Another important finding in this research is that the
reason laws were not codified was not the lack of social
memory and its ability to systematize data. Rather it was
because the reality in which they operated was deemed too
changing and variable for such a system to obtain. No one
had an absolute perspective from which to proclaim such a
code. Rather than abstract norms, such as those expressed by
the ancient Hebrews in the Ten Commandments, for example,
Indigenous expressions were rooted in case examples mediated
to the group through the collective memory of the community.
A good summary of this principle is found in the following:
"The highest compliment or tribute they could pay
a speaker was to say of him or her ‘w’daeb-wae’, taken
to mean ‘he/she is right, correct, accurate, truthful.’
It is an expression approximating the work for ‘truth’
in the English language, except that it means one casts
one’s knowledge as far as one has perceived it and as
accurately as one can describe it, given one’s command
of language. Beyond this one cannot go. According to
this understanding, there can be no such thing as
absolute truth" (Basil Johnson’s intro to Dancing
with a Ghost - )
The moral norms implicit in this judicial wisdom was
passed on through storytelling, not through the development
of certain "test cases" that then took on normativeness and
eventually gave rise to abstract codes. As Cruikshank points
out:
"Oral traditions survive by repeated tellings, and
each narrative contains more than one message. The
listener is part of the storytelling event too, and is
expected to think about and interpret the messages in
the story. A good listener will bring different life
experiences each time he or she hears it and will learn
different things each time. Oral tradition is like a
prism which becomes richer as we improve our ability to
view it from a variety of angles. It does not try to
spell out everything one needs to know, but rather to
make the listener think about ordinary experiences in
new ways." (1991, 12)
It follows that a case was not a straight re-telling of
all pertinent details. To imply that one could do that is to
imply that one has knowledge of all frames of reference
relevant to the story, or at least one has complete view of
all perspectives of this distant occurrence. Indigenous
wisdom was too modest to make such claims, or at least too
aware that there could be many conflicting frames to
evaluate an important case. So Nature’s Law would be very
reluctant to assign the place that we give to some basic
principles, like "Thou shalt not lie," for the simple reason
that no one could know what the ‘lie’ was unless it was
experienced in a particular case, and then the understanding
would require that it apply to that case rather than to
establishing a fixed code about lying. True, the Indigenous
accepted that this case was an example of lying, but they
did not then go on to draw the conclusion that all lying was
bad. It is precisely this variability of the frameworks of
testimony that makes our designation in court of guilty or
not guilty so artificial to Indigenous peoples. They have no
word for such a concept.
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