Rural crime rates by Indigenous nation in Canada (2019 to 2023)
I often emphasize that sample size is crucial in geography. If the sample size isn't appropriate, the data becomes too vague. This is an issue in how people discuss crime statistics, where the sample sizes are usually too large. In one of my previous articles , I compared citywide crime rates with neighborhood-level rates within the same cities. You'll find that cities are too large of a sample size to provide meaningful crime statistics. Similarly, when discussing Australia, Canada, the United States, or any country colonized by Europeans, Indigenous populations are often treated as homogeneous: with the same culture, history and issues to solve. This assumption is flawed: it is an overly large sample size. I wanted to explore violence in rural Indigenous communities in Canada. Indigenous reservations are often generalized to all be the same, assuming that a rural community on the Pacific Coast is the same as one in Northern Saskatchewan, Southern Ontario, or Baffin Island. Ev...