An Indigenous-led organization standing for the rights and long-overdue liberation of Indigenous peoples in Canada — and keeping the record of what was done, in the words and documents of those who did it.
This is not a fringe claim. Two of Canada's own official bodies — created and funded by the Canadian state — reached this conclusion after years of testimony and evidence.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded that Canada pursued a policy of cultural genocide through the residential school system — the destruction of the political, social and cultural structures that allowed Indigenous peoples to exist as distinct peoples.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (Summary of the Final Report), 2015.The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded that the violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people amounts to genocide — a word chosen deliberately, in an official national inquiry.
National Inquiry into MMIWG, Reclaiming Power and Place (Final Report), 2019.The conditions these policies created have not been repaired. Many First Nations still live in what the United Nations has described as fourth-world conditions, on their own territories, within one of the wealthiest nations on earth.
See the TRC's 94 Calls to Action — the great majority remain unfulfilled.The purpose of the residential school system was never hidden. It was stated openly, in Parliament and in the records of the Department of Indian Affairs.
"I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone … Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill."— Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, testimony to the Special Committee of the House of Commons on amendments to the Indian Act, 1920. Archived: Library and Archives Canada, RG10, vol. 6810, file 470-2-3, vol. 7. Parks Canada confirmed in 2023 that Scott's policies "did widespread and long-term damage to Indigenous Peoples."
"Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence … the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men."— Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, House of Commons Debates, 9 May 1883, pp. 1107–1108. Quoted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Summary Final Report, p. 2.
In 1907, Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, Canada's Chief Medical Health Officer, submitted a report to the Department of Indian Affairs documenting overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that were spreading tuberculosis and killing children in the residential schools at catastrophic rates.
His findings were ignored and his report suppressed. In 1922, denied the chance to act on what he had seen, Bryce published it himself under a title that named the thing plainly: The Story of a National Crime. The government knew children were dying, and chose cost over their lives.
Dr. P.H. Bryce, Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (1907); The Story of a National Crime (1922). See The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Peter Henderson Bryce."The Department of Indian Affairs published photographs of children before and after entering the schools, as proof of "progress." Today they are evidence of what was taken. These images are held in Canada's public archives.
Published in the Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1904. Held by Library and Archives Canada / Saskatchewan Archives Board.
Search Library and Archives Canada →The same child, remade to the department's design. The pair was used as propaganda for assimilation.
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation →More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children passed through 139 federally supported residential schools. Thousands never returned home.
NCTR archive →Canada signed the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1949. But when it wrote genocide into its own criminal law, it narrowed the definition — leaving out the one act the residential schools were built to commit.
"genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group, namely, (a) killing members of the group; or (b) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction."— Criminal Code of Canada, section 318(2). The UN Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute also include "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Canada's own definition omits it.
That omission is the whole story. Taking the children — by force, to be remade — is the act Canada's Criminal Code leaves out of its own definition of genocide. Canada was also among the states that pushed to strip "cultural genocide" from the 1948 Convention while it was being written.
And these crimes carry no statute of limitations — not under Canada's Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, and not under the Rome Statute, Article 29, which states that genocide and crimes against humanity "shall not be subject to any statute of limitations." The passage of a century is no defence.
No one was ever charged — not because it did not happen, but because the architects are long dead, a full genocide offence entered Canadian law only in 2000, and a state does not prosecute itself. The absence of a conviction is not innocence. It is impunity. And impunity is not the end of the argument — it is the beginning of it.
Sources: Criminal Code (Canada), s. 318(2); Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, S.C. 2000, c. 24; Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Arts. 6 & 29; UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).Canada has adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and passed the UNDRIP Act in 2021, committing to bring its laws into line with it. The obligations are real and ongoing: self-determination, the return of lands, the protection of languages and children, and justice for the harms done.
Indigenous Liberation exists to hold that line — to keep the record, to support Indigenous people navigating the systems that were built against them, and to press for the liberation that is long overdue. We are not complacent, and we do not ask permission to exist.
Founded in 2022, Indigenous Liberation is an independent, Indigenous-led organization. Our mission is to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples in Saskatchewan and, in time, across every province — and to document and confront the historical and continuing wrongs that remain unreconciled and unrestored.
We are independent of government and of other agencies for our funding and our direction, so that our voice cannot be bought or silenced. We stand for the rights of Indigenous peoples and their long-overdue liberation, for we remain, too often, prisoners on our own territories.
Founded and led by an Indigenous two-spirit member of a Treaty 4 First Nation, living off-reserve, who has lived the injustices of the colonial system — and refuses to accept them as the end of the story.