As the luminaries of the Indigenous finance world met for a luncheon on “economic reconciliation” last month, they found themselves seated in a building honouring a man who helped ensure their peoples’ exclusion from the Canadian economy for more than a century.
Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, now lends his name to a former bank building across from Parliament Hill, an imposing granite and limestone structure with marble-panelled walls, ornate stone carvings and bronze banisters.
For many gathered there, it represented precisely the sort of wealth they say Indigenous lands have yielded Canada, but which the country’s early leaders guaranteed Indigenous peoples
