The politics of assimilation with regards to the First Nations peoples of Canada has been a complete an abject failure. Various levels of government spent 100+ years in an attempt to force assimilation through residential schools and whatnot and they all failed. Given that, expecting an entire group of marginalized people to assimilate based on the will of the majority or the government is a pipe dream. First Nations people and culture exist and they'll continue to exist. Any solution that doesn't accept that reality is doomed to fail.
As an immigrant society where most peoples' experience has been the exact opposite of that (most people who came to this country assimilated within a generation) it can sometimes be a tough concept to grasp but it's true. Further, we must recognize that there's a fundamental difference between a group of people who willingly left their places of birth to move to Canada to start a new life and a group of people who lived here in self governing societies prior to the Canadian state being thrust upon them. This distinction is a fundamental aspect of the Canadian constitution with regards to French-English rights and relations, and Aboriginal rights must be recognized in the same way. Canada has always allowed for group differentiated rights and that fact is going to continue regardless.
Given that, the solution to this issue isn't really clear, but the only real way to move forward is on the premise of First Nations people having some form of autonomy over areas of land that are large enough for them to live off of. How much land that is, and where it is will be a subject of long debate and negotiation, but to me that's the only realistic way forward. Obviously measures will have to be taken to ensure that the current corruption that exists in the band system will not simply be transposed onto the new one, and that too will be extremely difficult but there are ways to try and avoid that, and some of those options have been brought up here.
The sad fact is, a few generations of abuse can take many more generations to overcome. Expecting First Nations societies to simply wake up and turn themselves into what we want them to be when they've grown up in an environment with entrenched poverty and abuse is asking far too much. It'll take time, it'll take effort, and it'll take will from everyone. But short of ignoring the problem like we've done for the past 50 years, there's really not much else that can be done that'll have any hope of success.
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