Too many of Canada’s reserves are plagued with unemployment, alcoholism, suicide, drug addiction, low income, substandard housing and issues with crime and unsafe water.

The chosen antidote to these intolerable and chronic issues has, in part, been growing government intervention and an increasing reliance on Aboriginal traditional knowledge.

To any reasonable observer, neither is working particularly well.

In a 2008 book that received too little attention, Professor Frances Widdowson (a Metis and faculty member at Mount Royal College in Alberta) and her husband, Albert Howard, who has worked as a consultant for government and native groups, offer a compelling, if not troubling, argument for the perpetual woes afflicting Canada’s reserves.

In Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry — The Deception behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, Widdowson and Howard meticulously expose the new “Aboriginal Industry,” an increasingly powerful “amalgamation of lawyers, consultants, anthropologists, linguists, accountants and other occupations that thrive on aboriginal dependency.”

In short, there are a lot of people who make a lot of money from the misery of the ordinary people living on reserves.

This legion of interdependent freeloaders is, for the most part, hidden from public scrutiny.

They operate behind closed doors, unless they are in court.

Even then, they use atavistic arguments to justify present day policies that perpetuate poverty and dependency in Aboriginal communities, ad infinitum, at a cost of approximately $8 billion annually.

So much so that “The activities of the Aboriginal Industry, in fact, are cynically referred to in bureaucratic circles as ‘The Great Game,’” the authors write, a characterization that’s broadly present in government.

The most direct and caustic criticism in the book came from David Crombie, a former Toronto mayor and former minister of Indian and Indigenous affairs between 1984 and 1986.

Crombie, a Progressive Conservative, who is still frequently asked to take on leadership roles, is not known to have a short fuse.

However, he exploded in a scathing condemnation of the despicably venal “Great Game”.

Hardly naive, like Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien before him, Crombie nevertheless “thought he could transform aboriginal policy during his tenure in the department.”

This is some of what the usually restrained, Crombie said, quoted on page 20 of Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry.

“You get a whole bunch of obfuscation, meeting after meeting, word games, magic shows of all kinds. And that’s why so much of Indian Affairs is a convoluted process of negotiation, meeting, consultations. … There is a consultation industry, and that means work for politicians, lawyers. It means money for Indians. It means everything but getting on with the task at hand.”

The juggernaut that is the Aboriginal Rights Movement is now in ascendency and its objective is to remain largely segregated from mainstream society, even if it means its constituents — the often powerless community members who are not connected to the leaders by kinship or other ties — continue to live in abject poverty, with little education.

“They reveal the arrogance of many Aboriginal leaders who reject financial accountability for public funding, trivialize spousal and child sexual abuse, and defend their personal and kinship privileges,” Widdowson and Howard wrote.

There are many legitimate issues facing First Nations communities today that will require a firm and consistent political will to resolve.

The incarceration rate of Indigenous people is a national shame and youth suicide on reserves a national crisis.

Decades of federal efforts, not to mention billions of taxpayers’ dollars, have done shockingly little to address these and other fundamental challenges facing average Indigenous people living on — and off — reserves.

So too with traditional measures, the diversion court system, and prayers.

Little is likely to change as long as Canadian governments and some First Nations leaders continue to prop up an Aboriginal industry that feeds on the misery of average people, instead of helping them.