Native men die or go missing at a much higher rate than women actually, so it's not just girls. Natives, regardless of gender, experience more violence and go missing at a significantly higher rate than non-natives. According to several RCMP reports released over the last few decades, the overwhelming majority of this violence is within the community. Most native women (and men) who are assaulted or killed are assaulted by other natives.
So, where's this "genocide" thing in the latest report coming from then?
The MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indiginous Women and Girls) was started about two years ago for political reasons. It's goal was to catch the RCMP in a lie, to uncover their incompetence/malfeasance, and root out any kind of conspiracy. They didn't find anything of the sort. It really is natives hurting natives. The inquiry cost $92 million and generated a lot of bad press for incompetence and high staff turnover rates. So, how do you salvage something politically from that? Stir up controversy.
Why are natives hurting natives at a higher rate than non-natives? There are a host of reasons. Poverty is probably the biggest one, and this absolutely is something we need to work on solving. Another contributing problem is lingering cultural trauma from the residential school system. From the late 19th century until the late 20th century, some native children were taken from their parents and raised on boarding schools. The motivation at the time was to turn tax consuming reserve residents into tax generating members of broader Canadian society. Obviously, this is now viewed as a deeply misguided policy. The government has apologized for this practice, and the legal system is still sorting out compensation in some cases. Some decided to call this an attempt at "cultural genocide". The language is inflammatory, and deliberately so, but it's not wholly inaccurate.
So, given that people were talking about attempted "cultural genocide" as one root of the problem, the MMIWG took the next step in inflaming the language used about this problem by calling it outright genocide. Their report isn't officially released until Monday and I haven't read it, but I suspect the logic they use to define what has happened as genocide will be highly creative. This choice of language creates the controversy they apparently couldn't get from their findings in any other way.
So, no, the Canadian military is not roaming reserves in humvees, sniping off little native girls and drinking their blood. No, truckers are not swerving to hit native girls on highways. No, an actual genocide is not going on. What's going on is we have a higher incidence of violence within disadvantaged communities, and those communities are native. There are historical reasons for this disadvantage and a desperate need for the government to do a better job of solving them, but no genocide has taken place. The people saying this are saying it for political gain.
We absolutely have failed these communities, but calling what happened a genocide is not going to contribute to a solution. Quite the contrary, it's going to make people angry about being accused of committing genocide and encourage them to ignore any reasonable recommendations that might be hidden in this report. It's politics at their very worst.