Hymie Rubenstein ——Bio and Archives--January 24, 2026

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The title of this piece is a deliberate play on Rebel Without a Cause, a classic 1955 film starring James Dean, which sought to explain the moral decay among middle-class American youth.

Its use here reflects the moral decay exhibited by the wearisome portrayal and explanatory shallowness of the differentially high murder rates of indigenous women and girls compared to non-indigenous ones.

While there is no single, absolute number for the total studies on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada, the crisis has been the subject of hundreds of reports by indigenous organizations, government bodies, academic researchers, and international organizations going back decades.

A key 2014 literature review by the Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence Against Indigenous Women (LSC) identified 50 major reports containing over 700 recommendations. Since then, dozens more studies have been completed.

The National Inquiry into MMIWG Final Report (“Reclaiming Power and Place,” 2019) is the largest, most comprehensive of these studies: its two volumes are based on testimony from over 2,380 people.

The key themes in most of these studies are: (1) systemic neglect: police have inadequately investigated these missing and murdered girls and women cases; institutional racism and misogyny underlie these investigations; (2) genocide: the 2019 National Inquiry concluded the violence constitutes a race-based genocide; (3) intergenerational trauma: many studies point to the long-term impact of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the Indian Act.

These reports also show that in virtually all cases involving indigenous women, the victim and accused knew each other, suggesting that both parties identified as indigenous.

This disparity between the murder rates of indigenous and other women and girls saw the June 2019 National Inquiry report mincing no words when it claimed there currently exists in Canada “a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … empowered by colonial structures … leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.”

The chief commissioner of the National Inquiry, Marion Buller, a B.C. Provincial Court judge, former president of the indigenous Bar Association, and a member of the Mistawasis Indian Band, wrote in her opening comments that the report is about “deliberate race, identity, and gender-based genocide.” Buller declared that “The violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people is a national tragedy of epic proportions.”

The Final Report declares that its use of “genocide,” which occurs no fewer than 72 times in its first volume alone, is in keeping with the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

This Convention is the gold standard for identifying this heinous crime against humanity wherever it might occur. Article 2 of the UN Convention defines genocide as:

Sloppy, politically motivated reasoning underlies the MMIWG Final Report’s genocide accusation.

Unlike universally recognized genocides like the Holocaust and the Holodomor, none of the murders of these indigenous Canadian women was aimed at destroying them as an ethnic, racial, or other grouping. More particularly, despite the many differences and the varying definitions of genocide, there is one necessary and sufficient feature that distinguishes a genuine genocide: that the murder of members of another group be deliberate, systematic and organized, as opposed to coincidental, unconnected and uncoordinated.

This important distinction is why the United Nations General Assembly resolved in 1946 that, “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”

Translation: A lot of random murders--the nearly universal shared feature of the killing of indigenous women and girls--however heart-breaking and outrageous they may be, do not add up to a genocide.

This necessary qualification did not prevent then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from thundering that, “I have acknowledged that I accept the findings of the report, and the issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term,” Trudeau stated. “As I’ve said, we accept the finding that this was genocide.”

Irwin Cotler, former Attorney General of Canada and head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, summarized the issue far more........

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