In the case of Toronto presumably water is a municipal responsibility… Reserves are a federal responsibility though so you’d think they would be responsible here. The government has actually been putting in a ton of money on this issue and as the article says the number of boil water advisories is down by like 2/3 since the Liberals came to power. So also kinda weird argument by the justice department here.

I honestly wonder why the federal government is pursuing this. Getting First Nations communities on water has been an ongoing project of theirs. Either the left hand isn’t talking to the right or this is “I’ll do it but not because I have to”.

I wish I could upvote more since this is exactly what I was going to say. This is infuriating.

You know it’s not that easy right. We build plants then the tribes don’t maintain them and they break down. In those situations what is the government supposed to do? Then there is money they has been paid for this but it just disappeared.

Treaties.

Treaties for the first thing, and also just an abstract moral idea that we don’t leave people behind.

For the second thing, self-perpetuating poverty and trauma.

I mean, it’s an adversarial system. They’ll be the first to tell you they don’t agree with their clients, they just represent them as part of a process that’s ultimately supposed to shake out to good outcomes.

I am truly sorry for what our governments have done to your people and their half-assed reparations. This shit needs to change.

No one can just “take over” resource extraction. It is a massively capital-intensive business and most First Nations don’t have that kind of capital. Instead, First Nations communities are essentially rent-seeking from companies, which is not a bad idea as a way to fund impoverished communities, but it makes the business endeavour less profitable and, therefore, less likely to happen at all.

As for your other hand, begging for hand-outs to make indigenous communities functional is just going to keep you at subsistence poverty levels forever. Being “taken care of” is what we do for children. You’ll never get ahead that way in the modern world. You can call it “treaty rights” or welfare, but it amounts to the same thing, practically speaking. It is infantalizing. Maybe in the 1800s, in the face of the total collapse of indigenous societies, all your ancestors wanted was a reliable source of food and medicine, but I’m sure that isn’t the limit of your ambition in the modern world. Fighting over old treaties of pointless. Colonization happened. Native peoples all over the globe were defeated by more powerful nations, either militarily or through deception or one-sided treaties. It’s sad, but it is done. Every square inch of habitable land on Earth is claimed, and virtually the whole globe is converging on a semi-common culture because of mass media and the internet. So, there is no going back. And indigenous people don’t want to go back to hunting and fishing and subsistence farming for survival anyway.

Given this reality, how can indigenous people in Canada escape the poverty trap?

Well, first it must be said that many indigenous groups have done a good job with education. Even in just the last 25 years, I have noticed a huge difference in how sophisticated the leading edge of indigenous advocacy and governance have become. It is very, very impressive. That’s just the first step, though. Indigenous people, as a whole, still experience more poverty and hopelessness than other racial groups.

Step 2, in my opinion, is to abandon the remote reserves. It doesn’t matter whether you are white or brown or purple, it is hard to have a thriving modern community in the middle of the muskeg with no road access. It just isn’t viable. That land is effectively worthless for First Nations that don’t have the capital and expertise to run a modern remote resource extraction industry. Not only that, but reserve land isn’t privately owned so you can’t use it as collateral. And what are your treaty rights worth in real terms? Not much, right? So, make a deal to sell off those remote reserves and treaty rights to the federal government in exchange for something that will give people on those reserves a good start in a more populated area. Whatever you do, though, don’t accept individual cash payments. That’s like winning the lottery and most people will just blow it.

Okay, so what about all of the indigenous people not on remote reserves? Well, some reserves close to populated areas are doing fine, if they’ve invested in viable businesses. For the urban indigenous that are poor, they share in the wider problem of poverty for all races. This is not easily solved for lots of reasons: racism, mental illness and addiction caused by intergenerational trauma, etc. So, unfortunately, it has to be solved one person and one family at a time. I definitely don’t have all the answers for that.

Self-governance can help, and you are wrong to say that you “aren’t allowed to govern” yourselves. There is plenty of indigenous self-government in Canada, from individual reserve governance to larger tribal councils collectively taking on health and welfare programming, policing and education. These are the parts of government that make an actual difference in people’s day to day lives and their chances of success. But, ultimately, indigenous people still have to (and probably want to) live in the wider Canadian society, so these systems of self-governance have to interleaf and interact with other Canadian institutions so there is some semblance of continuity between reserve and non-reserve life. It is happening, but it takes time to build institutions.

I went to indigenous cultural safety training a couple of years ago and the trainer said something that stuck with me. She said that broader Canadian society actually shouldn’t try to “fix” the problems of indigenous people. She said it will take a couple of generations for indigenous people themselves to re-construct an identity for themselves in the modern world, but that work is well underway. Some of that work will draw on romanticized ideas of the past, but most of it will be new. She said that Canada should be passively supportive and give indigenous people space to heal and to recreate themselves. At the end of the day, indigenous success will look a lot like every other kind of success.

There is no doubt that indigenous people in Canada and around the world were fucked over, and they continue to live with the resulting disadvantages. But you are exactly right when you say that non-indigenous people don’t really care. Sure, people will wear an orange shirt from time to time and perhaps even shed a tear for MMIW, and they’ll support things like free education and welfare, but no one is going to hand over their personal income or their own home to solve indigenous poverty, or any other kind of poverty. This lack of care is only going to worsen because new citizens are coming from non-European countries that feel zero sense of responsibility for centuries-old European colonization. Heck, many of the ancestors of these new Canadians were also victims of European colonization and worked their asses off to save money to move here, so they are not likely to support special rights or hand-outs for Canadian indigenous people. So, I say that indigenous people should take advantage of the current climate of white guilt to get a free education and whatever else they can toward long-term individual success while they still can. Is that harsh? Maybe, yes, but the world isn’t exactly fair. You’ve got to figure out how to be successful. Lots of people, including many, many indigenous people are doing it.