What Are Aboriginals In Canada

In Canada, the term Aboriginal refers to First Nations, Metis and Inuit people who were the first to inhabit Canada. The aboriginal community represents 4% percent of the population in Canada with 1.4 million people having an Aboriginal heritage in 2011. (Statistics Canada, 2015). As aboriginals were the first people to inhabit Canada comes a long history full of injustices including a major injustice know as residential schools. Aboriginal people face multiple barriers in modern Canada such as unemployment, education, drug or substance abuse as well as higher crime statistics across Canada. The Aboriginal population faces issues such as racism, prejudice and segregation from the rest of the community on a day to day basis. The experiences
The school system forced every single Aboriginal child to attend which involved taking them away with force from their homes and families to the residential school where they also lived on site. The children were not allowed to speak of their Aboriginal culture or language and were punished if they broke any of the numerous strict rules that were enforced. The children were sexually, mentally, spiritually and physically abused at the hands of the residential schools. Former residential school survivors recall being beaten, strapped and even electrocuted; some were shackled to their beds, while others had needles shoved in their tongues as punishment for speaking their native language. (Haig-Brown, 1998.) Upon arriving at the school, all the children’s hair was cut short, made to wear uniforms and the boys and girls were separated including siblings which further severed family bonds. (Hanson, 2014). The education the students received was very poor as most only taught up to grade five and the education focused on learning manual labor jobs instead of reading, writing or math. Boys were taught carpentry and farming and girls were taught domestic skills such as cooking, sewing and laundry and were forced to use these skills to work for the residential school. The students had to have a childhood without the nurturing support of family or the knowledge of how a
The Aboriginal Multi-Media Society reports that 90% of young children do not have access to adequate early childhood education such as preschool or kindergarten and the national Aboriginal student dropout rate is at 51%. (Laboucane, 2010). Students with parents who did not receive proper education are not able to be supported at home to learn the subjects which can often lead to students dropping out as education is not an asset that is deemed valuable. Educational institutes on reserves are underfunded so they cannot provide the same level of education that provincial schools receiving funding from the federal government can. Schools situated on reserves receive half the funding that provincial schools do and in the past 10 years funding increased 19% for on-reserve schools while provincial schools received a 45% increase. (Laboucane, 2010). Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada reports that in 2006-2007, the budget for aboriginal students in elementary and high school was 1.2 billion dollars which included 120,000 students, 518 school and 45 secondary schools however that is two thousand dollars less per student than provincial schools. (Laboucane, 2010). The government of Canada has released its budget for 2016 which states that over the next 5 years, $2.6 billion dollars are being invested into Aboriginal education