Urban Aboriginal communities in Canada : complexities, challenges, opportunities

The majority of Canada's Aboriginal peoples live in urban areas, yet scholarly work on Aboriginal issues continues to focus on reserve-based communities. In contrast, this collection of papers provides a comprehensive portrait of the country's urban Aboriginal population-a population defined by both great promise and great challenges. Using data from the 2006 census, the authors draw on the urban catchment or service area, a custom unit of geography, to examine over three hundred non-reserve communities with significant numbers of Aboriginal residents. By doing so, they capture the urban Aboriginal dynamic in a way that existing data and analysis do not. Urban Aboriginal Communities in Canada provides a critical examination of the issues and challenges faced by urban Aboriginal people in such key areas as education, income, mobility, and language, and identifies the important policy and programming implications of this research. Book jacket.… (more)