Niki Christina Ashton (born September 9, 1982) is a Canadian politician. She is currently the New Democratic Member of Parliament for the electoral district of Churchill in Manitoba, Canada. She was first elected in the 2008 federal election.

A resident of Thompson, Manitoba, she is the daughter of Manitoba provincial NDP cabinet minister Steve Ashton. She has been an instructor at the University College of the North.

Ashton was born in Thompson and attended École Riverside School and R. D. Parker Collegiate. She later attended the Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong. She has a B.A in Global Political Economy from the University of Manitoba, and an M.A in International Affairs from Carleton University.

Later, she was a coordinator and promoter of volunteering at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. At the event, she assisted the team from China.

She has studied human rights in Canada, and was awarded the Ahmed Ali Hashi Human Rights Scholarship for her work.

Ashton speaks Greek, French, English and Spanish fluently. In 2011 it was reported that she was also studying Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian and Turkish, and Cree.

First Nations is a term that collectively refers to various Aboriginal peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis. There are currently over 630 recognized First Nations governments or bands spread across Canada, roughly half of which are in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia. The total population is nearly 700,000 people. Under the Employment Equity Act, First Nations are a "designated group", along with women, visible minorities, and persons with physical or mental disabilities. They are not defined as a visible minority under the Act or by the criteria of Statistics Canada.

The term First Nations (most often used in the plural) has come into general use for the indigenous peoples of the Americas located in what is now Canada, except for the Arctic-situated Inuit, and peoples of mixed European-First Nations ancestry called Métis. The singular, commonly used on culturally politicized reserves, is the term First Nations person (when gender-specific, First Nations man or First Nations woman). A more recent trend is for members of various nations to refer to themselves by their tribal or national identity only, e.g., "I'm Haida," or "We're Kwantlens," in recognition of the distinctiveness of First Nations ethnicities.

Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as "indigenous" according to one of the various definitions of the term, though there is no universally accepted definition.

In the late twentieth century, the term began to be used primarily to refer to ethnic groups that have historical ties to groups that existed in a territory prior to colonization or formation of a nation state, and which normally preserve a degree of cultural and political separation from the mainstream culture and political system of the nation state within the border of which the indigenous group is located. The political sense of the term defines these groups as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by nation states. As a result, a special set of political rights in accordance with international law have been set forth by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The United Nations have issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and natural resources. Depending on which precise definition of "indigenous people" used, and on the census, estimates of a world total population of Indigenous people range from 220 million Indigenous peoples in 1997 to 350 million in 2004.