I'd actually be interested in the elder's thoughts about this, personally.
Just quickly, I think about emerging carbon market trading systems, for example, and the idea that one might, in an emerging market, be compensated for leaving a tree standing. It's an interesting concept that is just emerging. It's a new conversation, but make no mistake about it, from a personal Ahousaht Nuu-chah-nulth perspective, it's a conversation about what's been lost. We don't have any bison in our territories, but we have lots of other things that we can't access any longer, and that has tremendous health, economic, and social implications. How do you quantify those?
I like to share this story: only about 15 years ago, when I was in a Stanford executive management program, the professor waggled his finger at me and said, “Issues of environmental and social justice do not belong in the market economy.” That wasn't that long ago, in one of the top Ivy League schools in the world, so it feels as though we're still at the baby-step stage around points that we're talking about here.
As this country embraces the recognition of indigenous peoples, there is unquestionable harm; the residential schools were a tool used under the guise of education as a tool of destruction. We're talking about people's food and medicine, and the fundamental balance being thrown out of sync. Is it anything that can really, truly, ever be compensated?
The points being made here are about the restoration of balance between people and the environment, first of all. Second, there is no question that first nations seek justice when it comes to land and the access that's now being lost, and they seek to reconcile that with the market system that was developed around us and brought into our territories. Previous to it, we had a market system that was otherwise operable, but in a different manner.