WHERE IS MY CHILD?
READ THE RULE.
SEE WHAT CANADA DID.
MAKE THE COMPARISON.
Canada has waged war on First Nations under other names: pacification, policing, schooling, child welfare. Its weapons were a mounted police force, an army, residential schools and a funding formula. This walk holds every article of the four Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention against that record.
TEXT→CONDUCT→EVIDENCE→MATCH?
The pictures on this page are staged illustrations, not records. They carry no evidence. Every finding on the board rests on its cited sources.
1920. Every child from seven to fifteen is sent to the school the Department chooses.
The schools kept files. Between 1936 and 1944, about 200,000 were destroyed.
For one death in three, no name was written down.
Families asked where their children were. The forms that would answer them were never filled in.
Canada ratified this in 1952. This is it now, held against the record.
01
THE WAR
A war does not stop being a war because the state calls it policing.
The force Canada sent west in 1873 was armed and organised on military lines. It became the RCMP. Since then the state has used it, provincial police tactical units and the Canadian Army against First Nations people defending their land, the same way an army is used against a civilian population. The record is below, dated and sourced.
- 1873
Parliament creates the North-West Mounted Police. Its first commander is “Lieutenant Colonel W. Osborne Smith.” The RCMP later receives campaign honours “for its military service during the Northwest Rebellion.”
- 1885 · Batoche, Battleford
More than 5,000 troops, artillery and a gunboat are sent against the Métis, Cree and Assiniboine. Eight men are hanged together at Battleford. Macdonald: the executions “ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs.” Pupils of the Battleford Industrial School are made to watch. A pass system that no law ever authorized confines Prairie Nations to their reserves into the 1930s.
The Canadian Encyclopedia ↗ · Nestor, U of Regina ↗ · Pass system ↗
- 1990 · Kanesatake, Kahnawake, Akwesasne
The Canadian Forces deploy about 4,500 personnel with armoured vehicles, helicopters and artillery for 78 days. At Tekakwitha Island soldiers use rifle butts; 75 Kanyen’kehà:ka aged five to 72 are injured. On the last day a soldier bayonets 14-year-old Waneek Horn-Miller in the chest.
- 1995 · Ipperwash
OPP tactical officers advance “with assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols,” “a show of force.” Dudley George, 38, of Stoney Point, is shot dead. The Inquiry finds the Premier said “I want the fucking Indians out of the park,” and that the statements were racist. It also finds no evidence that the Premier directed the march.
- 1995 · Ts’Peten (Gustafsen Lake)
“400 Mounties fired up to 77,000 rounds of ammunition, deployed helicopters, armoured personnel carriers and buried explosives” against about 20 Secwepemc people and supporters. A police sniper fires at a man in an agreed safe zone. Filmed RCMP: “Smear campaigns are our specialty.”
- 2013 · Elsipogtog
A tactical operation clears the Mi’kmaw camp shortly after RCMP negotiators offer tobacco. At least 40 arrested, including Chief Arren Sock. The review commission finds Charter breaches in surveillance and searches, and finds the force itself lawful and proportional.
- 2019–2021 · Wet’suwet’en
RCMP planning notes for the Gidimt’en raid: “lethal overwatch is req’d,” an officer prepared to use lethal force, and “use as much violence toward the gate as you want.” Officers in green fatigues with assault rifles. 14 arrested in 2019, 28 in 2020, 29 in 2021 including two journalists; a police dog and a chainsaw at a cabin door. A judge later finds officers called Indigenous women “orcs and ogres.”
- 2019 · United Nations
The UN racial discrimination committee urges Canada “to guarantee that no force will be used against Secwepemc and Wet’suwet’en peoples,” to withdraw the RCMP from their lands, and “to prohibit the use of lethal weapons, notably by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, against indigenous peoples.” In 2022 it writes that force had escalated.
- 2007–2017 · the RCMP’s own count
RCMP officers shot dead 61 people in a decade. 22 were Indigenous: 36%. Indigenous people are about 5% of the population.
The other weapons were slower. A school system that took the children, a register that lost their names, a ration list, a funding formula. Every one of them is on the board.
02
FIVE INSTRUMENTS
Every article stays on the board.
Tap any article to read its rule in the treaty’s own words, the Canadian record held against it, and every source. Red means breached.
All five instruments
03
FINDINGS
articles breached.
of the articles set out how people must be treated and carry Canadian conduct against them: named Nations, dated records, links to the source. are not rules about people at all: signature, ratification, languages, registration.
are left open on purpose. They govern hospital ships, the protective emblem, medical aircraft, neutral Powers and the battlefield care of soldiers, where no Canadian conduct has been compiled. Calling them breached would be padding, and padding is what makes a sourced finding worthless.
The heaviest weight falls where the war fell on children: the conditions of their confinement, their removal without any hearing, the families never told, the dead never named.
BREACHED articles. Red on the board. Each one sourced.
RECORD INCOMPLETE articles. No Canadian conduct compiled against them, and no pretending otherwise.
NOT APPLICABLE articles. Rules about the treaty document, not about people.
THE SHAPE OF THE RECORD
What the board is made of.
How the findings fall across the five instruments, which sources carry them, and how much weight each one bears.
04
GENOCIDE CONVENTION · ARTICLE II
Five acts. Canada’s own record holds all five.
II(a) · KILLING MEMBERS OF THE GROUP
The dead.
Death rates in the schools “4.90 times higher” than for all Canadian schoolchildren in the war years. Starvation used as policy on the Prairies. RCMP officers shot dead 61 people in a decade; 22 were Indigenous.
1880–1885 · Prairies. The Commission’s finding: “in the 1880s, the threat of starvation became an instrument of government policy.” Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney cut rations and pursued what he called “sheer compulsion.” In 1883 he withdrew food distribution from Fort Walsh to force First Nations onto reserves. The First Nations population on the Prairies fell from 32,000 to 20,000.
1941–1945. The Commission compares the schools’ death rate with Statistics Canada’s rate for all children aged five to fourteen. During the war years it was “4.90 times higher.” In the 1960s it was “still double.”
TRC Final Report Vol. 1, pp. 123–24 ↗ · TRC Final Report Vol. 4, pp. 18–19 ↗ · RCMP memo, Globe and Mail ↗
Open Genocide Convention · 2 →II(b) · SERIOUS BODILY OR MENTAL HARM
The harm.
More than 2,380 people gave evidence to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Its commissioners concluded that the violence is genocide, and that Canada’s responsibility for it continues for as long as the policies do. The Prime Minister accepted the finding the next day.
3 June 2019. The finding: “This violence amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights.”
4 June 2019 · Vancouver. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “We accept their findings, including that what happened amounts to genocide.”
Reclaiming Power and Place, Executive Summary, p. 1 ↗ · CBC News, 4 June 2019 ↗
Open Genocide Convention · 2 →II(c) · CONDITIONS OF LIFE CALCULATED TO DESTROY
The conditions.
Food was the first lever. Then came schools where children died of tuberculosis at rates the government’s own medical officer measured and reported, and where, after the Second World War, federal scientists kept children underfed to see what would happen.
1907. The Department’s chief medical officer, Dr. Peter Bryce, reports on the western schools: “of 1,537 pupils … 24 per cent are reported dead.” At File Hills, “69 per cent of ex-pupils are dead,” and “everywhere the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis.”
1948–1952. Federal nutrition experiments on close to 1,000 children at six schools: Alberni, St. Mary’s, Cecilia Jeffrey, Shubenacadie, St. Paul’s and Blood. At Alberni the milk ration was held at eight ounces a day, “less than half of the quantity recommended in Canada’s Food Rules,” for two years to set a baseline. Researchers ruled out fluoride and dental prophylaxis because tooth decay was one of the things they were measuring.
Bryce, Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, 1907, p. 18 ↗ · Mosby, Histoire sociale/Social History 46:91 (2013), pp. 161–63 ↗
Open Convention IV · 55 →II(d) · MEASURES TO PREVENT BIRTHS
The births.
Two provinces wrote sterilization into law, and the laws fell hardest on Indigenous women. The laws were repealed in the 1970s. Women kept being sterilized in hospital, some while in labour, and a Senate committee heard of a case from 2018.
1928–1972 · Alberta. Under Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act, “the Board approved 2,822 cases for sterilization. Many of these were children under the age of puberty.” The court found its effects “highly discriminatory,” and that “later female natives were more likely to be sterilized.” British Columbia had its own Act from 1933 to 1973.
2018. A survivor tells the Senate committee about the birth of her son in 2018, when she was 24: while she waited for an emergency caesarean, she was asked about a tubal ligation. The committee: “Forced and coerced sterilization is a horrific and ongoing practice in Canada.”
Muir v. Alberta, 1996 (AB QB) ↗ · Senate Human Rights Committee, 2021 ↗ · Senate Human Rights Committee, 2022 ↗
Open Convention IV · 32 →II(e) · FORCIBLY TRANSFERRING CHILDREN
The children.
In 1920 Parliament gave the Department of Indian Affairs the power to take any First Nations child from seven to fifteen and put that child in the school it chose. It made Mounted Police officers the enforcers and jail the penalty for parents. The removals then passed to child-welfare agencies, and the share of Indigenous children in care has not come down. The schools closed. The removals now run through a funding formula. In 2016 a federal tribunal found that Ottawa paid for First Nations children to be taken into care but not for their families to be helped to keep them, and that it did so because of race.
1920. Parliament amends the Indian Act: “Every Indian child between the ages of seven and fifteen years who is physically able shall attend such day, industrial or boarding school as may be designated by the Superintendent General.” Truant officers get “the powers of a peace officer.” A parent who resists faces “a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both,” and the child “may be arrested without a warrant.”
2021 Census. Indigenous children are 7.7% of children aged 14 and under, and 53.8% of the children in foster care. Statistics Canada: the share was “essentially unchanged from five years earlier.”
26 January 2016. On a complaint brought by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal rules: First Nations children on reserve are “denied equal child and family services.” The federal funding formula provides “an incentive to bring children into care because eligible maintenance expenditures are reimbursable at cost.” “It is only because of their race and/or national or ethnic origin that they suffer the adverse impacts.”
TRC Final Report Vol. 1, pp. 279–80 ↗ · Statistics Canada, The Daily, 21 Sept 2022 ↗ · 2016 CHRT 2, paras 456–459 ↗
Open Convention IV · 49 →05
CANADA’S OWN LAW
Canada wrote these rules into its own law.
06
THE CORRESPONDENCE THAT WAS OWED
What a family is owed, and what Canada sent.
- NOT DELIVERED
GC IV · ARTICLE 50
The child’s name and parents.
- OWED
- Every child identified, its parentage registered, its personal status never changed.
- CANADA’S RECORD
- For 32% of the children who died, no name was recorded.
- NOT DELIVERED
GC IV · ARTICLE 26
An answer to the family that asks.
- OWED
- Enquiries from separated families facilitated, so they can find each other.
- CANADA’S RECORD
- In 1933 a federal policy let school records be destroyed; about 200,000 files went between 1936 and 1944. Nations still ask for the attendance records.
Special Interlocutor ↗ · CBC, 2021 ↗
Open Convention IV · 26 → - NOT DELIVERED
GC IV · ARTICLE 129
A death certificate.
- OWED
- Every death certified, and the certificate sent on.
- CANADA’S RECORD
- For 49% of the deaths the Commission found, no cause was recorded. Families were often not told the child had died.
TRC Vol. 4 ↗ · Special Interlocutor ↗
Open Convention IV · 129 → - NOT DELIVERED
GC IV · ARTICLE 130
A grave that can be found.
- OWED
- An honourable burial, a grave “marked in such a way that it can always be recognized,” and a list of graves with “the exact location.”
- CANADA’S RECORD
- Children dug the graves. Wooden crosses rotted or burned. 215 at Kamloops and 751 at Marieval were found by the Nations, not reported by Canada.
Special Interlocutor ↗ · Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc ↗ · CBC, Cowessess ↗
Open Convention IV · 130 → - NOT DELIVERED
GC IV · ARTICLES 136–138
A record that tells the family.
- OWED
- An information bureau holding each person’s name, parents, date and place, “to advise his next of kin quickly.”
- CANADA’S RECORD
- The register of the dead was still adding names in 2025: 1,143 more, verified by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, not by Ottawa.
07
ONE YOU CAN STILL SEND
Ask who holds the record.
The Conventions say a family that asks where its child is gets an answer. Canada has never given that answer to the families of the children in its schools. Your MP can put the question to the Minister of Crown–Indigenous Relations in writing.
Enter a postal code. This finds your MP and opens a letter in your own mail app, copied to the Minister, Rebecca Alty. Change anything before it goes.
Read the letter before you send it
The postal code goes to Open North’s public Represent lookup to find your riding, and nowhere else. Nothing is stored here and nothing is sent for you. The letter opens in your own mail app, under your own name.
METHOD
The same walk, the same method.
Read
Keep the treaty article visible, verbatim from the ICRC database.
Document
Attach the Canadian record: who, what, where, when, and the source, linked.
Compare
An article is marked breached only when a sourced record of Canadian conduct stands against its text. Where nothing has been compiled, it says so.
Expose
Every source is linked. Anyone can check every tile.
09
CLOSING
What did the state owe these children?
At the least, what it demands for strangers in a war: a name kept, a family answered, a grave marked. That is the Geneva floor. The Genocide Convention asks what the state was doing instead.
This is the Canadian walk of the Geneva Walk, which holds the same 429 Geneva articles against documented conduct in Gaza. The method is the same: read the rule, document the conduct, put the evidence beside it. The mailbox lists the 53 messages the Conventions require somebody to send.