Aboriginal Conditions: Research as a Foundation for Public Policy

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan. He is the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A
History of Indian-White Relations in Canada and co-editor of the
Canadian Historical Review.

Aboriginal Conditions is the product of efforts by academic and
governmental social scientists to build a “research-policy nexus”
focused on Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. Five sociologists from the
University of Western Ontario, four employees from Indian Affairs, and a
management consultant combined their expertise to address two questions:
“What is the situation [among Aboriginal peoples]?” “Why has it
developed?” To answer, they analyzed data from the 1990s to look at
educational attainment, income, employment, and other factors critical
to “social cohesion” in communities.

The researchers’ findings frequently raise important questions about
the assumptions and directions of several policies that are now in place
or advocated by bodies such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal
Peoples (RCAP) and the Assembly of First Nations. For example, RCAP’s
projections about the growth of the Aboriginal population seriously
underestimated its extent. Contrary to general belief among provincial
bureaucrats and politicians, net migration between cities and reserves
has favoured the latter. Some of the apparent recent gains in Aboriginal
education and income are the result of legislative changes affecting
Indian status and a greater willingness in the 1990s of people who
previously did not identify with their Aboriginal ancestry to declare
their Native identity to census-takers. Increasing the use of Aboriginal
languages in communities “is not the economic panacea that many
advocates believe it to be.” And government transfer payments to the
disadvantaged do not appear to reduce income inequality in either the
Aboriginal or the non-Aboriginal population.

If Aboriginal Conditions provides a valuable corrective to what
Canadians think they know about “the situation,” it is less
successful in answering the second question about why things
“developed” as they did. The volume argues for the construction of
another statistical tool—a community capacity index—that will allow
planners to predict the likelihood that specific Aboriginal communities
will be able to manage programs effectively. While such an index will no
doubt be useful to bureaucrats and interesting to researchers, it will
not uncover the causes of contemporary Aboriginal conditions. For that,
research of other kinds will be needed.