UN Convention on Genocide:

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent

to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

Carole Dawson: “Like I say, unfortunately many of the people I was in school with have died. Many of them have died tragic deaths. A lot of them have been murdered. Some of them through alcohol and drugs have killed themselves. There aren’t too many people that I went to school with that survive.”

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Grant Severight: “I loved my grandparents. I would have stayed in the bush with them rather than being put in a Residential School. I remember missing them and the dislocation I felt, the disconnection I felt to my family. Eventually that whole dislocation and disconnection kind of built walls in me that took me years to deconstruct again. The feeling of inferiority I felt —”

“ In Marieval there was sexual abuse. I experienced some sexual abuse but it was from older boys, not from the staff.” “He didn’t injure me or anything but he used to fondle me and that kind of stuff. But he learned it from a supervisor. He used to tell me. He learnt that off Brother so-and-so. George did pass away after he left school, but he was the guy who used to do that kind of stuff.” “t throughout time I come to believe it because Father Sharon (ph.) spent a lot of time with that lady. That’s where my sexual abuse happened was in St. Philip’s. Q. From the older boys? A. No. From the music teacher.”

“And then they had a guy by the name of Rocky (something). He was a supervisor. He was convicted not of sexual assault but he was convicted of physical assault on the boys. Q. What kind of things did he do? A. He burnt them with cigarettes. He whipped them. He used to set up sweat lodges and just burn the boys while they were in there.”

Carole Dawson: “Probably the abuse that happened there. It’s not only my own abuse. I saw the abuse of other students. That was very compelling for me to see young girls getting taken out of their dorms at odd hours; eleven in the evening and midnight, and to hear them whimpering and crying and then find them in the bathroom later. I didn’t understand then about sexual abuse. It wasn’t explained to us by our parents or our Elders, or these people that operated the schools. But I knew there was something wrong.”

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical

destruction in whole or in part;

Grant Severight explaining how one school was better than the other, and what kind of things they got there that he didn’t in his old school: “I remember getting cookies and a glass of milk. I mean, it was the real milk that tasted good. The other stuff we had was always powdered stuff. I remember, man, was this ever different. And the meals were different. I remember having corn flakes, boiled eggs, toast, and I remember at dinner time we would get hot dogs and bags of chips and hamburgers, and a full course meal at supper time, just completely different.” “And I remember the boys were given access to guitars. We could play little guitars. They had bikes there, too, that we had to share. Man, I really hit the big time here. It was a completely different world.” “One of the things that stands out for me is I was constantly being punished. I was being either whipped or made to wash toilets because I physically attacked supervisors who beat the children, for instance, with radiator brushes. My cousin, Bob Joseph, who is one of the Residential School guys in BC, his wife is my cousin, her and I were always getting punished because we were always trying to defend the little children.”

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

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(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

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