We need to treat this as a refugee situation, because that's what it is. 
Those who are willing to leave for a town where there is work would be given support for a minimum of a year and offered a home to replace the one they left. We did this with 10,000 refugees from Syria. We can certainly do it with those who have been so miserably failed by the misguided Indian Act and the reservation system. 
Life up North was just as brutal and unforgiving a hundred years ago.  It hasn't changed, but society has. The romanticized myth of First Nations idyllically hunting and fishing in peace and harmony with nature is gone, if it ever existed in the first place. 
Those of us who are not First Nation are immigrants or children of immigrants who left their "ancestral" grounds far behind and traveled thousands of miles sometimes never to see their families again. You do what needs to be done for your family to survive.