I think it's going to be different from region to region, so it's not going to be a cheap endeavour. For the Gitxsan, for example, you might be able to aggregate some of it, but each nation is going to have its own way of doing business. I think we missed an opportunity with the guardians program 20 years ago to amalgamate the two ways of thinking.
The traditional law that guides first nations morals and guides the way they extract resources within their territories is what tells our folks to get out of the water when it's time. When traditional law says that there's not enough fish to sustain their food this year, that's the advice they listen to, not the advice of government. When C and P comes to town and says that we need to stop food fishing, there's a reluctance and a trust miscommunication there that is historical in nature. By providing an opportunity for our people to be involved in decision-making, it is easier for our people to palate those types of things.
Building off of that, there are opportunities, if you do enable, acknowledge and empower our traditional law, for them to be licence-issuers for whatever catches may happen in their territory. This can lead to shared resource mechanisms. The effort of our people goes up and down because we haven't had opportunities to fish every year, but a lot of us are starting to utilize recreational gear to get into the water for those types of purposes. If we could license up the sector through our nations, it would allow us to have more of a shared management tool in the sector.
That's one of the ways to do this, but it's going to take bilaterals. Sometimes they can aggregate up, and sometimes they're going to be about individual nations. That would also allow for traditional protocol agreements, which is something Bob spoke to a little with the treaty he mentioned. The treaty he mentioned was spun off a northwest tribal treaty on the Skeena. Through that mechanism, we were able to solve a problem in the Lax Kw'alaams territory, because since western law came into play, our fishermen have started to go down to the coast to harvest. That was a problem for our brothers and sisters in the Lax Kw'alaams territory because that was their territory. When our fishermen would go down there, DFO would take the allocation off their allocation, not ours.
We set up an MOU with the Gitxsan people, the Wet'suwet'en people, the Gitanyow people and the Lax Kw'alaams people to articulate that we would come down and take 5,000 sockeye this year. That's going to come off our plate, not the Lax Kw'alaams's plate. We were able to interact with each other through this tool and were able to speak to DFO in a cohesive voice. The problem, though, was that we weren't able to be acknowledged and enabled by local C and P because they didn't understand what was going on.
Those are some of the traditional ways we could start to alleviate some of these overlap conversations.