Indigenous people remain rural

Saskatchewan's Indigenous population has remained more rural than the rest of the province — at least according to Statistic Canada's definitions.

According to the most recent census, nearly half of people who identified as Aboriginal in the 2016 census lived in areas classified as rural. For Statistics Canada, rural means a community with fewer than 1,000 people in an area with density of fewer than 400 people per square kilometre.

In the 2016 census, 46.2 per cent of the 175,015 Indigenous people living in Saskatchewan lived in rural areas. Just 27.5 per cent lived in or near the province's two largest cities, Saskatoon and Regina.

Another 7.3 per cent lived in Prince Albert or Moose Jaw, and 15.8 per cent in communities larger than 1,000 people, but smaller than 30,000.

When you compare the Indigenous population to the rest of the province, it's almost a mirror image when looking at the rural population versus those living in the two largest cities.

Nearly 42 per cent of the province's population lived in or near Saskatoon and Regina in 2016; only about a third lived in areas classified as rural.

In Canada, nearly 52 per cent of the population that identified as Aboriginal lived in urban areas of more than 30,000 people, while only about 35 per cent in Saskatchewan lived in the four largest cities, the only communities in the province with more than 30,000.

Among Canada's 35 census metropolitan areas (CMAS) in 2016, Saskatoon had the third highest share of Indigenous people with about 11 per cent, behind only Thunder Bay and Winnipeg.

But from 2006 to 2016, the growth of the Indigenous population in Regina and Saskatoon was among the slowest in the 35 CMAS. St. John's, Newfoundland had the highest growth over that decade.

In Regina, the growth was the lowest at 26.4 per cent — which still outpaced the growth among non-indigenous people — while the growth in Saskatoon was the third lowest at 45.4 per cent.

Of the province's First Nations population — 114,570 people in 2016 — just slightly over half lived on reserves. Across Canada, about 44 per cent of First Nations people lived on reserve in 2016.