Smokers who buy Native cigarettes help support a tribe-owned company that produces quality smokes at lower prices. These smokes lack the additional chemicals that are found in many commercial brands and deliver an authentic tobacco experience.

Native Cigarettes Canada  at the end of a narrow drive surrounded by a green fence, it’s easy to miss the manufacturing plant on the Akwesasne Mohawk reserve in Kahnawake, Quebec. Inside, a handful of employees turn raw tobacco into the controversial new lifeblood of First Nations communities across the country – and, some say, a threat to Canadian public health.

It’s a business that has exploded on reserve, where status Indians are legally entitled to purchase legal products such as tobacco exempt from federal and provincial sales taxes under Section 87 of the Indian Act. But there’s little enforcement of the requirement to pay federal excise taxes, so cigarettes made on reserve are often illegally resold without tax in off-reserve smoke shacks or by criminal gangs operating out of rural and urban areas.

Health Considerations: Native Cigarette Use in Canada

On average, only 18.2 per cent of Canada’s population smokes — but that figure rises to 56 per cent among First Nations people. That fact, along with the low smoking initiation age among youth in Indigenous communities, is at the centre of a fierce debate over the role of tobacco in Indigenous cultures and society.

Some argue that tobacco is sacred to Indigenous peoples, but others say there are better alternatives for the health of Indigenous children and adults — including education about the dangers of tobacco, a minimum legal age limit for buying cigarettes, and more effective prevention strategies aimed at both families and youth.