Relations between First Nations and the Crown have been a thorny issue ever since Europeans first began colonizing this land. The Canadian, British and provincial governments certainly made a lot of mistakes when dealing with the aboriginal peoples — including taking large swaths of land from indigenous peoples and perpetrating human-rights abuses in residential schools. The one redeeming quality of the British policy toward natives, it is widely claimed, was that it chose to deal with them as nations, rather than conquered people.

But the treaties that came out of these negotiations were short-sighted measures designed to appease geographically diverse tribes of hunter-gatherers by promising payments and land, in exchange for non-interference in the Crown’s colonization plans. Later, the Indian Act would formalize the relationship whereby aboriginals receive housing, education and medical care, all while being exempt from many taxes and relegated to living on isolated, Soviet-style collective enclaves, with Big Brother in Ottawa paternalistically watching their every move.

As the Post’s Jonathan Kay has observed, under the terms of the James Bay treaties, “the natives would continue hunting and fishing for sustenance and trade, and receive annual payments from the government … And here we get to the massive problem that has taken shape in communities such as Attawapiskat, which were not originally intended to become static settlements that survive entirely as government-funded welfare states (with the pathologies that attend all government-funded welfare states, including unemployment, anomie and substance abuse).”
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/14/jesse-kline-3/
In an ironic twist of fate, the very policies that are supposed to give aboriginals a leg up are responsible for the poor living conditions we see on many reserves: Depressed economies and poor infrastructure are exactly what we should expect when we deny people basic private-property rights (since reserve residents cannot own their own land) and force them into a life of economic dependency.
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