As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Indigenous Americas)

by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

The poverty facing Indigenous communities is an imposed poverty, the result of being a target of extractivism for generations now. Solutions to social issues like housing, health care, and clean drinking water that divorce the cause (dispossessive capitalist exploitation under settler colonialism) from the effect (poverty) serve settler colonial interests, not Indigenous ones, by placing Indigenous peoples in a never-ending cycle of victimhood, and Canadians in a never-ending cycle of self-congratulatory saviorhood, while we both reinforce the structure of settler colonialism that set the terms for exploitation in the first place.