They mean business — in both senses of the term — and are determined to get rid of dependency and paternalism. And why should we be surprised? They are simply reverting to an entrepreneurial behaviour that was characteristic of North American Indigenous communities for millennia before the Indian Act stunted it.
But trading networks existed on the continent long before the Europeans arrived. Chinook Jargon for example was a simplified trade language between the various communities of the Pacific Northwest region. Despite the absence of written records, there is ample archeological and anthropological evidence that business and trade were essential aspects of social life in North America at that time.
, including private ownership, and not just the communist-style communal property of myth — which is actually what the reserve system imposed by the Canadian and American governments is more akin to.published in 2010, three Western University researchers, André Le Dressay, Normand Lavallee and Jason Reeves, did a historical survey of First Nation market culture in the territory that would later become Canada.