People often think that self government is about a totally separate native administration. Not so, says law professor Jeremy Webber, who worked on the co-management study with Scott. Self-government isn't about aboriginal people going off and doing things totally on their own. Complete autonomy is rarely an option and even when it is, we have to be careful about how it's defined. One of those students, Susan Drummond, did her master's thesis on Inuit justice systems.
Aboriginal women can be very vulnerable, for instance.
Imposing a system from the South with little regard for native culture is insensitive. And constructing a system with an overly naive conception of how problems can be solved is just as bad. We assume native culture is still rooted in exactly the same sets of historical beliefs that existed before contact with Europeans, and we think that notion of culture should be preserved, as if it were a museum piece. Aboriginals are struggling with what it means to be native today, not with what it was like in the 13th century.