the area that we're talking about is about 20,000 square km and has a population of about 2,000. it's mostly densely forested land, punctuated by rivers and valleys. people live in camps - in tents - and survive by fishing and hunting. i want to hesitate to suggest that jobs don't exist, but the idea of a job is more communal than financial, and the exchange of currency for a task is actually somewhat corrupting to the communitarian basis of the economy.

the 2,000 people are distributed amongst five clans which, if you're scottish, you know is synonymous with a concept of extended family. so, the population is essentially composed of five isolated, extended families living in camps in the woods. they share everything; they're family. and, they broadly make decisions by unanimous consent, not by majority decree. anybody involved in any kind of activism has run across these kinds of decision making bodies and is aware of how difficult they can be in actually getting anything moving; they are perhaps not well suited to activism, and could certainly not be effectively extrapolated to an industrialized, urban economy, where you have a multitude of class-based competing interests trying to take control of a body that is seen as wielding authority (and has the sympathies of law enforcement). could you imagine a city of even 200,000 people operating on unanimous consent?

but, likewise, the introduction of western-style voting to very small, close-knit communities in isolated areas is likely to create conflict where none currently exists, and where there isn't actually any rational basis for conflict. when you take class out of a society, you largely eliminate the concept of democracy, because you don't have interests competing against each other; rather than have different interests competing over control of the community, you have a community discussing what is in it's best interests - like a family does, in the western system.

it's consequently less of an ethnic conflict than it is a difference of scale. when indigenous society has scaled up in the past - as it did with the six nations, or the settlements in cahokia - it has needed to adjust, and adopt confederacies that look something like western systems of governance. it is well understood that the united states took the six nations governing structure as a model when it started off with it's 13 states. likewise, the kind of governing structure that exists in the indigenous regions of bc today is not foreign to western culture, and even still exists today in certain isolated areas of europe - including on certain islands in the united kingdom, itself.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-a-contested-pipeline-tests-the-landscape-of-indigenous-law-who/