This one came in via email, I looked, but I couldn’t find it in a Google news search

Most of the time, Nick Finney’s job is to respond to rapid-onset humanitarian disasters — floods, earthquakes and health emergencies. But in First Nations communities in northern Canada last winter he witnessed “the slowest evolved disaster that I’ve ever worked in.”

Finney, based in Britain, is Save the Children’s acting head of emergency capacity. He was invited by the remote communities to visit and conduct international aid–style assessments. “At first, it seemed like my work in Kenya after the flood — creating a multidisciplinary team of locals and others, taking a plane to remote communities,” he said in a telephone interview from London. “But this disaster goes back to the last century. The level of deprivation is truly shocking. We visited a damp, 1-bedroom house with a family of 25 living in it.”

The aid worker compared what he saw in Canada with regions that had endured years of conflict. “In a natural disaster, hope is a vital thing. People lose family and possessions, but society is united with those who can help. What I felt in northern Canada was like Darfur. The reasons are different, but there is a hopelessness, a despair, a sense of despondency.” Finney stressed that he also saw “powerful leadership” in the communities he visited, but said while “they are fighting hard, they need some help.”

Finney is far from the first to compare the living conditions of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples with those in the Third World. The United Nations’ Human Development Index, a standard measure that ranks the well-being of member states, placed Canada number 6 among 192 nations in 2006.

But when the same formula is applied to data about the living conditions of Canada’s First Nations, a very different story emerges: in 2001 that ranking was number 76.

“Aboriginal people endure ill health, run-down and overcrowded housing, polluted water, inadequate schools, poverty and family breakdown at rates found more often in developing countries than in Canada. These conditions are inherently unjust.” That passage was from the extensive 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which was co-chaired by Georges Erasmus, the former president of the Dene Nation and former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, which represents on-and off-reserve Aboriginals (but not Inuit) in Canada.

Doing a good job ain’t we?