Atlanta is sort of known as a city with a sizable black middle class, and a city where blacks have historically held more political power and had deeper ties to the business community than most other American cities in the north or south. This
Wikipedia article actually is a pretty good primer on why that might be the case. Now, that's not to say that black Atlantans are better off than white Atlantans or that black Atlantans don't face a disproportionate amount of social problems. Far from it. But if I were black and looking for a metro to raise my family, Atlanta would probably be high up on the list. Even as a non-black person I felt this when I went on a business trip there once.
This led me to wonder whether a Canadian city could emerge as a First Nations mecca with a healthy, decent-sized Aboriginal middle class and institutions. Granted, there are fewer FN as a percent of the Canadian population than blacks in the US. Also, black Americans across the US have more common cultural and ancestral ties than FN groups, all of whom are very different from one another historically. Finally, black culture and a black "sense of self" has always been more on most Americans' (of all races) consciousness, while First Nations culture - for various reasons, including the sad fact that it was mostly exterminated up until very recently - has only begun to reemerge.
I was thinking that any number of cities - Vancouver, Winnipeg, one of the Alberta cities, and even Ottawa or Toronto - could be the one, but we're not there yet, and each city has its pros and cons to forming a healthy Aboriginal middle class.
But I'd be interested to know the thoughts of people who may know a little more about this subject than I do, or who live in places with a large FN population (like the prairies).