I think land back is a great way to start looking at indigenous laws and looking at how.... There's no word I can use, but “stewardship” is the closest thing I can think of when we look at land back and look through our indigenous knowledge and our indigenous laws around that. We're probably the best people to be taking care of the lands, to be protecting those lands and respecting the fish, the shellfish and the environment. That would be a place to begin with applying indigenous laws to land back, to own things.
For Semiahmoo, one of their things would be taking back Boundary Bay and putting Semiahmoo into jurisdiction over that so they could apply their indigenous laws in bringing back the fishery, bringing back the shell-fishery and the protection of other waterways. In the U.S., where waters cross reserves, everybody upstream of that reserve on non-indigenous lands has to meet or exceed the water quality requirements on the reserve. There's nothing like that in Canada.
If we were to apply indigenous laws to things like that and to other areas of land, I think we'd be a lot better off. That's where I see a start.