Natural Resources committee  Thank you. That's a good question. In terms of capacity, you'll find that the way our communities work is that they are broken into really two parts. In one you have the thinkers; if those people don't agree to something, then it's not going to work. In the other you have the pe

Natural Resources committee  —instead of one by one. You're wasting time and energy, and you may be saying two different things to two different peoples. If I had a proposal, I'd want all of you to hear it, and I would deal with all of you within this room. You're from your various constituencies, which are

Natural Resources committee  I was trying to answer it by telling you that the approach is what's important. Deal with the whole collective. You sit all of them down. They all hear the same things. Then they can talk amongst themselves, and they'll develop a way to say yes or no—

Natural Resources committee  Yes. Thank you. The questions are very interesting. I'm going to try to deal with both of those questions in the answer. I think when you approach the first nations, you have to approach them as a collective. Don't go to them as individual communities or bands, because they're

Natural Resources committee  The Arctic Council doesn't get specifically involved in any of that. Those are more domestic matters, like what we're involved in here. We are able to sit down and develop ways to proceed. I'm thinking about what you said earlier about maybe giving you some examples. Mr. Chair,

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for bringing that up. I'm not entirely familiar with the specifics of that agreement, but it looks like they're organizing themselves around that whole concept. If you look at Treaty 8, it doesn't encompass all of the Treaty 8 area, because Treaty 8 was put into place

Natural Resources committee  The Berger inquiry happened in the early seventies in the Northwest Territories and it actually happened because the Liberal government at the time was a minority government. They asked Justice Berger to travel throughout the Mackenzie Valley to speak to the Dene on the future of

Natural Resources committee  As said earlier, people within their own territories have a certain degree of legal and political authority which has to be recognized. They also have overlapping interests. You will find that there's more than one community or one tribe that needs to be dealt with in a lot of in

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. In Canada, at the pace we're going, it's going to take a long time to settle all of the outstanding differences between the first nations and the Crown. It takes decades to negotiate agreements, because Canada doesn't want to recognize the rights that we have within t

Natural Resources committee  I think Canada most likely leads in terms of how to deal with indigenous peoples, depending on specific approaches, but then again in some respects we're behind in Canada. If you look at instances in Australia, for example, you'll see they're far ahead in how they deal with natio

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to present to you and have this discussion with this important committee. I am the Arctic Athabaskan Council's international chair. We also are members of the Arctic Council as permanent participants. We represent approximately 50,000