An impossible issue
The biggest problem the Aboriginal people have is contained within the numerous treaties that regulate our common relationship.
As treaties provide many rights to the Aboriginal people, they are also roadblocks in their development.
The Indian Act also provides the right to live off the land, but also prevents, to a certain extent, the industrial exploitation of those territories which keeps the Aboriginal surviving but never thriving... They will remain forever in some sort of imposed poverty.
Then there is the entire idea that the "land belongs to Aboriginal people" and its consequence that many still see non-Aboriginal Canadians as invaders... We have to put that notion to rest if we are ever going to have a productive relationship.
The problem with treaties
Many Aboriginals, convinced (maybe rightfully) that the treaties give them large land claims, will never even consider scrapping those treaties, even if, in reality, it means condemning their people to eternal poverty.
The idea that non-Aboriginal people should pay some sort of "rent" to live and use the "aboriginal land" that is Canada becomes more and more laughable with the rise of the globalized and entirely integrated world economy.
The Indian Act
There is probably not a more racist piece of legislation in Canada... But, somehow, many Aboriginal people won't agree to scrap it... I guess the "evil you know" is more reassuring than the unknown... Even if the unknown might be better.
Aboriginal Self-government
Self-Government can sound good, but it implies that those who govern themselves also take on many responsibilities... And self-government is more than land ownership, it is institutions, infrastructures and the education and skills to make it work...
And the last part of self-government is to pay for it yourself... You are not independent if you live in your parent's basement while they pay for everything...
Aboriginal people must overcome their status of "Wards of the federal government" and that means policing oneself, governing oneself and financing oneself...
Arriving in the 21st Century
Eventually, we must reach the point where the relationship between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals can shed the old and usher in the new... But that means putting treaties in their historical context and stopping treating them as gospel and scrapping the racist "Indian Act"...
but for the majority of Canadians to agree to this new relationship, the whole idea that they are "invaders" and that the land belongs to Aboriginal people cannot be center place... Otherwise we will reach a stalemate and in 50 more years, Aboriginal people will still live in poverty and dies in misery while clutching those treaties in their hands..
Reality is that non-Aboriginal Canadians are not going to move back to "where they came from" because for the crushing majority, where they came from is Canada. And with the ever increasing number of immigrants coming into this country, the strength of those treaty claims will weaken...
For all the fairy stories we like to tell each other, REALITY comes down with a crushing blow... Reality is an unstoppable force and reality is that our relationship with Aboriginal people HAS TO CHANGE and keep with the times or RISK BECOMING IRRELEVANT.
Holding on to the past treaties, holding on to the Indian Act are detrimental, not to the non-Aboriginal people, they are detrimental to the Aboriginal people themselves.
It is not the non-Aboriginal who are struggling, it is the Aboriginal people themselves... The rest of us are doing just fine...
One day, they will have to come to terms that their treaties are just a mirage, an illusion, that they won't ever be able to claim the land of Canada as their own because there are 35 million people here who also have human rights and enslaving one people, doesn't matter is Aboriginal or not, is a shit idea.