The author looks at community based management as practiced by the indigenous peoples of Canada and the modern day management regimes; and the historical management systems in Japan in contrast to the current management methods. This article’s objective, the author says, was to present some pieces for solving the puzzle of community-based fisheries management. There are two possibilities for understanding these pieces. The first is that the pieces create a story in and of themselves. The second is that the pieces are more than the sum of their parts. With the first possibility, the pieces may actually be linked as part of a story in their own right. Community-based management is nothing new in Canada or elsewhere in the Americas. It becomes a novelty only if the millennia of history are ignored by re-constructing the story as the history of European settlement. In making changes to resource use and management, the Canadian government followed European traditions. The scale of access and management followed the political map rather than the biology of the resources, and the lessons learned by aboriginal societies were simply discounted. The resource management knowledge and creativity of these societies must be honored rather than ignored.