If you actually think they have it good, keep in mind that a disproportionate number of them live under the poverty line and in third-world conditions, on reserves with despicable infrastructure. Often, these reserves are chemically toxic, causing severe health problems and birth defects.
For those of you that believe that they should leave their communities and integrate into the Canadian majority "for their own good", consider that they suffered a ruthless attack on their culture, identity, and human dignity throughout the 20th century at the hands of major religious institutions such as the United Church of Canada and the Roman Catholic Church. This was all done under the premise of "civilizing" and "christianizing" a culture that these bloodthirsty colonizers scarcely understood. Also consider that the Canadian government & its citizens were totally complicit in all these activities.
In church-run Residential Schools, indigenous children were physically tortured for expressing their culture, speaking their traditional language, and even in showing emotions such as love, happiness, and brotherhood. Students infected with smallpox were deliberately forced to play with healthy students so as to spread infection and kill off as many aboriginal youth as possible. RCMP motorboats went to aboriginal communities and forced parents to sign off custody of their children to the government, in effect allowing them to do whatever they wanted to these innocent children. Why should Canada's aboriginal peoples' have to bow to a society that tried to destroy them?
A colonizing majority must take full responsibility for the crimes of its past and assume the financial burden for infrastructure development on First Nations' reserves. It is the only righteous thing for a settler majority to do.
Associated Links:
"Unrepentant: Kevin Annett & Canada's Genocide" (Documentary)
Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement
Assembly of First Nations
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami: Canada's National Inuit Organization
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