Genocide is a word that wasn’t created till the 1700’s but had occurred long before the word was ever used. Genocide is defined as the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. Many people relate this term to what occurred in the Holocaust but forget that this term also applies to the Aboriginal peoples of both Canada and the United States. I learned that both the American and Canadian government systematically tried to exterminate the Aboriginal culture from existents- for one would not usually relate their own government to Hitler. Canada tired to accomplish this through residential schools and the Indian Act both were used as a way to punish Aboriginal people for taking part of any aspect of their own culture. Within the residential schools Aboriginal youth were forcibly taken from their families to be educated by either Catholic or Protestant run boarding schools, as well as a place where they were punished for speaking in their native language. Residential schools were supposed to “kill the Indian and save the man”, as if there was a distinction between the two groups. What many people don’t know is that within these residential schools enumerable amounts of children were either killed or went missing, many other children were also either physically or sexually abused, or both. But the government failed to realize that Aboriginal peoples wouldn’t go down without a fight, they would not stand by watching their life style disappear. Many Aboriginal groups across Canada and the United States banded together to fight the retrenchment that their cultures were facing, they have gone to the United Nations to seek justice when justice was not found within their home country. Aboriginal peoples are not peoples of the past.