Invisible Mothers: Indigenous Women, Poverty, and the Colonial Inheritance
Indigenous mothers in Canada face poverty rates 2–3 times higher than non-Indigenous mothers, the highest food insecurity rates of any demographic, and a system that was built to exclude them. This isn't a statistic. It's a colonial inheritance.
Every statistic we share at Momera tells part of the story of mothers and poverty. But some mothers are carrying a weight that the mainstream data barely captures: the weight of a system that was not just indifferent to them, but actively designed to displace and dispossess them.
Indigenous mothers in Canada face a compounding set of barriers that cannot be understood without understanding colonialism. Intergenerational trauma. Forced displacement from land and community. The residential school system. The Sixties Scoop. Child welfare systems that still remove Indigenous children at disproportionate rates. These are not historical footnotes. They are the conditions in which Indigenous mothers are raising their children today.
The Numbers
Indigenous children in Canada face poverty rates 2–3x higher than non-Indigenous children
Indigenous mothers have the highest rates of food insecurity of any demographic in Canada — 39.9% for Indigenous people living off-reserve. Indigenous single mothers are more likely to be sole providers AND earn less, creating a compounding poverty trap. (Statistics Canada, 2022–24)
The food insecurity rate for Indigenous people living off-reserve in Canada is 39.9% — almost 10 times the rate for white Canadian households. For Indigenous people on-reserve, the data is worse and less consistently collected. The hunger is real. The invisibility of it is also real.
The System Was Built Against Them
We say at Momera that the system isn't broken — it was never built for us. For Indigenous mothers, this is not a metaphor. The systems that govern land, income, housing, child welfare, and education in Canada were literally built to exclude, assimilate, and disappear Indigenous peoples. The poverty Indigenous mothers face today is a direct consequence of policy — policy that still exists in modified forms, still extracts and limits and monitors.
Child welfare is perhaps the starkest current example. Indigenous children make up approximately 53% of children in foster care in Canada, despite representing less than 8% of the child population. Many of these removals are tied to poverty — inadequate housing, food insecurity, poverty conditions that get coded as 'neglect.' The system punishes Indigenous mothers for the poverty that colonialism created.
“Poverty in Indigenous communities isn't a failure of culture or character. It's the balance sheet of colonialism.”
Momera is a movement of all mothers. We cannot talk about ending poverty for mothers without centering the mothers for whom the poverty is deepest, the barriers most compounded, and the system most hostile. This work is incomplete without Indigenous voices leading it. If you are an Indigenous mother and you want to be part of shaping this movement, we want to hear from you. hello@momera.ca
Becky Tsadilas
Founder, Momera — Movement of Mothers Ending Poverty. Based in Cochrane, Alberta. hello@momera.ca