Noah D. Arney

Tag: Indigenous

  • Dispelling Myths about First Nations Chief’s Salaries

    First nations chiefs are essentially CEOs these days. And with the First Nations Financial Transparancy Act we can see how much they’re making – see here for the data.

    Now that list includes counselors so I pulled only chiefs and based this on the results.

    Remember, these are CEOs. In addition to managing Treaty & Indian Act money coming in from the government they also manage various band run businesses, land and many other organizations.

    Average salary: $80,00
    Median salary: $75,000 (median Canadian salary is $70,000)

    # paid less than poverty line: 76 (11%)
    # paid less than canadian average salary: 179 (26%)
    # paid less than middle class salary: 230 (34%)
    # paid less than canadian median salary: 286 (42%)
    # paid middle class salary 185 (27%)
    # paid more than canadian middle class salary: 264 (39%)
    # making it into the top 100 highest paid CEOs: 0

    The highest paid chief made $930,793 but remember most of that (86% to be exact) was a bonus for negotiating a $8 million land deal for the band.

    Only 15% of chiefs are even classed as “rich” (earning over $125,000 per year). To put that into perspective, more chiefs are earning less than $30,000.
    So it looks like in general the “rich chief” myth isn’t just misleading, it’s completely wrong.

  • Education and the Indigenous wage gap

    The National Post had an article this morning titled “Government stumped as report shows aboriginal wage gap widening, unemployment growing”

    The federal government touted a number of initiatives Wednesday for improving First Nations’ well-being but could not explain why a new report showed the prosperity gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people was widening in some cases.
    source

    There are a lot of reasons for the wage gap but I’m going to focus on one. And yes, it’s education. I discussed this earlier but I want to go into a bit more detail.

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  • Indigenous Access to Post-Secondary

    Aboriginal people make up 6% of BC and the percentage is rising quickly.

    From an economic standpoint there’s a huge wage gap between aboriginal and non aboriginal workers pay based on looking at full time workers with the same career classification. But the good news is that the more education an aboriginal person has the closer that gap is. In fact the gap almost disappears for aboriginal people with a masters degree or higher. But Aboriginal people are less likely to go to post secondary, with only 45% of working age aboriginal people having a post secondary certificate diploma or degree compared to 62% for non aboriginal residents.

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  • #MySAPath – My Path to Student Affairs via Indigenous Education

    The full post of this is over at The Student Affairs Collective blog.

    I am a student advisor (both academic and career advising) at a small aboriginal college in Vancouver B.C., Native Education College. The issue I have with describing a non-traditional student affairs path is that I have very little reference for what a traditional path is; there are so many routes to the field, at least among my colleagues here in Canada. Mine may have been a little unusual, though.

    My plan when I went to University was to be a high school English teacher. There were many reasons my plan changed but most of them come down to being unaware of my options. I went to university thinking I had one option, came to realize that I had three, and wound up taking the first option anyway only to change my direction two years later.

    Please go here for the rest of the article.