> All citizens of Canada live immensely higher standards of living than they would otherwise under the Colonial umbrella - including aboriginals. I mean, that

> All citizens of Canada live immensely higher standards of living than they would otherwise under the Colonial umbrella - including aboriginals. I mean, that was a typical argument in favour of slavery. After the apartheid ended in South Africa there was a pretty large movement of former slaves protesting about their lower quality of life and demanding a return to the previous status quo. We don't only consider standard of living when making moral judgements about structures of government. It is the standard paternalistic European attitude. And the last vestige of justification remaining for residential schools so I'm not so quick to just let it slip. It's the analogy to a parent soothingly telling a child in tantrum: "You'll understand why I'm doing this when you're older". As if they should thank us for raising them out of their savagery. I also reject your comparison to immigrants, like Syrians literally running for their lives from a civil war in their country of origin, to aboriginals who were living within their own land of origin and had this life thrust on them unrequested. The circumstances couldn't be any different. Immigrants make a choice of self-determination while aboriginals are being deprived of self-determination. > The political situation on many reserves is more of a hindrance than not and will require reform, which will probably take the shape of falling more under the Canadian legal norms On this we agree and it fits into the complexity of the situation. One area that most Canadians would find hard to stomach is that some traditional tribe hierarchies are patriarchal. It is a difficult balance to allow self-determination while also upholding concepts like universal human rights. We've gone a bit deep here and I admit I'm pretty far out of my depth. In fact, the only real thing I'm confident on is that this issue is too complex to fix with money alone.