In The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation, David B. MacDonald confronts the truths of Canada’s Indian residential school systems and likens this to waking a sleeping giant. In this book genocide is used as an analytical tool to better understand Canada’s past and present relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. David B. MacDonald begins by defining genocide in domestic and international law and then applies this concept to the forced transfer of Indigenous children to residential schools including the Sixties Scoop. Archival research, interviews with residential school Survivors, and officials at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada were used in the compilation of The Sleeping Giant Awakens. This work is also an informative perspective on the prospects of conciliation after genocide through a detailed analysis of how the TRC approached genocide in its reporting. The Sleeping Giant Awakens provides a platform for ongoing discussions on the term genocide for understanding the Indian Residential School system as both imperiling prospects for conciliation and providing an important basis for respectful and proactive engagement of Indigenous-settler relations. The table of contents includes: 1. Understanding Genocide: by Raphael Lemkin, the UN Genocide Convention, and International Law; 2. Pluralists, Indigenous Peoples, and Colonial Genocide; 3. Forcible Transfer as Genocide in the Indian Residential Schools; 4. The Sixties and Seventies Scoop and the Genocide Convention; 5. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the Question of Genocide; 6. The TRC, Indigenous Death, Inside and Outside the Residential Schools; 7. Indigenous Genocide: Remembering, Commemorating, Forgetting; 8. Indigenous Peoples and Genocide: Challenges of Recognition and Remembering; 9. Reconciliation, Resurgence, and Rollback in the Aftermath of Genocide.
