Abstract: The discourse of missing and murdered Aboriginal women has garnered national media attention and embedded itself firmly within the Canadian imaginary. However, scholars as diverse as Andrea Bear Nicholas, Sherene Razack, and Bonita Lawrence have pointed to the gendered nature of colonial violence since the social upheavals wrought by the fur trade onward. To excavate the roots of power within the ongoing historical obfuscation of these patterns of violence I ask: what has changed within white settler discourse about this gendered violence, and what are these changes producing at an institutional level within Canada? To achieve this study, I begin with a brief historical overview and then move to contrast the cases of Helen Betty Osborne and Loretta Saunders. I use these prominent cases to highlight the similarities and differences within national media and policy discourse to reveal the specific moments of colonial power and technologies of obfuscation operating to normalize gendered violence. My primary aim is to engage Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel’s argument that the current iteration of settler colonialism is premised on historical and geographic erasure rather than continuing patterns of gendered violence against the bodies of indigenous women. I intersperse Foucauldian approaches to discourse analysis with a critical engagement with Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to explicate the gendered and hierarchical nature of nercopolitical discourse while attempting to sketch moments of indigenous agency within and beyond these processes. Overall, I argue that the Osborne and Saunders’ cases reveal distinct patterns of isolation and obfuscation of gendered violence.

Abstract: A small but growing literature in genocide studies has begun to explore the role of law not in the prevention of genocide, but in its perpetration. In this largely theoretical paper I seek to contribute to this discussion, first, by drawing on interpretive and critical socio-legal theories to understand how the law legitimates group destruction by rendering such practices “lawful” and by classifying, and thus delegitimizing, targeted groups as “deviant”. Second, I confront the assertion that the use of law in genocide seems to involve the non, or less violent, aspects of genocide (segregation, deportation, marking, revocation of citizenship etc.) while the more explicitly violent processes of destruction are usually “extra-legal”.This argument is largely accurate if we are referring only to mass violence genocides. But, I will argue, if we consider cases of cultural genocide in settler societies, more specifically the residential school system in Canada, we can see that law, without being “bent” or “broken”, plays a leading role in the entire process of destruction as democratic governments wedded to the rule of law turn to the law itself to craft and enforce programs of forced assimilation legitimated as “lawful” against groups defined under these same laws as “deviant”.

Paper / Communication

Abstract: "Genocide denial is a term typically applied to individuals and states that overtly deny past crimes. The most studied case of this in contemporary scholarship is Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide. However, there is another type of denial that has been overlooked. Canadian denial of its settler colonial genocide against Indigenous peoples, particularly the Residential School system, is denied subtly and in ways not yet fully understood. My paper offers institutional insights of Canadian denialism’s pathologies and patterns. Canadian denialism is produced and sustained through ignorance, racism, and socioeconomic deprivations which foster negative attitudes of Indigenous peoples and make histories of genocide against them unbelievable. Indigenous experiences are dismissed as improbable because of Canada’s multiculturalism policy which leads to sentiments that Canada is, and has always been, a nation of human rights and toleration. However, Indigenous peoples are systemically excluded from multiculturalism and their experiences are constructed through racialized colonial institutions. Second, institutionalized racism against Indigenous peoples undermines efforts to view past Canadian genocidal policies, particularly Canada’s efforts to clear the plains and the Residential School period, as illegitimate and genocidal. Education is a fundamental human right, but when it is used as a weapon to assimilate, the lines between morally legitimate and criminal become blurred. Finally, socioeconomic deprivations forced upon Indigenous peoples create inescapable cycles of poverty, fuelling sustained discriminatory and racist beliefs in non-Indigenous Canadians. Racism and denial are inseparable. Until racism is alleviated, denialist patterns will continue because they are appropriate for Canada’s institutional logics."