Aboriginal Poverty in Urban Areas of Canada

     In urban areas across Canada, Aboriginal poverty has been a long-standing issue. While fairly recent standard poverty rates for non-Aboriginal families are in themselves shameful, placing at 28.4% in Winnipeg (a city with a particularly high Aboriginal population), they pale in comparison to the 64.7% among Aboriginals (Loxley,2003). There are many who would suggest that Aboriginals are entirely to blame—that by and large, the race as a whole lacks the ability to function socially or economically in our western capitalist world. Such views, however, ignore the longstanding history of suppression and conflict, as well as present day barriers faced by native peoples to prospering in urban areas. Furthermore, this discriminatory view ignores that Aboriginal poverty affects everyone, and that everyone stands to gain from its elimination.

     An important question to ask is, “just how disadvantaged are Aboriginal people?” There are a number of comparisons to be made. Census data from 1996 shows that Aboriginal people are more than twice as likely to live in poverty (Anderson, 2003) Further research from Anderson shows that forty-six percent of Aboriginal children live with a single parent compared to seventeen percent of non-Aboriginal children. In 2001, Aboriginal youths between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four were twice as likely to be unemployed, and in 1996, seventy-five percent of Aboriginal youth made less than ten-thousand dollars a year. In 2001, only eight percent of Aboriginal people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four had a completed university degree compared to twenty-eight percent of non-Aboriginals in the same age group. In virtually every indicator of success, there is a notable discrepancy.

     The troubling gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people is deeply routed in their history: cycles of abuse and discriminatory barriers. The struggles of Aboriginal peoples against assimilation and prejudice goes back for centuries, such that no single paper, nor even single book, could truly encapsulate it all. For the purposes of providing a narrow focus, and keeping to more recent times, nothing prior to the establishment of residential schools will be touched upon.

     The Canadian residential school system, which began in the nineteenth century and ran well into the twentieth, involved churches working with Indian Affairs, which received its funding from the federal government. Many would ask how residential schools, something which may to them seem to have been so long ago, could still negatively effect anyone in the present day, especially to the point of interfering with social functioning.