Canada Travel Guide

The ownership of land and control over funding have brought opportunities for economic self-sufficiency and expansion previously unavailable to aboriginal groups. This last decade has seen the rapid growth of a free-enterprise economy among Canada's aboriginals, especially in the cities. In 1995 there were an estimated 18,000 aboriginal-owned businesses across Canada. About 66 percent of aboriginal businesses were in the service sector; 13 percent were in construction and related sectors. Another 12 percent were in the primary industries such as mining and forestry, and 9 percent were businesses related to food processing, clothing, furniture, publishing and other manufacturing. One fast-growing area is aboriginal tourism, where an insight is given into culture and environment. However, employment and subsequent social problems (particularly among the growing young population) are still rampant.

Each year the oil-rich aborigines get $32 million in petroleum revenues. This upsurge in revenue would seem to bode well, but migration from the still impoverished reserves to the city (which began three decades ago) is on the increase, resulting in an unskilled and impoverished underclass of aborigines in Canadian cities and a subsequent increase in social fragmentation, greater unrest and increased crime. Most of the aborigine newcomers to the cities are young, and they are increasingly angry with the federal government and their own leaders. With 60 percent of aboriginal populations now city-based, there has also been the formation of young street gangs . Such gangs have made a mark in Winnipeg, which has the nation's biggest aboriginal urban population.

The anger that the street gangs epitomize has risen across native communities. Gang members complain about financial and political corruption by their leaders; young people, who make up more than half of the native population, say they are being ignored by an uncaring federal government and ineffectual elders. As a young native activist said recently, "Most of us have nothing to lose, so we will do what we have to to have our voices heard." Violence is inevitable, and flared up most notoriously with an armed standoff between Mohawk militants and the Canadian military at Oka in 1990 . Five years later there was trouble again at Gustafsne Lake in the British Columbia interior and Ipperwash Provincial Park on the shores of Lake Huron. Meanwhile, the white attitude to militancy has hardened. Tough prison sentences are passed out to native protesters who break the law, yet there is little punishment for police officers who overstep the mark - in 1997, an Ontario Provincial policeman was given two years of community service after he was found guilty of criminal negligence in the fatal shooting of an aborigine demonstrator at Ipperwash Provincial Park.