In Canada not only does Thanksgiving come earlier in the autumn, but none of the legend surrounding its American version has traveled across the border. There’s no widely shared Canadian variation of the story of the Pilgrims at the Plymouth Plantation and the indigenous people who helped them survive joining together for a harvest festival.

Still, indigenous people are far from an afterthought in Canada. As a Canadian who reports for an American newspaper, I’ve long been struck by the extraordinary contrast between the two countries when it comes to the political and media attention indigenous issues receive.

I’ve written about Canada and Canadians for The New York Times for more than 13 years, including 11 years as the only reporter in the country. All three of us who currently report for The Times on Canada — Catherine Porter, Dan Levin and I — have indigenous stories at or close to the top of our to-do lists. Sometimes those stories reflect issues confronting minorities in the United States. When protests were sweeping the United States over monuments to leaders of the Confederacy, I was writing about the debate over maintaining statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, who introduced a school program to wipe out indigenous culture. We also try to avoid writing articles only about the problems facing indigenous communities. Ms. Porter, for example, recently wrote about attempts to bring indigenous culture into universities.

Generally speaking, indigenous stories are an integral part of the daily news mix in Canada. Even before his government’s election two years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made reconciling with the indigenous population a key priority, and there is a sustained discussion of the struggles native people face here: staggeringly high suicide rates, mostly among their youngest members; the large number of unsolved disappearances and murders of aboriginal women; unsafe drinking water in reserves. They also suffer from overcrowded and unfit housing, higher rates of homelessness and — in a mirror image to the national conversation unfolding in the United States — lopsided incarceration rates: Although indigenous adults make up about 3 percent of the population, they account for 26 percent of people in jail.