I should preface by saying that I'm not a treaty person. The Haudenosaunee people are not treaty people. We had treaties like the Two Row Wampum treaty, which is referenced quite often. We know the royal proclamation did not include Quebec, so that doesn't apply here.
In regard to how land is used by the Haudenosaunee people, it's the women who hold title to the land. It's this rupture of the family unit that has caused colonization to attack, not just the family unit but the land itself. We look at how the land has been destroyed and contaminated. This is what's happened to indigenous people. You could see it as a symbolic representation of what has happened to the identity of indigenous people.
The foundation for me is not colonial laws. The foundation for me is Kaianere'kó:wa, the Great Law of Peace. That teaches us how to work with the land, to love the land, to love our relations and to try to find peaceful ways for resolution, but the way this current system exists makes it impossible. It's impossible because not only is it costly with lawyers and a lot of people do not have the resources, but the land, which is a huge part of our identity—in fact, it's the pillar of our identity—we're losing more of that land so that future generations are not going to be able to enjoy it.
In my community, we are still fighting for those same pieces of land. Oka still claims that land. They are still playing golf on that eight-hole golf course. We have not even come close to a solution.
When I spoke to Marc Miller about the organized crime, the lack of safety and the vulnerability of people like me and others, he said that we can't do anything, but we can't not do anything. To me, this is really evidence of the lack of goodwill that is needed to talk about what it means to have land back.