Richard Foot, Canwest News Service
April 6, 2010 National Post
Cities are home to a rising number of Aboriginal Peoples, who -- despite pride in their heritage -- live in Canada's ethnically diverse urban centres and are reluctant to return to native communities, according to a study on urban aboriginals.
The study also says despite the educational and career successes of many urban aboriginal people, a majority feel they are negatively and unfairly stereotyped as victims of addiction or abuse, or as lazy and unintelligent, by non-native city dwellers.
The Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study, published Tuesday by the Environics Institute, a national polling firm, is a groundbreaking, 188-page report on the attitudes and aspirations of Canada's urban aboriginal population.
The study includes a 2009 survey of 2,614 native people, and 2,501 non-native people in 11 cities: Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Ont., Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax. The work was sponsored by the federal government and a handful of provincial and municipal governments.
Canada's aboriginal population -- which includes First Nations, Inuit and Metis --grew by an amazing 45% to 1.2 million between 1996 and 2006, the year of the most recent national census. The proportion of native people living in cities increased from 47% to more than 50% over the same period.
The new study found that most urban aboriginals are longtime residents, with 61% moving to cities more than 10 years ago.
Half of the survey's native respondents said they had no plans to leave the city and move back to their ancestral communities, while only 22% wanted to return to their original homes.
In other questions, 71% now considered the city their permanent home, and 94% said they enjoyed city life.
Despite being happy in diverse ethnic urban environments, 82% of respondents also said they remained "very proud" of their aboriginal heritage and maintained strong links to their families and original communities.
Only 70% said they were very proud to be Canadian.
The study also found that a majority of aboriginal respondents see cities not as obstacles to native culture, or as places of assimilation, but as venues for the development of aboriginal culture.
"One of the most optimistic findings from the [survey] is the strong sense of cultural vitality among urban Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian cities," the study says. "This is especially true in Toronto and Vancouver, where residents are both more aware of aboriginal cultural activities in their city and participate in them more frequently."
These generally positive findings are offset by the way urban aboriginals feel they are perceived by non-natives. Seventy-one% of respondents said non-native people viewed them negatively -- despite their success -- stereotyping Aboriginal Peoples as either suffering from addictions, or being stupid or lazy.
At the same time, 70% of aboriginal respondents said their individual relationships and interactions with non-natives had shaped their lives in positive ways.
Among the non-aboriginal people surveyed, 52% said they often or occasionally had contact with Aboriginal Peoples, while 47% said they rarely or never had any contact. The majority of those that did have contact said their impressions of Aboriginal Peoples were positive ones.
Eighty-three per cent of non-native respondents said it was important to understand the history and cultural contributions of Aboriginal Peoples to Canada.
Nationally, 42% of non-native respondents said they were aware of Aboriginal Peoples', or an aboriginal "community" in their city. Locally, the results were strongest in Thunder Bay where 90% said they were aware of an aboriginal community in their city. In Regina, 77% said they were aware of such a community.
The results of that question were lowest in Toronto (31%) and Montreal (22%.)
The study's manager said the survey's purpose was to examine the attitudes of urban aboriginals in ways that looked beyond the stereotypical media lenses of poverty and childhood abuse.
"When urban aboriginal peoples are researched it's often about problems like homelessness and sexual exploitation," says Ginger Gosnell-Myers. "There are hundreds of thousands of us living in cities, and there are a lot of positive things happening in our communities. It's not all crises."