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The term "genocide" is often used colloquially to denote mass killing as part of a plan of total extermination, but the formal meaning of the word as defined in international law and by the person who coined the term itself is not limited to this alone. A short thread...
The idea of genocide is not simply killing every member of a group, here is the definition in law from Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which was created in 1948 
For Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term, genocide was the effort to destroy a group as a group. Or as Lemkin himself put it:
For Lemkin, the destruction of cultural foundations was an essential element of genocide, rather than a separate kind of genocide that belonged to a lesser category. From his his 1944 book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe"
When Lemkin described the process of genocide, he focuses on the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but also had a larger world historical view and saw colonialism and settler colonial policy towards indigenous people in the Americas as part of his definition of genocide.
To claim that applying the term genocide to Canadian treatment of native groups devalues and distorts the word directly contradicts the interpretation of the term genocide put forth by the person who invented it, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had fled Nazi terror.
One of the motives behind this appeal to authority (which is ahistorical and wrong on the law,) is that it often comes from those who support policies of forced assimilation, which under the definition of Lemkin and international law, constitutes genocide.
To learn more about the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and its claims of ongoing genocide, check out:
Cited passages from Lemkin were taken from two sources: @dirkmoses article Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide dirkmoses.com/uploads/7/3/8/… and Genocide and American Indian History by Jeffrey Ostler oxfordre.com/americanhistor…
And check out this special issue on Canada and genocide
