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Tasked with investigating the residential school system, the TRC found it to be part of a coherent and systematic campaign to assert control over Aboriginal land and resources. In other words, to build Canada.Much of the response to the report has focused on whether residential school policy does or doesn't count as cultural genocide, or wondered at the use of the term "cultural genocide." People have inevitably questioned what this might have to do with the Holocaust. For some Canadians, the word genocide is enough to jar them into taking notice. The stories undoubtedly deserve attention—seven generations of children torn from their parents' arms, beaten, shamed, broken, disappeared. Children in residential schools were more likely to die there than Canadian soldiers were in World War II. Look closely, and "genocide" won't seem like too strong a word.But this is not just a story about residential schools. The report reminds us what residential schools were intended to achieve. It was not simply a culturally-driven project of Christianizing. Rather, the goal was to destroy the economic, political and legal foundations of Indigenous communities, and make way for the unrestricted exploitation and occupation of their land.For over a century, the central goals of Canada's Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can be best described as "cultural genocide."
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