4) On racial politics, the Indigenous population probably gets the worst racist rhetoric than any other group in the country which, when you consider that we colonized their country, would be silly if it weren't so devastating for them. In certain regions of the country, Indigenous people:
- are racially profiled like African-Americans by police
- have systemic drug problems in their communities that aren't being addressed
- tend to be the closest to the poverty line
- are thought to be "lazy sponges of the welfare system that we enable thanks to the stupid treaties we signed", despite the fact that the treaties aren't even honoured correctly
- are "whiners" because they talk about how our government used to put them in residential schools to force them to be more like white people, forcing them away from their parents and family in the hopes that they would abandon their own culture, all while their parents are told that it was best for them
- have deep divisions even within their own cultures and tribes (eg. the Inuit are ostracized by certain other Indigenous groups, several others having a grudge against the Cree nation for making the rest of them look bad, etc.)
- have reservation lands that white people tell them to "go back to", which are the textbook definition of squalor due to things like terrible access to clean drinking water, low access to gainful employment and...
- live in a country where the government and populous historically would rather pretend they don't exist and therefore don't do anything to actually solve their problems, which further perpetuates the racist views of others.
Coming from Australia, I'm sure there's some parallels you can draw there, from what I understand of the Indigenous population's treatment down there. It's not the same, but I think you'll find that it's an ugly look all the same..
_/ÂŻ