CAID is a not-for-profit charitable non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to meaningful Aboriginal consultation and the rebuilding of missing Aboriginal infrastructures. By infrastructure, we do not mean simply roads and water filtration plants, although these are important. We mean any and all services, and their supporting regulatory structures, that will allow Indigenous People to be who they are in the 21st century; and prosper as they do it. This prosperity must encompass finance, health, and spirituality while bringing Aboriginal culture and business into the world’s economy.

CAID’s objective is to help identify, define, and harmonize missing infrastructures that are needed to lay a self-sustaining, culturally appropriate foundation for the prosperity of Indigenous Peoples. These foundational infrastructures are missing as a direct result of lies, broken promises and forced assimilation policies. In Canada, if settler European nations had accepted the hand of native people in the Spirit it was offered, together they would have built a nation in which Aboriginal infrastructures would have existed.

Now that Canada has acknowledged the human carnage caused by the policy of forced Aboriginal assimilation, we are left with absent, insufficient or inappropriate infrastructure in each of the areas that Indigenous infrastructures should have developed to keep pace with the changing needs of Indigenous citizens. These missing traditional infrastructures would have developed in a modern context and integrated into modern Canadian and global infrastructures. Nothing will change for Canada’s First Nation, Inuit, Innu and Métis Nations until missing traditional Aboriginal infrastructures are restored and harmonized into both the Canadian and global systems.

So, identifying and defining missing culturally appropriate aboriginal infrastructure is simply part of reconciliation. It is the process of undoing what was done and building what should have been. When relationships between Indigenous Peoples and colonizing nations are restored and harmonized with respectful infrastructure, the poverty seen within Aboriginal communities will be beaten and reconciliation will be complete. 

There is a teaching in Ojibway Cree called, “Bimiiwinitisowin Omaa Akiing.” Roughly translated it means, "we have everything we need to survive as a people," or, "everything we need to continue as a people is already here." To go forward, First Nation people need to be who they are and Canada needs to respect and accommodate their rights and culture. Unfortunately, colonizing nations still withhold funds and expertise to prevent Indigenous Peoples' rights from being realized and their cultures from being respected. Aboriginal People have no funds to finance, and very little existing infrastructure to facilitate, rebuilding on their own.

CAID has developed a meaningful consultation process that facilitates the rebuilding of traditional First Nation infrastructure with four simple steps: (1) Develop a knowledge base on Indigenous culture through a culturally-based meaningful consultation process; (2) use this knowledge to develop model frameworks for missing traditional Aboriginal infrastructures; (3) work to harmonize missing traditional infrastructure frameworks with outside jurisdictions; and, (4) develop the support necessary for harmonized traditional infrastructures to be realized..

               Meaningful Consultation in Canada: The Alternative to Forced Aboriginal Assimilation (2009)