Thank you for the kind words.
Aboriginal rights in this country are very limited and very narrow. Section 35 aboriginal rights afford us the ability to do what—to hunt, fish and gather? That is not the conception of rights that indigenous people had in mind when our ancestors agreed to share the land with Canadians. They are not the rights that we exercised prior to the establishment of this place—Canada—and, as I said, they provide very few avenues for us to express rights in any contemporary way. Courts have routinely frozen indigenous people in the past in terms of the expression of rights.
I think the one area where there is some innovation is title, in particular, the 2013 Tsilhqot'in case that vested a management interest, an economic interest, in jurisdictional potential among first nations that can prove title to their land.
I think that's an additional reason we see fewer communities moving through the comprehensive land claims processes. If the court recognizes that there's a managerial stake and interest in title lands, why would you go through a claims process that extinguishes those rights? You wouldn't. That's silly.
Instead, communities are starting to look to unique and novel models that are not connected to any federal policy or any federal legislation to begin animating aboriginal title in their own ways. I think the examples on the west coast with what the Haida are doing and what the Tsilhqot'in are doing really reflect an indigenous-led, indigenous-imagined approach to aboriginal title that isn't necessarily tied to section 35 aboriginal rights.
I think we often, as indigenous people, get caught up in this belief that we're bound by Canadian law and policy, but that's not necessarily the case. We have our own law. We have our own approaches to our relationship to the land, and we can assert and enforce jurisdiction on that land using those laws.
In fact, we're starting to see that Canadian law is providing maybe the shade or the contour to have a dialogue about where those laws meet. I think that was a really powerful element of the 2013 court decision.
The answer to your question is entirely on the side of indigenous people. It is up to indigenous people to enforce our interpretation of our rights in practice on the land. It's less about what a court decides or a government decides, in fact.