The majority of Canada’s Indigenous peoples live in urban areas, yet scholarly work on Indigenous issues continues to focus on reserve-based communities. In contrast, Western University researchers Peter Dinsdale, Jerry White, and Calvin Hanselmann have published a collection of papers that provides a comprehensive portrait of the country’s urban Indigenous 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 more than 300 non-reserve communities with significant numbers of Indigenous residents. By doing so, Urban Aboriginal Communities in Canada: Complexities, Challenges and Opportunities captures the urban Indigenous dynamic in a way that existing data and analysis do not.
