Canada's genocide of its first nation's people was gross.

It was a system of forced assimilation through child abduction, economic and nutritional deprivation, and political disenfranchisement.

But it happened that way because Canada DID see them as people.

It IS called genocide. When it's called genocide it's usually done with the clarification that it was a cultural genocide to distinguish it from the common conception of genocide (murder factory genocide).

I don't think mass graves is the right term for the recent[ish] [re-]discovery of unmarked graves.

The discoveries document that the killings weren't the result of the sort of misguided, racist, and overzealous military campaigns which are tragically common through colonial history. (And result in mass graves)

It's not 'those soldiers were racist and wrong, they shouldn't have done that'. It's not one commander or general that was overly brutal. It was sustained racist indifference, complicity, and callousness by settler Canada for 100 years! That is a much bigger indictment of Canada as an institution.