”) Any removal of Indigenous people anywhere in the
country that resulted in a significant number of deaths might be considered
genocide by deportation.
The term genocide was originally coined in 1944 by a
Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin wanted to include what we now call
cultural genocide in the definition. He wasn’t thinking about Indigenous
peoples; he was thinking of the cultural genocide of ethnic groups such as
Estonians by the Nazis. He thought destruction of works of culture that
represented “the genius” of a group should be a crime called vandalism, and
destruction of a religious or national collectivity should be a crime called barbarism.
Although Lemkin lobbied hard for the UN to accept
his definition, in the end it didn’t. If it had, we could argue that the
establishment of residential schools, with their explicit policies of depriving
Indigenous children of their languages, customs and cultures--as well as removing
them from their communities--was an aspect of genocide, the barbarism of
destroying a collectivity. We use the term cultural genocide as a descriptive
term, but it isn’t part of the UN’s legal definition.
Legally speaking, moreover, the UN definition
requires proof of intent to commit genocide. So if Canadian authorities didn’t
intend that Indigenous women should be sterilized: if those sterilizations were
the accumulated, taken-for-granted practice of many doctors over many decades,
then legally, Canada wasn’t committing genocide by preventing births.
Similarly, if there was no intent to destroy a community by forcibly
transferring children, then the Sixties Scoop wasn’t genocide. And if there was
no intent to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about
peoples’ physical destruction by deporting Indigenous peoples, then Canada
wasn’t committing genocide.
But as citizens, we might want to consider our moral
responsibility as well as governments’ legal responsibilities. If we add up all
the ways that our governments have oppressed Indigenous peoples over the
centuries, then those of us who are not Indigenous bear a weighty burden, to
remedy practices that in effect, if not in intent, constituted genocide.
