Mexicans vs Candian Native Americans: what am I missing?

I was listening to the recent interview of Paul Martin by Steve Paikin when two important numbers were thrown out. The first was there are roughly a million aboriginals in Canada. The second was that the Kelowna accord was priced at $5 billion dollars (that an additional $5000 per aboriginal on top of the $6300 per aboriginal or $6.3 billion allocated in 2007 for Native affairs, see here) . Martin was stating that the aboriginals live in third world conditions.

Now as I though about the situation the parallels with Mexicans (or more generally central Americans) became apparent to me. Both live in 3rd world conditions and have little employment opportunity in their "homeland." So why is it Mexicans risk their lives to go to the US or Canada illegally, work crazy hours for crappy wages and send most of their money home to their family where as the aboriginals who have the right to work in Canada don't? As citizen they can get better education for them and their children than the Mexicans, healthcare since they are citizens andbetter jobs since they don't have to take illegal jobs. The aboriginals have what the rest of the poor world want, access to Canada and US jobs.

I guess one possibility is this isn't working for most immigrants who come here and spend most of their salary on remittance, which would beg the question why they stay or new immigrants continue to try to come in? Or maybe giving someone fish instead of teaching them to fish and letting them fish doesn't work. Am I missing some huge piece of the puzzle here?