“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”

From the UN articles on genocide. I don’t agree with that definition because “in part” is too broad and difficult to prove.

Edit: And because those acts need to be taken with intent to destroy a people. The residential school system was undertaken to erase a cultural identity to integrate indigenous children before they became “too native.” The primary intent was never to kill them off.

The term “genocide” has entered global imagination as the “crime of crimes.” Through the years since its creation by Polish scholar Raphael Lemkin in the 1940s, the concept of genocide has undergone considerable change. It is now conceived as an extremely rare and difficult to prove crime; a “once in a generation” crime moulded in the image of the Nazi Holocaust. Protecting the exceptionality of genocide, we are told, is important. Not everything can (or should) be a genocide, because, “if everything is genocide, nothing is genocide.”

But splitting hairs over the definition of something so broad and contentious is missing the point. I fight for restorative justice and believe, like you, these acts were/are detestable. Whether we agree on the definition of a word is moot.