If we turn the clock back about 25 years, before diamonds were discovered here in the Northwest Territories, we had virtually nobody in the aboriginal community working in our mining industry. There were some, but not a lot. We probably had a handful of businesses that could service the mining industry that were indigenous back in those days.
Since diamonds have come along, there's been a really strong effort by companies, indigenous groups, and government to help improve that. Through things like socio-economic agreements, impact and benefit agreements, and actions like that, today we have on the order of about 835 indigenous mine workers, which is about half of our northern workforce. The other half is a fly-in fly-out workforce. It's predominantly non-indigenous. We have almost $6 billion in indigenous business payments from those mines, in constructing and operating them since 1996.
That's a significant burst of growth in the last 20 years. The key is, mines don't last forever, so we need to be finding new mines to replace them so we can sustain that level of employment and even grow it.
The critical factors, then, are training people, to give them the skills. If you look at our education levels here, in the indigenous communities they are lower than in the non-indigenous population. We need to keep that effort on education, and get more people through high school and into the trades and professions, so training is a big opportunity there.