In the next 20 years the aboriginal population categorized by First Nations, Metis, and Inuit is projected to increase dramatically as more people begin to report themselves as being aboriginal.
According to data from the 2006 Census and 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) over the course of five years the aboriginal population as a whole increased by 20 per cent. While high fertility among aboriginal women is one factor in the population increase, the largest factor driving the growth has to do with an increased number of people identifying themselves as aboriginal.
Aboriginal identity has been a point of confusion at the legal, political, and personal level. Legislative changes to the Indian Act and most recently the Supreme Court recognition of Metis peoples in April, have sought to legally define aboriginal peoples. For the Metis population, recognition of their identity has been especially difficult in the face of discrimination.
“Metis identity is a very confusing thing to a lot of people, mainly because there’s two major aspects of our identity; not only do you have to be of mixed ancestry: European and aboriginal, but you also have to have that connection to a historical Metis settlement,” said Kelly Douquette, a Metis law student at the University of Ottawa.
Douquette thinks more people will identify themselves as Metis after the Supreme Court decision.
“Now that our rights are recognized and we are legitimized by the government, a lot of people don’t feel as afraid to come forward, and really be proud of who they are.”
“Self-reported identification is more important for the Metis population and the non-status Indian population, because even within the aboriginal population you have differences of main factors of growth,” Stephanie Langlois, senior analyst for Statistics Canada demography division, said.
“Someone in the past might not have identified themselves as an aboriginal person and five years later they self-identify with an aboriginal group.”
Annie Turner, a statistician with Statistics Canada, said the drastic increase can be attributed to a number of factors.
“We know that fertility rate is higher for aboriginal people compared to non-aboriginal people but there are many factors that we need to take into account when comparing the aboriginal population between 2006 to 2011, so there could be slight differences in the wording of the questions, differences in methodology between the 2006 Census and NHS, some legislative changes for example Bill C-31 in 1985 or Bill C-3 in 2011, which could affect these concepts of aboriginal identity or registered Indian status, as well as the definition of reserves.”
The 2036 projections estimate that the aboriginal populations could rise even higher if certain growth characteristics such as fertility and ethnic mobility continue their trends. In the western provinces such as Saskatchewan and Manitoba, aboriginal populations could make up one in five people in this provinces by 2036.
Meanwhile in the territories like the Yukon, Nunavut, and the North West Territories, Inuit hold the highest share of the total population although of a much smaller total population.
Compared to the non-aboriginal population, the aboriginal population is growing at a much faster rate. The non-aboriginal population is increasing less than one per cent a year, mainly due to immigration, while the aboriginal population is averaging 1.1 to 2.2 per cent.
Denise One Breath Mitchell has worked with several families of victims. She doesn’t believe the missing persons database is reliable in the first place.
Last week, government released the inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). It focuses on the number of MMIW, perpetrator characteristics, outstanding cases and victim circumstances. However, Denise One Breath Mitchell doesn’t believe the missing persons database is reliable in the first place.
Mitchell is the Victim Support Navigator at the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre and has worked with several families of victims, including the family of Tanya Brooks, an aboriginal woman who was murdered in 2009. She believes there are more missing women than the 1,181 reported by the RCMP and says the attitude of police when missing aboriginal persons are reported is a factor.
“They [police] have an attitude or an opinion, especially if they’re working the sex
A dream catcher made in the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre by members of the Aboriginal community. Each feather represents a missing and/or murdered Aboriginal woman. Mitchell says more feathers shall be added in the near future.
trade, or they say ‘they’ll come back’,” said Mitchell. “We need to look at how the police investigate these cases and if the police took them seriously.”
Dawn Lavell-Harvard, President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), has also worked with families of victims. She says another problem is there are inconsistencies on whom to report a missing person to.
“The police forces will turn them [families] back and say ‘no, you go to your own police force and report it to them’ or our local police force would say ‘well she got missing in Toronto, you need to report it to Toronto’,” said Lavell-Harvard. “There is no standard of practice, there’s no protocol.”
The missing persons database is a national public website called Canadasmissing.ca. It contains information about missing aboriginal and non-aboriginal individuals as well as unidentified remains. According to the site, cases only appear on the website when the investigator or medical examiner of that case concludes that a profile of the missing person will assist the investigation.
The cases are broken up by province, age, sex and probable cause with categories marking the circumstances of a disappearance; like ‘abduction by stranger’, ‘wandered off’, ‘runaway’ or ‘presumed dead’, to name a few. However, over 300 were not included in the 2015 report as there was ‘no probable cause entered’.
When asked for clarification, the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) responded via email:
“As for the ones with no, or an invalid, probable cause, they cannot be counted in the existing categories, therefore they were not included… Only the original investigating police service for each of the specific incidents may have that information, and even that is unlikely this long after the fact. It may be that they would fit into one of the categories; we simply don’t have the information.”
Lavell-Harvard is working with the RCMP to improve how reports are taken and investigations are conducted. She’s satisfied with the RCMP’s new policy of taking immediate action when a person is reported missing but says other police forces need to follow suit.
“There’s over 300 other police forces out there across the country so even though the RCMP has this protocol, that doesn’t necessarily translate into effective action, we need that protocol with all the police forces,” said Lavell-Harvard.
According to the Missing Persons Act, any information received by police is considered confidential and cannot be released, even to a spouse or family member, unless the information may assist in the investigation.
Mitchell says keeping families in the dark does more harm than good.
“The family is left carrying these unanswered questions about what happened to their loved one,” she said. “Keeping that rapport and communication open is letting families know that something is being done, that their loved ones matter to them, and that they’re taking this seriously.”
Lavell-Harvard calls for police forces to come together and do their part in the MMIW cases.
“We need to stop allowing indigenous women and children to slip through the crack because of jurisdictional boundaries,” she said. “People need to start putting the whole politics and jurisdiction aside, and recognise that these are human beings.”
It was hailed as Canada’s last chance to make amends. But 25 years on, it seems most aboriginals agree the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples failed to restore Canada’s relationship with indigenous peoples.
“It was virtually ignored and laid to gather dust,” says former commissioner Paul Chartrand, who represented Métis people.
Chartrand remembers aboriginal organizations rallying behind the commission’s recommendations. But faced with government inaction, fervour soon gave way to disappointment. “The shouts turned to murmurs, and the murmurs died away.”
Established in 1991, the commission was born of growing clashes between aboriginals and non-aboriginals. These tensions had reached a flashpoint in the 1990 Oka Crisis: the 78-day standoff that pitted Canadian soldiers against Mohawks from the Quebec community of Kanesatake over a land dispute.
Then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave the commission an ambitious mandate — to redress “literally centuries of injustice.” By the time the commission released its report in 1996, its costs had ballooned to $58 million, making it the most expensive royal commission in Canadian history.
The commissioners roundly condemned Canada’s long-standing assimilationist policies. Their report contained 440 recommendations, setting out a twenty-year plan to address indigenous issues: from self-governance to resources, economic development to social and cultural affairs.
But when asked about the commission’s legacy, Chartrand offers a bleak assessment: “None of the significant foundational recommendations were ever accepted.”
Unfortunately, to many aboriginal observers, that’s where the government’s efforts ended.
“That was the one public statement that I think captured the Canadian imagination for at least a news day,” says Cindy Blackstock, who heads the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. “Then it faded into the white noise of Canadian society.”
Ten years later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper again apologized for Canada’s residential schools — but not before scrapping the Kelowna Accord in 2006. Endorsed a year earlier by Paul Martin’s Liberal government, the agreement would have provided $5 billion towards Aboriginal education, employment, housing and health. The Conservatives committed $450 million.
And aboriginal leaders struggle to spur Ottawa into action. “I never anticipated how difficult it would be to get the federal government to respond to basic equity issues for children,” says Blackstock. Blackstock recently won a nine-year-long legal battle against the federal government before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which found Ottawa provides far less child welfare funding to on-reserve children than provinces do off-reserve.
But Hayden King, director of Ryerson University’s Centre for Indigenous Governance, remains optimistic. He says the commission’s work offers a path forward, pointing to the Idle No More protest movement.
A young girl holds a placard at an Idle No More protest in London, Ont. on March 21, 2013. (Creative Commons licence provided courtesy of Flickr user The Indignants)
“Canadians were just losing their minds. ‘What do the Indians want?’” King says the commission’s report “was a helpful device for people to put forward and say, ‘If you’re curious, give this a read. Take a look at this. Understand your own history to better understand what we’re asking for.’”
Now that the Liberal government has committed to carrying out all 94 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations, aboriginals can only hope history won’t again repeat itself.
b) I found this discussion paper through a Google search early in my research process. Considering the breadth of the commission’s actual report (i.e. close to 4,000 pages), I was looking for an effective summary of the commission’s work and recommendations, as well as developments since the release of its report.
c) This discussion paper was an extremely valuable reference throughout my research and writing process. It provided a useful overview of the commission’s work and recommendations, quickly bringing me up to speed in advance of my interviews. It was also a useful resource while conducting those interviews; having marked up a paper copy, I was able to flip back and forth between relevant sections while discussing various aspects of the commission’s work with my sources.
b) I found this press clipping through ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers database, available through Ryerson University. More specifically, I searched for articles published near the date of the release of the commission’s final report.
c) This article was helpful in gaining a sense of the initial reaction from both aboriginal leadership and the federal government immediately following the release of the commission’s report. Besides providing insight into the reasons behind the government’s slow response, this information helped inform my line of questioning for all four of my interviews.
It has been 25 years since the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was introduced in Canada, but despite years of consultations and research, the federal government has yet to accomplish most of the recommendations outlined in the report.
Established in 1991, the Royal Commission was created to help repair broken relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous communities.
To create the report, the federal government completed hundreds of studies and gathered testimony from over 2000 individuals to see how indigenous communities were hindered by Canada’s social, political and economic climates. The Commission’s results were revealed in 1996 through a report which made over 440 recommendations to be implemented over a 20-year period.
A portion of Volume 5 of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples annotated in DocumentCloud:
(Click inside the annotation to see the entire document and other annotations)
The main conclusion of the report was that Canada needed to overhaul its relationship with indigenous people in order to show respect for their history, culture and right to self-determination.
“In the final report, it made sense to recommend that the government establish a nation-to-nation relationship,” said Paul Chartrand, one of the commissioners for the Royal Commission.
The “nation-to-nation” relationship would allow indigenous communities to govern under their traditional structures and work alongside the Canadian government to improve access to things like education, infrastructure and healthcare.
The nation-to-nation concept had not been employed by previous governments in power , but in December 2015, Justin Trudeau announced that they would be forming this relationship with indigenous communities.
“The Trudeau government from early on has identified Aboriginal issues as a priority,” said Linc Kesler, an associate professor at the University of British Colombia that specializes in indigenous studies.
“They also have at least begun discussions about the inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women, so I think a lot of people were happy to see that.”
The government’s announcement was promising for some, but Chartrand remains skeptical of the Liberal government in terms of what its specific plans are.
“At the moment, it’s pure rhetoric. We now have a government that says it will have a nation-to-nation relationship. Well you should be looking at Royal Commission for inspiration on what that might mean. But nobody’s mentioning it,” said Chartrand.
“The government can do anything in the first year, and by the third year, no one remembers. Public amnesia is a constant feature of our country.”
Looking back at the actions of previous governments, Kesler agrees that political leaders continue to make the same promises, but fail to provide indigenous communities with tangible results.
“What people have shared with me is that they have not seen movement on the recommendations in the Royal Commission,” said Kesler.
“If you were to look at the recommendations that the [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] included in the final report, you would see many of the same items identified as in the Royal Commission.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the latest government initiative which attempts to repair damage caused to indigenous communities, but according to Chartrand, it is not entirely comprehensive.
“The merits of the Truth and Reconciliation report stand on its own, but you cannot replace the foundation that was set by the Royal Commission’s broader mandate,” said Chartrand.
If the government’s past actions are an indication of future behaviour, Kesler believes it’s appropriate for indigenous people to be “cautiously optimistic” about Trudeau’s enthusiasm for indigenous issues.
“I think people have not seen the kind of actions on the whole that they had really been hoping would be the result of Royal Commission,” said Kesler.
“That’s not however, to say that there hasn’t been change, but it’s not the kind of change that the Royal Commission called for.”
Volume 5 of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples is the main document which I reflect on in my story. I found Volume 5 of the commission to be particularly relevant to the ideas discussed in my article because it outlines the main objectives of the report which were supposed to be implemented over a twenty year period. I found a PDF version of the document through Queen’s University online library catalogue and converted the sections of the report using DocumentCloud.
Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report
Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is one of the most recent initiatives completed by the federal government which deals with indigenous relations, I thought it was important to include this document in my research as a tool for comparison. Both of my interview subjects made comparisons between the Royal Commission and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission so I included a hyperlink to this document so that readers could compare the two documents side-by-side if they wished. Looking at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report provided evidence for my argument that the newer report essentially repeats made of the recommendations made previously in the Royal Commission. This helped to illustrate the point that these commissions are heavy on rhetoric, but light on concrete results. I found a PDF version of a summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by visiting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s website.
