If America's great shame is slavery, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report painfully laid out Canada's great shame Tuesday.
Canada and Canadians are guilty of genocide against its aboriginal population.
Genocide is a harsh word, loaded with so much meaning and more commonly associated with the targeted slaughter of people in Nazi Germany, Cambodia and Rwanda.
Yet genocide is about far more than that.
"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation," wrote Raphael Lemkin in 1944.
"It is intended rather to signify a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups."
Lemkin gets to define genocide because the word didn't exist until he invented it, addressing what Winston Churchill had once called a crime with no name. Lemkin simply combined the Greek "genos," meaning people, and the Latin "cide," meaning to kill.
Lemkin's definition prevails to this day in international law and with the United Nations. The breadth of genocide's full meaning show how Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish and Jewish descent, deeply understood that violence and murder are just two of the many ways to destroy a group of people.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called what happened in residential schools in Canada for 120 years "cultural genocide" but that is too polite, too politically correct, too Canadian.
There is no such thing as "cultural genocide," in Lemkin's view. The stories by residential school survivors told to the commission clearly meet "the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language... personal security, liberty, health, dignity" under Lemkin.
When defining genocide, Lemkin stepped smartly around the numbers question.
Genocide can't be explained as more than one million deaths or one thousand or even one. Genocide is not destruction but the planned destruction of an identifiable group.
Even if multiple actors working independently of one another are involved, if there is a "co-ordinated plan" to steal a people's existence, including its self-identity, regardless of the plan's degree of success, that, too, is genocide.
The Canadian government, working with the Roman Catholic Church, conspired to eradicate the history, culture, language and identity of Canada's aboriginal peoples for more than a century by shipping young people away from their families and communities to schools where the Indian could be unlearned and children could be taught to be proper "Canadians."
The result was generations of misery from substance and sexual abuse, violence, poverty, victimization and powerlessness.
Perhaps worst of all, it created multiple schisms in the aboriginal community and even within individual families, pitting those who excelled in broader Canadian society, those who refused to be considered victims and those who chose to not be identified by their skin colour, language or birth place against those who were discriminated against and shunned, those who found solace with others in their victimhood and those who refuse to accept the selfish and individualistic notions of identity so commonly held in the "white man's" world.
The reconciliation between and within aboriginal communities is just as important as the reconciliation that needs to happen between Canada's First Nations and its governments and the Catholic Church.
A papal visit to Canada and a sincere, heartfelt apology and acceptance of blame from Pope Francis would help, but the Vatican only aided and abetted a travesty that was born and bred in Canada.
The shame must be owned and understood by all Canadians and the genocide perpetrated on this country's aboriginal populations under the guise of education must be accepted as truth. Without that, there can be no reconciliation.
