Indigenous people face 'internal dilemma' when deciding whether or not to vote, says expert

For many Indigenous people, deciding whether to cast a ballot in the upcoming federal election is a complicated choice. 

"We can impact the vote, it's whether or not we choose to," said Chadwick Cowie, who is Ojibway from Hiawatha First Nation in southern Ontario, and an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough.  

"The internal dilemma is very understandable, and I don't hold it against anyone who chooses not to vote based on treaty rights."

He said some First Nations people must take the time to reflect on whether or not voting makes sense to them. 

"The idea of citizenship in the Canadian state hasn't been one to necessarily treat us as equals, but rather to be utilized as a way of furthering settler colonialism," said Cowie. 

Inuit were granted the right to vote in 1950, but many of them didn't see a ballot box in their home community that decade. Elections Canada says all Arctic communities got voting services by 1962.

First Nations people wouldn't be granted the right to vote federally until 1960. 

The 2015 election was on the heels of Idle No More, a protest movement that grew to encompass everything from Indigenous sovereignty and protecting the treaties to addressing social and economic inequalities. 

"Indigenous people were deciding to vote, not because of having a sense of duty to being a Canadian citizen, but a sense of duty to their own nations and wanting to see a government in place that would actually listen to them," said Cowie. 

"For First Nations people, it was more that they had enough of a government that consistently steamrolled them." 

The overall Indigenous voter turnout is not recorded by Elections Canada, but they do track the turnout on reserves. 

In 2015, Elections Canada reported 61.5 per cent of First Nations voters living on reserve cast a ballot, an increase of 14 percentage points from the 2011 election. The turnout for the general population was 66 per cent.

In the 2021 election, 62.6 per cent of Canadians voted, and 44.5 per cent of people living on reserve voted.

"The lack of conversation on reconciliation and treaty rights and all these other things that had been dominant in 2015 … it's not at the forefront," said Cowie.