Hamar Foster, associate professor of Law at the University of Victoria, explains it this way. First of all, Indian title is a legal concept, hundreds of years old, and no one, not even the government, is free to choose whether or not to accept the law. Secondly, to accept the legal concept of Indian title in B.C. is to accept a claim, not a result, and is quite consistent with rejecting a particular native interpretation of title. The extent to which each band or nation still has title, and what that means, is precisely what talks would be about. The problem, of course, is that when native people and non-native people politicians and lawyers sit down to discuss title, two very different definitions and set of assumptions are at work.
Native people tend to talk more about a relationship and responsibility to the land.
At a minimum, it is the legal right to possess and use land, to which the underlying title of the Crown is subject. Obviously, what the courts will do to fill in the gaps in this concept remains to be seen, but for present purposes the fundamentals can be summed up in the following five propositions. That when Europeans arrived in Canada, the Indians were there, organized in societies and occupying the land as their forefathers had done for centuries. That is what Indian title means. . . That Indian title is a unique concept.