Sleeping Giant Awakens

For over a century, Canada's Indian Residential Schools (IRS) system targeted Indigenous communities through the forcible removal of their children. The Sleeping Giant Awakens brings together two decades of archival research, legal analysis, interviews, and Survivor testimony to understand how Canada committed genocide against Indigenous Peoples. This substantially updated new edition, featuring expanded content and two new chapters, traces how genocide is defined in international and Canadian law and how the forcible transfer of Indigenous children – through residential schools and the Sixties Scoop – meets that definition. The second edition centres landmark developments since the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: how ongoing genocide was identified by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves. Political scientist David B. A. MacDonald outlines how the official recognition of genocide has faced an aggressive backlash by IRS denialists, while carefully unpacking and refuting denialist arguments. Picking up from the first edition, MacDonald carefully considers what reconciliation means in an era of political and economic uncertainty. Readers are challenged to rethink Canada's foundational myths, to understand why "reconciliation lite" is not enough, and to support concrete moves towards responsibility, such as the promotion of land back, Indigenous law, and Indigenous sovereignties. Essential reading for students, educators, policymakers, and all who care about meaningful and transformational change, this second edition of The Sleeping Giant Awakens supports Indigenous self-determination and participates meaningfully in conciliation after genocide.