Genocide in Canada

A Critical Approach

This book exposes deeply flawed genocide denialism surrounding residential schools, examining how Canada sought to resolve the “Indian problem” through genocide.

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Forthcoming October 2026
ISBN: 9781773638218
192 pages
CA$29.00
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About the book

“Is it genocide?” Too often the answer to this question requires killing fields, death camps, gas chambers, and massacres. Genocide in Canada directs us instead to the relationships through which groups of people persist as a people. Andrew Woolford’s critical approach pinpoints the many forms of violence that can and are used to destroy peoples.

Woolford explores settler colonial genocide in Canada, overcoming the limitations of the traditional genocide concept and its legal formulation and demonstrating that settler colonialism threatens the existence of Indigenous Peoples. Framed as a sociology of collective life, this book focuses on assimilative education such as occurred through residential schools. It examines how the residential school system was implemented by the settler state to deal with the “Indian problem,” intending to destroy Indigenous Peoples’ culture and relationships with family and territory, to eliminate them as peoples. Woolford traces the genocide debate in Canada, illuminating the blind spots and assumptions that disguise settler colonial patterns of group destruction. He exposes the deeply flawed genocide denialist claims about residential schools as many cling to a redemptive story of Indigenous-settler relations that absolves Canada of anything more than a “dark chapter” or “mistakes.”

Indigenous Resistance & Decolonization Crime & Law

What people are saying

Emma Lowman and Adam Barker, authors of Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada
"In Genocide in Canada, Andrew Woolford provides a clear-eyed, nuanced, and unflinching examination of Canada's treatment of Indigenous peoples that amounts, despite the rhetoric of denialists, inevitably to genocide. Not content to counter the more obviously bad-faith arguments against situating Canadian settler colonialism as a genocidal project, Woolford redefines the terrain of the "debate" to reveal that there is no debate at all. This book is an essential read in an era of rising misinformation and nationalist reactionism."

Author

Person wearing glasses and black shirt smiling at camera in a park setting with grass and trees.

Andrew Woolford

Andrew Woolford is professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba, an emeritus member of the Royal Society of Canada College, and former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is author of ‘This Benevolent Experiment’: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in the United States and Canada (2015) and Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty-Making in British Columbia (2005), and co-author of The Politics of Restorative Justice (2019) and Informal Reckonings: Conflict Resolution in Mediation, Restorative Justice, and Reparations (2005). He is co-editor of Did You See Us? Reunion, Remembrance, and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School (2021); Canada and Colonial Genocide (2017); The Idea of a Human Rights Museum (2015); and Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (2014). He has worked on two community-based research projects with residential school Survivors: 1) Embodying Empathy, which designed, built, and tested a virtual Indian Residential School that serves as a site of knowledge mobilization and empathy formation; and 2) Remembering Assiniboia, which focuses on commemoration of the Assiniboia Residential School. He is completing a project on human and more-than-human relations within genocidal processes under the title “Genocide with Nature.”