Ah yes, Trudeau and his Indian White papers, changed to ironically the Red Book by our old friend Jean. You know, it's interesting that in 1967, the G&M asked the same questions that are being asked by a few people here (talk about not researching before asking!) They quoted a government official on Oct 21, 1967 as follows:
"As a rule the economic development programs that the Branch supports are the marginal, low-profit enterprises like freshwater fish cooperatives. They’re useful, but it was my experience that whenever anyone proposed that the Indians themselves run some larger enterprise — such as building their own resort community instead of leasing to a developer, or organizing a company to exploit their own oil and gas resources — the idea was dismissed, because of fear that established companies would put on pressures against so-called unfair competition from the Indians, backed by the government.
"Indian band capital funds totaling $30 million are on deposit in Ottawa. Oil and gas alone on Indian reserves is estimated to total $2 billion.
"How is it that such rich people are so poor? Why can’t Crown corporations or commercial corporations be set up, primarily under Indian control but with expert outside help, to exploit these resources? Why can’t the Indians hire their own management talent?"
And again in the 60s, the most comprehensive study on the socio-economic conditions of First Nations found in 1967:
The vast majority of Native Indian people suffer incredible, soul-breaking poverty. The government’s Hawthorn-Tremblay study, published in 1967, found that of a sample survey of over 22,000 families in Indian communities across Canada, 74 percent made less than $2,000 in 1964; 47 percent made less than $1,000 a year. (Remember, those are family incomes.) Over half the Indian population is chronically unemployed: the survey reported that 61 percent of the workers held jobs less than 6 months per year; 23.6 percent for less than two months. The Indian unemployment rate is 10 times the national average.
As a result, more than one-third of the households in the Hawthorn-Tremblay survey depended for their livelihood on meager welfare grants from the Indian Affairs Branch — and this figure doesn’t account for the large number of bands providing their own welfare funds. The federal government allots about 25 percent of its Indian Affairs budget to welfare payments, as against the 10 percent it devotes to "economic development" on the reserves.
Most government services are either non-existent or of scandalously poor quality. Total spending of the Indian Affairs Department averages out to $530 per treaty Indian, a year (1967) ; whereas the federal government spends $740 a year on the average non-Indian Canadian, not to speak of the provincial and municipal government services (e.g. education, health, agriculture, roads, etc.) which our quarter-million treaty Indians do not have access to.
Nine out of 10 Indian homes on reserves have no indoor toilets; barely half have electricity; nearly 60 percent live in houses of three rooms or less.
It is estimated that more than 30 percent of the inmates in Canada’s jails and training schools are Indian, although Indians account for less than three percent of the total population. The number of Indians in federal penitentiaries has increased five-fold since 1950 to more than 2,500.
While the average Canadian can expect to live to the age of 62, the Indians’ life expectancy is only 33 for men, 34 for women. The mortality rate among Indians increased by eight percent between 1965 and 1968 alone. The mortality rate among Indian pre-school children is eight times the national average.
Yet Indians are the fastest growing ethnic group in Canada, with an annual population increase of five percent. Half the Indian population is under the age of 16, close to twice the proportion among non-Indians.
This phenomenal population increase, combined with rapidly declining job opportunities for Indian workers — half of whom are engaged in relatively traditional and marginal economic activities like fishing, trapping, hunting, and agriculture — means a tremendous pressure on the Indians to leave the reserves and head for the cities in search of work.
In Manitoba, for example, about half of the province’s 80,000 Indians and 30,000 Métis are now subsisting in substandard conditions in Winnipeg; 10,000 have migrated to the city during the last 10 years, most of them in the last three years. But in the cities, the employment prospect is scarcely better than on the reserves. Only three percent of Winnipeg’s inhabitants, the Indians and Métis account for 12 percent of its welfare cases.
And let's not forget Trudeau's plan for "Indians" in the 60s as well:
the Indians must assimilate. They must, as Prime Minister Trudeau put it recently, "become Canadians as all other Canadians." His government’s aptly named "white paper", which projects the outright abolition of Indian treaty rights within five years, spells this out in more detail. At the same time, this society every day reveals how unwilling and unable it is to "assimilate" the Indians. Even when destroyed as a people, they are completely rejected as individuals, the unemployed, underpaid victims of racism.
The essence of the white paper is the proposal to remove Indian lands from the protection against alienation now contained in the Indian Act provisions. Not only does this close the door to attempts to encourage economic development of the reserves, it is the prelude to a massive land grab of these six million acres, much of it choice land near the cities, by real estate speculators and industrial consortiums.
From: http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/1961-/Red%20Power/Red_Power_1970.htm
Then we can move right along to the 90s and review the RCAP findings - all 9 volumes of them.
http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/index_e.html
And ZC, if you still require more substantive literature, go read the numerous commissions on FN child welfare, housing, incarceration, criminal justice system, wrongly convicted, residential schools, environmental and health risks.
Then if you still think you have the answers to the problem, fire them away to the PMO, I'm sure he and his INAC Minister would be happy to take them under advisement.
