Ending the cycle of poverty and violence among Aboriginal youth can seem like an impossibly daunting endeavour. After decades of negotiations, commissions and protests, including last year’s Idle No More movement and Ottawa’s recent unsuccessful attempt to reform First Nations education funding, Aboriginal children continue to face a fate that should horrify most Canadians.

Half of First Nations children live in poverty, with rates reaching as high as 64 per cent of children in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. They are far more likely to grow up in communities racked with violence, live in overcrowded housing and lack access to clean drinking water. Nine of Canada’s 10 most violent communities are Aboriginal, according to Statistics Canada’s violent crime index, as are 92 of Canada’s 100 poorest communities.

Deep poverty and domestic violence have pushed many Aboriginal youth toward a life of crime. Compared to non-Native Canadians, Aboriginal youth are seven times more likely to be victims of homicide, five times more likely to commit suicide and twice as likely to die an alcohol-related death. A rising number of Native teenagers are in custody: in 1997, just 12 per cent of young offenders in custody were Aboriginal. Today, it’s one in three.

That’s if they make it to their teenage years at all. The infant mortality rate is double the Canadian average, and Native children are at higher risk of a wide array of serious health problems, from cavities in toddlers, to substance abuse, HIV infections, tuberculosis and chlamydia. Aboriginal girls are at greater risk of sexual assault, domestic violence and teenage pregnancies. The number of children taken from their homes by child welfare authorities now exceeds the number taken at the height of the residential-school era, says Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. Aboriginal children are 10 times more likely to be placed in foster care than the Canadian average and make up half of the roughly 60,000 kids in care.

So how, in one of the richest, most progressive countries in the world–where non-Native youth seem to have the world at their fingertips–is this allowed to happen?