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Alberta Online Encyclopedia
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Nature's Law
Spiritual Life, Governance, Culture, Traditions, Resources, Context and Background
The Heritage Community Foundation, Alberta Law Foundation and Albertasource.ca
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The Elements of Knowledge: Good Law is Good Medicine
Natural and Super Natural

Resistance to Categorizing Reality

Relatedness

Law and Landscape

Good Medicine

Social Memory

Meaning of Time

Visual representation of nature's laws


Furthermore, from the Indigenous point of view, there is a necessary therapeutic dimension to all law. By keeping the law, one lives in tune with a system that produces the good life…with Nature’s Law. Indigenous people accepted the truths of Nature’s Law because it was regarded as the best way to live in tune with the larger reality to which they were inextricably connected. That is why law could and was referred to as "medicine." That is not to say that Indigenouss believed that all laws, codes and taboos originated in some transcendent domain. To be sure, people to people issues did produce laws among Indigenous peoples, but the point is that these laws were held already to be enshrined in the normative relationships existing between currently-living humans and the physical and spiritual landscape. It is that relatedness that made the law a law. Thus Kluckhohn would write about the Athapascan-speaking Navajo:

"A Navaho cannot conceive of absolute good or absolute evil, though perhaps it is misleading even to use these two words. The Navaho conceive of what is to be desired and what is to be feared more than of the morally approved and disapproved … the two qualities of the sought and of the avoided shade into each of the and blend. Categories like ‘the social,’ ‘the economic,’ ‘the political’ baffle the schooled Navaho. Life is a whole." (Kluckhohn 365).

Proper relationship to that whole environment was a prerequisite for any local and personal "norm" to be approved. To use our language, Nature's Law was based upon a worldview that regarded the whole apparatus of norms, taboos, laws and treaties as having a sacrality. This was the foundation of Nature’s Law.

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