WINNER:  THE NORA AND TED STERLING PRIZE IN SUPPORT OF CONTROVERSY,  SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

“Throughout the book Starblanket demonstrates a broad knowledge of both history and law.  The documentation is vast and precise… a tour de force…” ALFRED DE ZAYAS,  former Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee,  UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order,  International Indigenous Policy Review, Volume 10, 4, 2019.

“The Residential School model existed in both Canada and the United States. It involved the systematic removal of Indigenous children – some as young as four – from their parents. These children were housed in crowded ‘boarding schools’ where – in addition to being subjected to an ‘English only’ education and corporal punishment for any expression of cultural heritage – they were “systematically demeaned and degraded, subjected to both physical and psychological torture (including wholesale sexual predation), denied […] adequate nutrition, medical care, or clothing, and typically impressed into manual labor” (p. 22). As Starblanket demonstrates, precisely and conclusively, this programme of organized, racist, colonial violence amounts to genocide, as the crime has been defined in international law.” DARRYL BARTHE, Decolonization of Criminology and Justice 2(1),

“[B]elongs on the reading list of anyone concerned with social justice and addressing the ongoing colonialism on which the Canadian nation-state stands.” AZIZ CHOUDRY,   STUDIES IN SOCIAL JUSTICE

“Suffer the Little Children is a path-breaking text that rigorously and robustly documents the numerous ways in which the Canadian state has and continues to commit genocide against Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.” TRAVIS HAY, THE JOURNAL OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

“An effective analysis of the legal structures the Canadian state set up to accomplish its objective: the complete absorption of indigenous peoples into the dominant European culture, to solve the “Indian problem…” CHRISTOPHER BLACK, International Lawyer, ANISHINABEK NEWS

“Starblanket’s book is an important, thought-provoking, and timely interdisciplinary contribution to the field of law, history, and Indigenous Studies that will push readers to reconceptualize colonization and the characterization of residential schools as genocidal.” CARLING BENINGER, BC STUDIES

“Tamara Starblanket’s work is confident, clear and succinct; her work is ground-breaking and provides us with new ways of looking at how the states treatment of First Nations Peoples has gone unrecognised for its genocidal affect. This work provides an excellent critique on the exclusion of cultural genocide from how genocide is defined in international law.”
IRENE WATSON, Research Professor of Law, University of South Australia

“Settler-colonialism reveals the brutal face of imperialism in some of its most vicious forms.  This carefully researched and penetrating study focuses on one of its ugliest manifestations, the forcible transferring of indigenous children, and makes a strong case for Canadian complicity in a form of ‘cultural genocide’ – with implications that reach to the Anglosphere generally, and to some of the worst crimes of the ‘civilized world’ in the modern era.” NOAM CHOMSKY