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Originally Posted by mintzilla

^^^change has to come from within the first nations communities

Change has been trying to come from First Nations communities, but the Indian Act keeps it down, which is ultimately what that law was intended to do. Nishnawbe Aski Nation, for example, wants to establish an education system for its people, but the Indian Act gives them no tools to generate the funds necessary to support that system, so it is constantly at risk. They have to beg Indian Affairs to give them the money they need to educate their people. The federal government, as a result of the treaties, made it law that the federal government would provide education on reserves, but it provides only the basics, up to grade 9. The quality of school buildings and teaching materials on some reserves is similar to African countries. You can not expect people living without decent access to education to be able to fully integrate themselves in our economy.

Originally Posted by Calgarian

What percentage of murders in the cities you listed are committed by, or involve aboriginals?

Off the top of my head, Thunder Bay is at least 85% and Winnipeg is probably over 70% based on what I can recall. Last year, 3 of 4 homicides involved First Nations people who were visiting the city from their reserves for education and legal reasons.

Most of Thunder Bay's homicides in the past 20 years have occurred in my neighbourhood, which has a large aboriginal population. My street in particular is around 60% aboriginal. As a white person I am a minority, though oddly, I've only experienced real racism (the kind that shocks you) from other white people, often when I explain my position on First Nations issues.

Originally Posted by drew

I cannot find any stats at the moment, but IIRC, Calgary has a far lower percentage of Aboriginals making up the population compared to those other cities mentioned.

I compiled this a couple years ago, the data is from the 2006 Census:

        ab.     total  %ab.

AB  188,365 3,067,990   6.1
SK  141,890   953,850  14.9
MB  175,395 1,133,515  15.5

NO  98,720    736,505  13.4 (Northern Ontario)
+NW 46,455    232,375  20.0 (Northwestern Ontario)
-KE 26,345     63,995  41.2 (Kenora District)
-RA  4,615     21,275  21.7 (Rainy River (Fort Frances) District)
-TH 15,495    147,105  10.5 (Thunder Bay District)
+NE 52,265    504,130  10.4 (Northeastern Ontario)
-AL 12,925    116,075  11.1 (Algoma (Sault Ste. Marie) District)
-CO  9,665     81,465  11.9 (Cochrane (Timmins) District)
-GR  9,635    155,995   6.2 (City of Greater Sudbury)
-MA  5,035     12,940  38.9 (Manitoulin Island District)
-NI  7,315     83,605   8.7 (Nipissing (North Bay) District)
-SU  2,885     21,255  13.6 (Sudbury District (rural area around Greater Sudbury)
-TI  1,805     32,795   5.5 (Temiskaming District (rural area between Sudbury and Quebec, north of North Bay))

NT  20,635     41,055  50.3
NU  24,915     29,325  85.0
YK   7,580     30,195  25.1

LB  10,560     36,920  28.6 (Labrador-Grenfell Health Region, which includes part of Newfoundland Island)
NQ  23,530     39,550  59.5 (Nord-du-Quebec, aka Ungava)

Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Regina are all around 10% to 15% aboriginal. Thunder Bay had the smallest percentage, but the fastest increase over the previous census. Edmonton was around 7%, but had the largest population nominally. Those stats were for CMAs which in Thunder Bay's case includes a reserve; not sure about the others.

Originally Posted by drew

Either way, the crux of this argument is not specifically an aboriginal issue, it's a poverty issue. It just happens that the majority of impoverished people in cities like Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon, and Regina are aboriginal.

It is an aboriginal issue in that a lot of aboriginals live in poverty "because" they are aboriginal. This is caused by the following, in no specific order:

Discrimination against Aboriginals by employers, under the assumption that "they're all lazy". Aboriginals are unreliable more often than non-aboriginals, but that is often caused by other issues (substance abuse or depression, most often).

Fear/lack of self esteem: Many aboriginal people are subjected to racism from a very young age, and this instills in them the belief that they can't succeed, and they often give up. This is another big challenge and you can ask any teacher in a largely aboriginal school about the difficulties of teaching these kids that they're not failures and they they do have a chance.

Mental health issues (such as depression, PTSD, FASD) caused by a variety of factors such as substance abuse, troubled home life or experience in the residential school system or the inability to find and hold down a job

Substance abuse, related to the above. Many aboriginals that use substances are using them to "escape" the problems they face. Older generations turned to substances to deal with the trauma of being in residential schools, and when they had kids they were not able to properly raise them. The kids ended up like their parents, and if they had kids, passed the behaviour down. This aspect of the most difficult part of the aboriginal poverty issue--getting those kids out of the substance abuse/poverty cycle. In some communities, such as Eabametoong, levels of substance abuse are over 50%. The drug of choice is pain killers and most of them are coming from Southern Ontario. This is a national problem, and it deserves national attention.



There is a lot of residual racism in society (our mayor was threatened with violence recently by a man from Edmonton because he pledged to work with Aboriginal leadership; he also received a very despicable letter from a local citizen--you can read more here.), and a lot of people, mostly whites, think that is isn't a problem and they should just "grin and bear it" or whatever, but those little remarks over a long period of time add up and do a lot of damage to a person's opinion of themselves. Being gay I'm better able to understand how that kind of thing works. Little comments like "faggot" or "gays are disgusting" can be shrugged off no problem, but when you're subject to this kind of thing for your entire life from most of the people you meet, it seriously impacts your self-esteem, and that limits what you can achieve.

While this might not be a problem in cities like Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto or Calgary, this low-key casual racism is still a very serious issue in the Edmonton-to-Thunder Bay region, and it is a significant contributor (but not the sole cause) of a lot of problems aboriginals face and a reason why it is so difficult to help them. We're constantly facing road blocks, as shown by the threats to Thunder Bay's mayor in the past couple weeks. Even within the comments to that story, there is a lot of "well, they should just deal with it" or "we shouldn't have let them in the city", and those are just not acceptable remarks on the situation the we, aboriginals and non-aboriginals (aka, "Canadians"), face. There are a lot of small problems and a lot of solutions to them but we aren't moving very fast at implementing any of the solutions, and the longer we wait, the worse the problem will be.

I'm going to make a chart to show aboriginal population percentages since it is something I've wanted to see for a while but haven't found yet, I'll post it later.