Bruce Cockburn on Day 6 – podcast/interview
by Brent Bambury – CBC radio
‘To think that we can absolve ourselves of having exercised cultural genocide is completely foolish’
15 June 2019 – Bruce Cockburn has been writing songs about conflicts in the lives of Canada’s Indigenous people for decades and he has no quarrel with the use of the word genocide.
“I don’t have any problem allowing that word to be applied to the interaction between people of European extraction and people of native extraction in North America,” Cockburn said on Day 6.
The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) sharply divided the country when it declared the oppression of Indigenous people to be “persistent and deliberate” and concluded it was genocide. Cockburn agrees with the conclusion.
“Whether it was intentional or not, and at times it certainly has been, the effect has been to destroy a culture,” he said.
Canada’s legacy media rejected the claim of genocide and so did some prominent Canadians. For them, Cockburn doesn’t hide his contempt.
“To think that we as Canadians can absolve ourselves of having exercised or attempted cultural genocide is completely foolish,” he said.
