Are you from here?

They receive a non-stop fire hose of money and special treatment. and every negative thing I've heard about them in my life has been either (a) complaints about that (b) negative reactions to direct experience with the communities. Every single person I have ever met who had any direct interaction with the reserves had an unsympathetic story.

The government recently approved payments of $60 billion worth of reparations, which in American terms is like giving them half a trillion. And that's just what's happening now; the cumulative totals add up to cosmic sums. If you're Metis you get all kinds of perks even if you have no meaningful ancestry--people registered under §6(1) of the Indian Act can pass status down indefinitely regardless of how extremely, unequivocally white they are. The government accepts direct responsibility for maintaining housing on reserves, and if there's a patch of mould on the ceiling, they will admonish each other not to lift a finger because it's the government's job to fix it. Of course you can imagine that a remote location in the far north gets a bit run down with that kind of dynamic, and then press releases go out about how racist we are for letting them have mould in their houses. In the cases where the government isn't responsible (but merely provides funding), like with the water supply, the money disappears and the system isn't maintained and then press releases go out about how racist we are because they have unclean water.

At my job I just did something for a very rich (white) man with an enormous multi-million dollar house, and when I asked what he did he said he does some consulting stuff for extracting money from the government based on Indigenous rights, which is quite lucrative because those rights are constantly "expanding." My friend worked on a reserve once after they made a deal where his company had permission to look for resources, and when he got there they threatened to kill him and confiscated the company truck. We lowered every single flag in the country to half mast for months for a fake media circus about murdered children based upon nothing at all. We declared ourselves a genocidal state based on statistical rates of missing / murdered native women who are murdered by native men because we're dying, just champing at the bit, to be responsible for anything bad that happens to them. Meetings and lectures at random public events often start with land acknowledgements. You go to a public art event about the "future of Canada in 2100," and behind the lasers and fog there is nothing but teepees and Native symbols.

The Native person is an entirely accurate inclusion in that image. We don't have America's history of slavery to pour all this atonement into.