Poverty, Colonization and Reconciliation

A Reflection for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

According to Statistics Canada, almost 1 in 5 Indigenous persons over the age of 15 were living in poverty in 2024. To arrive at this figure, Statistics Canada calculates the income a typical family would need in order to purchase the goods and services required for a modest lifestyle. Those who earn less than this amount of money are considered to be poor; money is the dividing line.

From this standpoint, the root of poverty is an inability to participate effectively in the market economy by earning wages to purchase things. Contemporary poverty is thus the product of a capitalist market economy. Efforts to reduce poverty typically involve work to improve the ability of people to be active participants in that economy to purchase more of the things that they need.

But the market economy is not neutral; it comes laden with important values and assumptions. It is premised on the primacy of private property and the free exchange of labour for wages by autonomous, competitive individuals acting in their own self-interest. These values are the product of a particular western European ideological tradition that gave rise to our modern capitalist economy. As such, they are not universal but culturally bound reflecting a particular understanding of human nature and society.

Over the past 400 years, that economy and ideological tradition was spread across the globe through colonization. For the European colonial enterprise was not merely one of territorial conquest, but equally a project of exporting these values to the colonies in the service of capitalist expansion. To be successful, alternative economic, social and cultural systems needed to be subjugated and replaced with capitalist structures and values. In Canada, this involved the parallel forces of land acquisition, Residential schools, and the suppression of Indigenous languages, cultures and spiritual practices so as to establish and replicate European economic,  cultural and governance systems.

For Indigenous persons, therefore, the roots of poverty are deeper than mere disadvantage within a market economy; they reflect the imposition of that market economy and its attendant western values and paradigm on Indigenous peoples following displacement from their land, destruction of their traditional economy, along with the colonial assault on their culture and spirituality. Consequently, attempts to address poverty within Indigenous communities that take as their starting place a monetary market-based understanding of poverty are themselves a form of colonialism. Any such efforts will only serve to further reproduce colonial relationships as the market economy is itself a product of colonization.

This poses a challenge to settler-based organizations seeking to address poverty among Indigenous peoples if the starting place of such interventions is typically rooted in western material conceptions of poverty. To speak meaningfully about poverty in the context of Indigenous society requires a post-colonial understanding of poverty that is not rooted in a western capitalist market economy. It must be more than just improving the incomes of Indigenous persons and their ability to participate in a capitalist economy. Rather, we must truthfully ask ourselves if the purpose of poverty reduction is merely to make people better consumers or is it to engage in practices that lead to healing and reconciliation.

For authentic poverty reduction work to take place, what will be required is a dialogue between Indigenous peoples and settlers that can lead to a shared understanding of poverty that has not been imposed by western values and frameworks. From such an alternative starting point, crafted from a place of mutuality, new pathways to a more abundant life may be discerned.  Through such a process we might gain a deeper understanding of who we are as human beings and what we require to flourish not just materially, but socially and spiritually as well. In this there may be true liberation for both Indigenous peoples and settlers alike who each bear the spiritual scars of that ideology in their own unique ways. The beginning of the end of poverty will be found in reconciliation.

Derek Cook

Director, Canadian Poverty Institute