3. Aboriginal Issues in British Columbia
Introduction
Archeological evidence shows that humans have inhabited the area now known as British Columbia (BC) for at least 10,000 to 12,000 years. The two most widely recognized routes for the migration of humans into the region are along the coast and through an interior ice-free corridor.
The term Aboriginal refers to the ancestors of these inhabitants and includes the distinct subgroups of Inuit, Métis and First Nations peoples.
Pre-contact Aboriginal communities were located throughout BC in three cultural regions identified as the northwest coast, southern Interior, and northern Interior. These three cultural regions had dramatically different ecosystems to which indigenous people adapted. The southern Interior was the most climatically dry, the northern Interior the coldest, and the northwest coast the wettest and richest in terms of animal and plant resources.
Although the pre-contact Aboriginal population may have numbered over 300,000, by 1881 European settlement had reduced Aboriginal population to an estimated 40,000. In fact, increasing European contact and settlement from the 19th century until present has had a major impact on every aspect of Aboriginal life.
The 2011 National Household Survey found that 232,290 people identified as Aboriginal in BC. This represents 16% of the total number of Aboriginal people in Canada (1,400,685) and 5.4% of the entire BC population. The number of people self identifying as Aboriginal has increased significantly since the early 1990s (1996 = 139,655; 2001 = 170,020; 2006 = 196,075; 2011 = 232,290) due to both increases in population and an increasing willingness of people (especially those over 35 and Métis) to identify as Aboriginal. Of the BC Aboriginal population, 66.7% identified as First Nations; 29.9% as Métis; and 3.4% as Inuit, multiple Aboriginal identities or Aboriginal identities not included elsewhere (see the table below). The median age of the Aboriginal population in 2011 was 28.9 years, much lower than the 42.2 years for the non-Aboriginal population in BC. Most of the Aboriginal population live off reserve, with only 44.2% of the 112,400 First Nations people with registered Indian status living on reserve.
While the majority of BC Aboriginals self identify as First Nations, the population is exceptionally diverse. For example, it includes 203 First Nations and over 30 spoken languages. According to the First Peoples Culture Council (FPCC), over 60% of all First Nations languages are spoken in BC. However, the FPCC estimates that the percentage of fluent speakers of native languages among Aboriginal populations declined to approximately 5.1% in 2010. The interactive First Nations Language Map of BC [1] shows the historical and contemporary spatial distribution of languages.
Despite recent positive trends of health, employment status and educational attainment indicators for BC’s Aboriginal communities, the same indicators reveal that off-