Definition: One of the 10 categories of
Nature's Laws developed by the Nature's Laws Project
Team and defined as "Domain of shamans, medicine people,
holy women, holy men, community 'religious' guidance;
enshrined in traditional ceremonies like the sun dance,
sweat lodge, shaking tent rites, hunter, fisher laws, etc."
Rules and requirements associated with ritual is the
responsibility of the wise and the spiritually gifted.
Ritual law has many dimensions, including seasonal
directives, the institutional demands of annual rites, and
hunting and planting ceremonies, to name only a tiny few.
Taboos also play a role in this law, some of which are kept
secret, or are the terrain of the knowledgeable. Most
ordinary citizens remain outside the deeper reaches of this
law as to the manner it is applied, and instead experience
the full power of the ritual as it happens.
The peoples on Turtle Island have incredibly complex and
diversified religious lives. We cannot hope to recount this
multiplicity here. Rather we need to remind ourselves of
this fact relative to Nature's Laws…the model for all
ceremonial life is the rhythms and patterns of nature
itself. It is Nature's Laws that provides the perceived
stability out of which ritual life develops.
Here we see a dramatic contrast with the notions of
Western society …where for Europeans, nature is wild and
untamed, unpredictable and uncaring, Indigenous peoples
everywhere in North America saw (and see) nature as
embodying regularity, constancy and benevolence. It is but a
step for Indigenous peoples, then, to insist that adhering
to Ritual Law parallel Nature's Law; properly carrying out
ceremony, taps into Nature's Laws by virtue of their
interconnection and intimate relationship. Furthermore,
rituals provide the means to influence those sources of
power that are known to be beyond human beings but were
intimately related to them.
In addition, participating in ritual provides the
individual and the collective the means of making sense of
Nature’s Laws and being a part of them at an emotional and
spiritual, rather than intellectual, level.
It might be helpful to recount some important ways that
Ritual Law impacts on culture and society of traditional
Indigenous people. We have chosen only a few here.
- Westerners are now very much conditioned to the fact
that a state’s law stands apart from Religious Law, and
indeed, subject religions to the greater power of the state
in civic affairs. But it was not always so. Indeed, it is
only recently that some aspects of a very ancient Western "religious law" are being done away with in Canada: Sunday
shopping and paid-time release for religious obligations.
This alerts us to the fact that religious law has shaped
Western culture even when official ties have been severed.
The Monarch of England is still the head of the Church of England.
One of the crucial aspects of Ritual Law is time.
Religion structures social and cultural life by determining
the ritual year, and Indigenous law is no different.
However, where time in the Western conception is linear, and
is founded upon the image of blocks of time sequentially
stretching to infinity in a straight line, Nature's Law
insists that time is cyclical. The model for this circular
view of time is the seasons, with their continual, yet
regular change. This model is the basis for Ritual Law. It
is Ritual Law that provides the rules for other codes in
society. It is to Ritual Law that all Indigenous people
looked when a decision of high import had to be made. It is
Ritual Law which ties individuals and collectives to the
cycle of the seasons and makes them a participant in it.
- Ritual Law insists that there is a protocol for
addressing the spiritual; this is not to be trifled with,
nor left to amateurs. Ritual Law deals with the most
powerful entities known to the universe, and therefore only
the most knowledgeable and/or the most wise are to provide
the access. The assumption is that there is a Proper Path by
which the group may access the powers, and everyone is more
or less proceeding along that path. Guidance is needed, and
Ritual Law provides the means for that guidance to be
appropriated.
Many of the artifacts that ended up in Museums across the
world relate to this Spiritual Legacy, and this suggests
that each represents a dimension of a Ritual Law system
about which even the most sophisticated purchaser knew very
little. Each artifact has its proper place within the
Pathway, and power becomes attached to it because of that
place. This applies also to gravesites, hunting territories
and sacred places that are now occupied by others. They all
constituted part of Ritual Law.
- Nature's Law provides that Ritual Law can be expressed
in many different ways, and that engagement with the
realities along the Path can take many forms. One of the
most significant expressions of Ritual Law is the embodiment
of sacred powers in masks and unusual dress. That is, in the
carrying out of Ritual Law, some ritual specialists use
dress and mask which all them to use their power. Everyone
knows, of course that the people thus dressed up are not
someone or something else, but rather that they have become
something else for the ritual. Ritual Law thus introduces
and brings to life the personified beings, whether they were
mythical, legendary, or historical.
The re-enactment of some mythical moment can become
a way of renewing and revitalizing the people and the
cosmos…a transforming and taking the people to that moment
when the powerful people were first here. It can be a means
of rejuvenating of the cycle of life. It was not "entertainment", regardless of how colourful and exuberant
it was. This is why ethnographical descriptions are so poor
a source for meaning…the writers had no knowledge of Ritual
Law. It was Ritual Law that dictated the rules for what the
ceremony meant and how it should be done. It was Ritual Law
that indicated who could attend such ceremonies and who
should be barred because of the power and significance of
the rite. Few anthropologists or missionaries were ever
parties to those rules, so most of the Ritual Law
descriptions we have are almost useless in comprehending
this aspect of Nature's Law.
- Nature's Laws provide that ritual is not dogma, nor
applied without change. The freedom of Indigenous peoples to
modify rites arise out of the fluidity of religious
encounter…once you accept that the gifted person can have
his or her own encounters with the spirit world, and that
those encounters can be extended to the world of everyday
existence through his/her power gifts, the dynamic nature of
ritual and religion has to be accepted. Thus religious acts
can and do take on a local colouring. This accounts for the
incredible variety of Ritual Acts. Furthermore, ritual could
be imported from another source or group and utilized if it
was deemed to reflect the Path for the people at that time.
So even the cyclical model can be modified by
'historical' interventions. For example, not all Indigenous
peoples on the Prairies practice the sun dance the same way,
with the same rules applying…the Cree regard it as a Thirst
Dance, suggesting its relationship to fertility and rain,
whereas other, such as the Lakota Sioux, stress the piercing
ceremonies and the offering of ceremonial life-blood to be
renewed. Not all peoples have Secret Societies that adopt
their own codes of behaviour and that discipline members
according to their own protocols. Not all groups use rites
like Vision Quests the same way. Yet they all have rites of
cleansing, rites of naming, acts of prayer, guardian spirit
relationships, great cultural gatherings, and give-away
procedures, to select only a few.
- Ritual Law apply in areas unfamiliar to
Non-Indigenous peoples. Hunting is not a 'secular'
activity. What is the meaning of a moose that returns often
to hang around the village of a powerful hunter? Westerners
would read this as the attractiveness of a patch of food, or
a previous familiarity with locale. An Indigenous hunter has
a relationship with the animals, and he knows very well this
is not happenstance…it is the moose "giving" itself to the
community for food. Contrariwise, if a good hunter misses an
easy shot, he knows very well there is something about this
animal that is sacred. He has a kindred connection to this
animal's spirit. He would never try to kill that animal. The
rituals of hunting and trapping, of honoring those animals
that give themselves, are all part of Ritual Law.
Similar constraints apply to planting. Especially
dominant in Algonquin-speaking people of Eastern Canada,
planting rites signal that a bountiful harvest is not just
dependent upon rain at appropriate times. It is dependent
upon the securing and active involvement of tutelary beings
in the whole process. Each and every activity has some kind
of ritual attached to it. In consequence, we conclude that
Ritual Law may apply to actions that to Westerners are "everyday" and non-religious in character.
- Ritual Law also has implication for landscape. Lake
Minnewanka near Banff in the Alberta Rockies may be a lake
of warm, pleasant water surrounded by beautiful mountains,
but it is also a sacred lake. In the past among Indigenous
peoples, it was known as a place noted for its powerful
visitations from the spirit world.
Thus, for example, youth among the Tsuu T'ina
may be sent to the higher reaches of the mountains, seeking
a vision regarding or from their tutelary spirit. Alone,
without food, and committed to prayer for day and night for
several days, the youth seeks a vision from the other world
as to his true nature, and what the nature of his
relationships will be with that spirit world. Ritual Law
dictates the site, the rules attached with the quest, the
requirements leading up to it, and the interpretation of the
result. No one would ever violate the sacredness of his
vision quest site in any way, for he is connected to it by a
"natural" umbical cord. The same holds true for Sundance sites, grave
sites, even sites of the burying of the placenta. In short,
Ritual Law operates with awareness of a wide range of
landscape that has both individual spirit or group-related
power.
- The Indigenous year was divided into time periods when
ceremonies that had group significance would be performed.
Among the Plains peoples, the Sundance/Thirst Dance was
clearly one of those occasions. When the whole "tribe" or
people moved to the bison hunt and the integral Sundance,
the Ritual Law structured the meeting in important ways: the
Holy Woman had to pledge herself to undertake the rite, the
Sundance site itself was set apart and purified, the tipis
and tents circled the ritual lodge and enclosed the ritual
leaders, the role of leadership was authorized for ritual,
policing and social control purposes, etc. Dancers may have
been preparing for a year for the event, based on a pledge
made at a previous Sundance. These rites may involve major
give-away rites, by which some wealthy individual expressed
his gratitude to the spirits by giving away as much as he
could to the tribe.
Wayne Roan from the Mountain Cree insists that the
Sundance structure was the basis for all other rituals
carried out throughout the year, and that leadership roles
in the local band arose out of the position people had
during the Sundance. In this way, Ritual Law set the agenda
for how people would live for the next year. Similarly,
among women, rites of passage from childhood into adulthood
were marked by the rites of holy women who inducted young
girls into puberty by secret women's rites. Girls learned
both the meaning of the rites and the responsibilities they
would soon be assuming as they grew up and married.
- One of the persons with the greatest power in any
Indigenous group is the shaman or medicine person. This
person is the custodian of the people's rituals, and is
charged with carrying them out properly and instructing
others in how to respond to the spiritual world. Most often
the shaman is male, but sometimes there are women medicine
people. They were deemed as the most powerful among all the
leaders, who, after all, could be dismissed from a position
if he or she became ineffective or senile. People treated
the shaman with extraordinary respect.
We will touch on the role of the shaman below, but
it important to realize that, because Nature' s Law was not
codified in our sense of the word, the shaman is the living
repository of legal understandings. The shaman is called
upon to give legal renderings of matters that would fall
under what we would consider "secular" leadership. For
example, outside people may be coming to the community with
a proposal for a business venture which would involve
cutting timber. The medicine person might engage in a
ceremony to better "see" the situation, and then
might present his analysis of the moral quality of these
outsiders, the likely consequences to the natural world of
the proposed operation, what likely would happen to the
community if it accepted the offer. The medicine person
provides this "intelligence." Hence we can see that Ritual
Law can be used for a very secular matter, in this case, a
business proposal.
- Major historical events also required Nature's Law, in
the form of Ritual Law. Rituals were necessary to demark the
significance of a treaty, for example, when everyone
attending had to smoke the welcome Pipe, and everyone closed
a session with a validating ritual smoke. Such actions were
not just good form. Smoking the Pipe both set aside
individual will and affirmed the good purposes of everyone
participating. It required the most honorable of men to
articulate the issues, and it presupposed a mutual
comprehension of the many dimensions of the problem.
Certainly it had a political content, but when consensus had
been reached, Ritual Law stepped in. This reflects that
participating in a final smoke was more than a denouement…it
was the validation that all had acted honorably and all had
agreed to the conclusions reached. The final smoke signaled
what we now say when a law has been passed and recorded in
Parliament: It has received Royal Assent. Similar rituals
were seen in this generation at the First Ministers’
Conferences in the 1980s, and in the "cleansing" of Paul
Martin when he was sworn in by the Governor General as Prime
Minister in 2003.
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