Is Colonialism a Form of Genocide?

In this paper, I'm going to look at what is genocide? Does it only occur in such situations as the Holocaust, the genocides in Darfur, Turkey, Cambodia, Tibet, & Bosnia, the disappearances in Argentina & Chile, the death squad killings in El Salvador, Stalin's purges, the killing of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Has there been a form of genocide in our own backyard? In this journal I'm going to explain that in fact Canada has had it's own stint in genocide that involves Aboriginal people with the Church and residential schools.

Genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

Colonialism 1): the quality or state as being colonial 2): something characteristic of a colony 3) a: a control by one power over a dependent

area or people b): a policy advocating or based on such control.

To make adequate sense of the idea of destruction in genocide, we need to grasp that it involves three stages:

1) The identification of a social group as an enemy in an essentially military (rather than merely political, economic or cultural) sense i.e as a group against which it is justified to use physical violence in a systematic way.

2) The intention to destroy the real or imputed power of the enemy group, including it's economic, political, cultural and ideological power, together with it's ability to resist this destruction.

3) The actual deployment of violence to destroy the power of the enemy group through killing and physically harming a significannot

number of its' members, as well as other measures. (http://www.martinshaw.org/warandgenocide/2.htm)

The Canadian Government along with the Church has practiced these three stages in the Residential schools, which in fact makes it genocide.

In the first stage that makes for destruction through genocide is the identification of a social group as an enemy. Even though the Government and Church didn't see aboriginals as a threat or enemy, they saw them as a plague and wanted to assimilate them so they would be more Ð''victorian'.

The second stage for destruction of genocide focuses on destroying economic, political, cultural and ideological power. The Church and the Government did a good job of ridding its plagues with the use of displacement. When young aboriginal kids were taken from their homes in order to go to residential schools they were stripped of their cultural backround. Having a ciricullum