The Mayor of Vancouver currently earns 171k annual - that appears to be enough for about 7 hummers, 4 after taxes[1]. Purchasing two hummers would cost you about 50k which is a very nice nest egg to have in the bank but, considering they may get a lot of use, probably not unreasonable. Most reservations have extremely poor roads and these cars might be shared in the community - I don't know if that's the specific case here but it's pretty common... lastly, cars aren't cheap and while hummers are expensive cars they aren't unreasonably priced, maybe having a hummer is this chief's personal luxury - we all want to have nice things, even when our lives aren't glamorous.
I think that the Mayor of Vancouver's salary is pretty fair considering the job they're doing, I can't speak on the specifics of this village but I am extremely suspicious of anyone who demands that people live in visible poverty to receive aide. The concept of "the welfare queen" originated with Reagan and was entirely born to utilize as a political tool - we can stop playing into stereotypes.
1. I am 100% not a car person - if anyone else knows a better assumed value than 24k please feel free to revise or correct numbers
I hesitate to even comment given the divisive nature of the thread but…
Hummers cost north of $100k USD. Assuming the mayor of Vancouver’s salary is listed in CAD it isn’t enough to buy one after tax. Furthermore on that salary it probably wouldn’t be prudent to buy one at all.
I'm personally a non-driver so I am quite clueless here. That said it does impact my understanding a fair bit since paying 24k for a car seems like a pretty nice price for a car (you can get used cars for thousands of dollars, but a new car is probably going to be well over 10k) but where there are definitely cheaper options - paying 100k is pretty ridiculous.
That can be a real problem for tribes, I agree. In my youth I worked with an organization for Haudenosaunee cultural preservation in the US and while the politics are a lot different there the status of tribes as nations means that there are a lot of weird power dynamics.
In particular this organization was opposing considerations of the Mohawk People to invite in outside investors that wanted to build casinos on reservation land - that's a hard decision to make and even harder when there is a single ultimate tribal representative that you can throw ten million dollars at without serious impacting long term financial expectations. The Mohawk Council of Chiefs in Akwesasne[1] represents a tribe with enough members, and historical precedent, that they benefit from and enjoy an actual government body, but many of these tribes are small enough or remote enough that a single member is vested with a lot of power and this will often go poorly. I don't think there's a really clear good solution here - it'd probably make sense to consolidate tribes into fewer regional bands but Natives are obviously pretty skittish about surrendering any of what little power of self-governance they have.
I think that the Mayor of Vancouver's salary is pretty fair considering the job they're doing, I can't speak on the specifics of this village but I am extremely suspicious of anyone who demands that people live in visible poverty to receive aide. The concept of "the welfare queen" originated with Reagan and was entirely born to utilize as a political tool - we can stop playing into stereotypes.
1. I am 100% not a car person - if anyone else knows a better assumed value than 24k please feel free to revise or correct numbers