Too Weak to Win, Too Strong to Lose: Indians and Indian Policy in Canada

Abstract

The Canadian government's policies pertaining to native peoples have consistently failed to satisfy either the government's goals or the native people's needs. Indians, Inuit and Metis remain Canada's most impoverished, uneducated and unhealthy minorities, while the government remains unable to achieve any significant economic or political integration of the minorities into Euro-Canadian society. Underlying the persistence of this state of affairs seem to be two factors that have usually been overlooked or underemphasized: the continued existence, despite efforts to eradicate it, of a vibrant, though by no means unaltered, cultural identity for a substantial proportion of Canada's native people ; and the existence of a vested interest on the part of native peoples and their leaders in maintaining existing structures and styles of policy making. Economic and social circumstances are themselves a cause of the political weakness of the native peoples. Native people make less money, are unemployed or underemployed more often, and receive welfare more often than non-natives. Native people are much more likely than others to have no formal schooling at all, and those who do go to school finish fewer years than others do. The houses in which native people live are more often than not substandard in construction, overcrowded and lacking in amenities. Native people die at an earlier age, frequently from diseases which cause few fatalities among the general population. They suffer a higher rate of alcoholism and related health problems. They are arrested more often, and for less serious offences, than are other people; they are convicted more often than others facing similar charges; and they are sentenced to jail more often than others convicted of similar offences. Social and economic ills are coupled to direct impediments to effective political organization. The most obvious impediment is the small size (some 4.5 percent of the Canadian total) and scattered distribution of