It’s been a long time coming, as the rumblings of discontent among Canada’s Aboriginal population are certainly nothing new. But until someone took to Twitter and stuck a hashtag next to the phrase “Idle No More” this past December, it was an issue that never really garnered the attention it truly deserved.

As we saw in several nations in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, social media has proved to be an instrumental tool in motivating public support for a destitute segment of the population. Now it has done the same for the Idle No More movement, which originally began as opposition to Bill C-45 and attempted to protect the sovereignty of waterways that passed through Indigenous lands; but it has grown into something much larger, and has worked to shine a spotlight on Aboriginal issues across the board.

There is certainly no shortage of grievances for Aboriginal people to cite. They are plagued by a multitude of social problems, both in urban centers and on reserves. According to Amnesty International, Canadian Aboriginal women are five to seven times more likely to die as a result of violence than non-Aboriginal women. On many reserves across Canada, infrastructure is in an abysmal state, leaving many Aboriginals to live in housing that is dilapidated and overcrowded, and sometimes even without running water. And one need look no further than downtown Winnipeg to see the plight of Aboriginals in urban centres, where they make up a disturbingly large percentage of Winnipeggers who live in poverty, and of those who suffer from substance abuse problems.

And while all these issues have more recently come to the public’s attention, there is something just as disquieting that has come more fully to light as well: the inherent, almost casual, racism towards Aboriginals that is shared by a shameful amount of Canadians. Online message boards are routinely flooded with hateful vitriol posted by anonymous anti-activists. The Morris Mirror newspaper published a myopic editorial that basically blamed Aboriginals for all their own problems, and although the paper did eventually apologize for their comments, they also received and published many letters from readers who supported their original ignorant position. Even Braydon Mazurkiewich, the former PC Youth President, was forced to resign from his position after some unenlightened comments he made on his Twitter account pertaining to the sale of the Kapyong Barracks.

There are countless people across Canada who seem ready to forget the fact that we took this land out from under the feet of Aboriginal people to exploit it for our own purposes; some are quick to dismiss atrocities like the residential school system just because it all happened before we were born. So many of us are ready to dismiss the sins of our forbearers, but are all too eager to reap the benefits those sins have brought us.

Some Aboriginal activists have taken to engaging in acts of civil disobedience like blocking traffic or railways, and even those who would generally consider themselves tolerant of Aboriginals and sympathetic to the issues facing them have been muttering about the inconvenience of it all. They seem to not realize that the Aboriginal people make up a significant portion of our population, and a significant portion of those Aboriginals are young, impoverished, and feeling very disenfranchised. In many other parts of the world, that is not just a recipe for discontent, but a recipe for a revolution. Canadians should feel lucky that we have experienced a ubiquitously peaceful movement so far.

There’s no denying that, as a nation, Canada has been making positive strides on Aboriginal issues, such as through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and by paying reparations to residential school survivors. But these are simply acknowledgements of the mistakes our nation has made in the past and ways of making amends from them. What are we doing to ease the plight of current and future Aboriginals?

Of course, there is no one simple solution. As Henry Mencken says, “for every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.” But one step in the right direction is through resource and revenue sharing. Rather than Aboriginal people being opposition to development of resource harvesting on their lands, bring them on as partners, like Stornoway Diamond Corp. did at Quebec’s only diamond mine. More than half of the 850 employees there are Cree, and the Cree leaders are kept fully appraised of the mine’s costs and financial projections. It’s not a fix-all solution by any means, but it certainly seems like a way that Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals can begin moving forward hand-in-hand, instead of ceaselessly butting heads.

And indeed, while many Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals are embracing this attitude of resource and revenue sharing, this step towards economic partnership, there’s something underlying that troubles me.

Though I do support the idea behind it, it’s also disheartening to me when I hear some First Nations leaders use terms like “our land” and “our resources” in the possessive tense. To my understanding, one of the reasons early European settlers were able to take advantage of Aboriginals was because the concept of owning the land they lived on was so foreign to them it was laughable. The relationship that they had with the Earth was more symbiotic; it was not one of exploitation, but of harmony. One could not claim the land for their own any more than you could claim your neighbour’s right arm.

I believe that if First Nations peoples are going to thrive in this modern world, it is necessary for them to engage in the field of Western style capitalism and talk in terms of ownership and profit. I just hate that it feels like another shovel full of dirt is being heaped upon a pure and noble spirit that has been buried too deep as it is. I would hate to see that spirit forgotten altogether, even if it is in the name of progress.