Still comparison to First Nations seems off. Maybe it's about this: Disadvantaged ethnic groups such as Romani or Jews (particularly post-Soviet Jews in recent times) are often denied a connection to the nation state or (what you might call) the shared European cultural heritage. In contrast, I don't think anyone argues that First Nations aren't true Canadians.
What do you mean by no path to citizenship?
Are there historical groups of jews somewhere in the EU without any passport?
Other persons whose ancestors emigrated from the Holy Roman Empire (long before Germany existed as a modern nation state) are considered Germans by blood, so it's not about the time of emigration from Germany. These decisions are arbitrary, and it's puzzling why Ashkenazi Jews are still not treated as having German ancestry.
We also have lost much to history. Take a look at the shuffling that happened during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
I also have no idea whatsoever what 1500 year old history has to do with anything. None of the cultures of that time exist today in any meaningful sense. Even the Italians or Greeks of today are not the Romans and Greeks of 300 CE, they are vastly different cultures and speak unintelligibly different languages.
Should different Slovak communities in the Czech Republic have their own lands and make their own laws? What if they're living in the same village as Czechs, how will they split the territory there?
There is simply no valid comparison between how populations in Europe live and have developed up to today, and how things sit in Canada with the First Nations.
And note, the Basque country in Spain is already an autonomous region with significant ability to do its own governance. The Basques there have been practicing their own traditions and using their own language since the fascist dictatorship fell. The Catalans of Catalunya (one of the richest regions of Spain, mind you) also speak their own language and are not in any other way culturally suppressed, again, since the fascist dictatorship fell. The reason for their struggle for independence is mostly their perception that they are being dragged down economically by the poorer parts of Spain (i.e. the strictly Spanish-speaking South).
The English starved them to death. The English forcibly displaced them. The English stole their resources.
The English even forbade them from speaking their language.
So what exactly should the English learn from Canadians today? Even the Irish in Northern Ireland have more freedom and autonomy than the First Nations have in Canada, not less.
Russian spending on 'internal security' is legendary.
We do have our own indigenous minority who are treated badly by society - Irish travellers. There's a lot of racism in Irish society towards them, and we could do with looking at how other countries treat minorities, indigenous or not, and recognize for all that we like to harp on about our own poor treatment in history, we are doing exactly the same here towards travellers.
Instead, it's the racism and discrimination against an ethnic minority that we should focus on.
Really? The Sami populations don't have any sovereignty that I know of.
But more significantly, it's not the arable or densely inhabited parts; the vast majority of Scandinavians do not live on land where Sami ever lived. This is just a vastly different than Canada where every square inch was native land at one point. For example, Vancouver has Squamish-owned and developed land right in the middle of downtown, it's a big controversy!
I'm not trying to dispossess or trivialize the Sami or the injustices they did suffer, it's just a very different relationship.
[1] https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-sami-side-of-trom...
The other examples (Irish, Bretons, Welsh etc) I would argue live significantly better and have significantly more practical rights today than First Nations people do in Canada.
As for the Jewish people and Romani, the fact that they are not indigenous people makes it impossible to apply any lessons from Canada. It's not possible, or even desirable in any way, to create any autonomous Jewish/Romani regions, because that would imply forcibly displacing people. These people generally live intermingled with others in the states they inhabit, at most living in concentrated neighborhoods part of larger cities. And otherwise, their languages and cultural practices are already legally protected in the EU (with some major tensions around one particular Romani cultural practice, child marriages). This is not to say that there isn't anti-Roma and anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, unfortunately there is plenty, but the situation is so significantly different from the First Nations of Canada that there are few, if any, lessons to learn.
Maybe the Irish, who were genocided by the English up into the 20th century.
I personally very much disagree with the concept that First Nations people in Canada are afforded more rights and are freer to practice their cultural identity than the Scots, Welsh, and Irish in the UK in 2024.
They (we?) do? This is the first I hear of this. Where did you read about this?
If anything they had a much bigger part oppressing the highlanders than the English.
I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most populations in Europe have created their own states. And the few tribal populations in Northern Europe generally were and certainly are today treated at least as fairly as anything in Canada. So who are they talking about? Would the Basques feel that they would be treated better as First Nations people in Canada than they are today in Spain?
Note that the treatment of immigrants is a completely separate topic in the article, so I don't think they could be referring to, say, the treatment of Syrian refugees with that sentence above.