Cannabis and Clan Governance

Cannabis rules and laws should follow the same format as our customs and usages in other parts of our economy. We shouldn’t start creating new rules and new ways of making rules and systems that will make our way of life confusing. We have to maintain our continuity. Especially since we’re saying we’re a sovereign people. We have a right to be independent and to be our own unique people, and we have to stay true to who we are. We can’t be making whole new systems that don’t fit our culture.

I’m watching all these band councils making regulations, they’re basically adopting European models for policy and governance and rules. They’re trying to mimic European laws written by European lawyers. That’s not following our laws.

We already have the rules for medicine. They already exist. Fully. It’s just a matter of adding cannabis to that same set of rules and applications. Now, because people are seeing the cannabis industry as an opportunity to make some money, we’re looking at adding or implementing an aspect to our culture that we haven’t followed in a long time and that’s giving back to the group. For a long, long, time people were so poor they couldn’t afford to do that or they stopped doing it on a community-wide basis.