09/25/2026
If anyone has questions about Indigenous Financial literacy please reach out and let's connect today, I won't shame you if you don't understand.
REMEMBERING
Poverty Was Not a Tradition
Poverty is often treated as if it has always belonged to Indigenous communities.
It has not.
Poverty was not an Indigenous tradition.
Dispossession created poverty.
Broken promises created poverty.
The reserve system created poverty.
Underfunding created poverty.
Exclusion from opportunity created poverty.
Resource extraction without justice created poverty.
Children inherited the impacts of those decisions.
They felt them in housing.
In food.
In health.
In school.
In family stress.
In the loss of land-based economies and traditional food systems that had sustained communities for generations.
That matters because poverty is too often used as an explanation without history.
A child is hungry, and people ask what is wrong with the family.
A home is overcrowded, and people ask what is wrong with the community.
A school is underfunded, and people ask why outcomes are unequal.
But those questions are incomplete when they ignore the systems that created the conditions.
Remembering the children means refusing to confuse colonial conditions with Indigenous identity.
It means refusing to treat poverty as culture.
It means asking how children came to inherit scarcity in lands rich with food, water, medicines, knowledge, trade, relationship, and responsibility.
It means asking who benefited when Indigenous Peoples were pushed from land, restricted by law, underfunded by governments, excluded from economies, and then blamed for the hardship those systems created.
Poverty does not tell us who Indigenous Peoples are.
It tells us what systems have done.
And it asks whether Canada is willing to repair the conditions it helped create.
Children should not inherit poverty as if it were destiny.
They should inherit land protected with care.
Water safe to drink.
Homes where families can gather.
Food systems rooted in dignity.
Schools that are resourced.
Communities that are trusted.
Families supported before crisis.
And futures not limited by the harms of the past.
Poverty was not a tradition.
Responsibility was.
Relationship was.
Care was.
And those are the teachings that can still guide us forward.
