Canadian Politics Today

Indigenous people, if we can even generalize a ton of different groups across the world, are also terribly poor, and often have subsistence economies. Subsistence, pre-industrial economies have usually always been sustainable.  Indigenous economies like all subsistence economies around the world are often very poor, with horrible outcomes in health, education, violence etc., just as they were pre-Columbus.

These groups are in no position to tell anybody how to run an economy, they have no idea how to run a modern industrial economy sustainably.

Wow. Generalized and stereotyped.
The IRC [Indian Resource Council] represents 134 First Nations that have oil and gas resources on their land.
Not all First Nations communities fit your stereotype. The Indian Resource Council has existed since 1987. These are in western provinces with experience in oil and gas.

I'd like society to live a lot more sustainably but I don't want to live like aboriginals either,

Wow. That's pretty ... !!!

though I'm sure we can learn some things from them.

Ya, you could learn some manners.

The competitive nature of the international economy has always been a race to the bottom by its very nature, regardless of capitalism and even centuries before industrialization.  Economic development means using natural resources like land, trees etc.

That isn't a sustainable economy. We need to stop that.

  Maintaining a city of people means plowing over huge masses of land to house and feed people.  There's no easy answers here.  Romanticizing the "noble savages" as our saviours, as the article did, will fix little.

We could listen. We have a lot to learn from their thousands of years of oral knowledge.

I find this all pretty bigoted.
There are lots of successful Indigenous business people, PG. Your knowledge is minimal, and very stereotyped.