How have Neoliberal ideas shaped the lives of the Indigenous People of Canada?

Bare with me, this may be a longer one.

If I could sum up how the Native people of this country (and around the world) have been treated in just two words, those two words would be “Shit on”. I can’t think of a population who has been more discriminated against (other than women in a select few middle-eastern countries) in the past few hundred years. How it must feel to be born into a world where you have extremely limited social opportunity, are highly likely to fall into the grips of addiction and less likely to receive an education, I can’t even imagine. Especially knowing that your ancestors were here way before the ancestors of the people that are taking your voice away.

Indigenous homelessness is a particularly nasty one because colonialism has such a huge role. In other words, White People. My people.

Historically, White People had a tendency to dislike you if you’re not like them. So what did they do? According to Julia Christensen (2012), right after WWII the federal government planned to centralize nomadic peoples in the Territories into settlements as a means for assimilation and introduction to wage labour. For years, the government funneled resources and funding into these settlements, encouraging people to settle there.

And they did; many people moved to these areas because of the health and housing services offered by these federally funded sectors. This was both good and bad – on one hand, Natives enjoyed these services with little no to payment, and on the other hand, these people became increasingly reliant on the federal government.

And as Moses and Young (2013) point out, most to all of these federally funded programs were removed in the mid 1980’s, leaving thousands of people without the social services needed to live in a place like the North-West Territories. This is what I like to call a dick move, and a move that is directly associated with Neoliberal ideas.

This post just brushes the foam off the top of a problem that is many fathoms deep, and if I were to write solely about how Natives have been left out of the equation, I’d be writing for quite some time, so I’m going to stop here and let this resonate.

Until next time!

References

Christensen, Julia. "“They Want a Different Life”: Rural Northern Settlement Dynamics and Pathways to Homelessness in Yellowknife and Inuvik, Northwest Territories." The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien (2012): 419-38. Print.

Young, Michael G., and Joshua M. Moses. "Neoliberalism and Homelessness in the Western Canadian Arctic." Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research 4.2 (2013): 7. Web.