With some marginal exceptions, contemporary aboriginal people in Canada are now integrated into our industrial society. They are literate and educated, own property work for wages and salaries, supply their needs through transactions in the market rather than self-provision, and deal with state agencies in a multitude of ways. Because of this integration, aboriginal communities will not be able to revive their ancient systems of informal governance. Their own cultures, now closely integrated with the general Canadian culture, require formal government. Members of aboriginal communities have to protect their own property rights and guarantee the market transactions in which they are constantly engaged. The present reality on Indian reserves is that elected chiefs and councils collectively exercise the kind of formal authority that was once exercised by Indian Agents. That will not change, no matter how the titles are revised. For aboriginals as well as for everyone else, this does not mean that aboriginal self-government is unworkable or harmful; it means that it will be like other forms of government, and will not fulfil expectations about the withering away of it. But there are further questions about how well aboriginal self-government can work in …show more content…
The development of aboriginal self-government in Canada has resulted in a disproportionate amount of political corruption in native communities. These problems have led to a number of federal government initiatives over the last five years to address the lack of transparency and accountability in aboriginal self-government regimes. Bolt seems compelled by his sense of reasonability to define almost entirely in his own terms what he claims will be best for Indians, because he appears to doubt Aboriginal peoples capacity to know what is in their best