We, by which I mean the people of the planet, are challenging the fundamentals of the Rule of Law, by which I mean the assumptions that provide order. I'm not talking treaties, constitutions, or anything written down, which has been the focus of the Western World assumptions for a long time. Studying law was called "reading" law. The job was owning the books and knowing what was in them.
I'm going more basic, the rule is that "big dogs eat first." (If the dog is Trump, he eats cheeseburgers.) The idea is that law is about power and the key is who has the power. In the zoo it is not the tiger. In the wild it is the top predator. In the tribe it is the "chief" and in the country it is the sovereign. In a democracy it is the voters unless they don't vote.
But the WWW (Western World White men) claimed that ultimate authority came from God, mythical or not, and if that wasn't enough for you there was force (whom the military would obey) and ownership (who gave your title to the land). So all these entities come into it. The ultimate authority for human arrangements is always the People, as a whole. That's why Pelosi is stalling impeachment -- she doesn't think all the people will support it. (God is dead. Many have left the pews.) Their power will be running in the streets. Ask HongKong.
Natural law is self-enforcing. It's not like moral law, which is rationally and emotionally effective but quite possibly against nature, which is the essential being of a creature or place. The sea rising, the volcano erupting, the hurricane blowing, act according to natural law, which is described by science. In the beginning of universities in about the year 1000 AD, they endorsed all this sorting of ideas into disciplines; the basics were theology, law, medicine and natural science. But it keeps getting unsorted.
When I was divorced and went back to teaching (1970), the principal was enrolled, though he was low quantum. He had the idea that marriage was not a religious or moral or legal state, but that it was a form of ownership. I suppose one could argue that this was early indigenous doctrine. His idea was that I had been "owned" by my husband (like Thomas Jefferson's second wife), but he had topped my famous ex- by hiring me, and therefore he could tell me what to do. With the younger, prettier teaching aides, he felt that he was "romantically" entitled to them and died while a court case was pending. The state did not agree. But on a rez, employment is a source of power and punishment. I don't know how she managed to get the case out of tribal court.
I was hired to monitor study hall, since I hadn't yet renewed my teaching license. Public schools are a form of state law even on tribal territory. He ordered me to research Indian law and report, but his idea was the laws made by WWW (the Western White World) about how to handle "Indians," which began as war law and ended as control by poverty. Obey or starve. He was after entitlement and justification for control. I stalled. Then I left.
Bob Scriver and I had had a Medicine Pipe Bundle transferred to us on the authority of Bob's dream as interpreted by indigenous people born in the 19th century and still living by those rules, still under the authority of something like "The Force", related to moral and natural law, never written down. Pipe ceremonies arose among the prairie tribes in the 18th and 19th centuries so the rules usually derived from ownership/possession of the lodge, weapons, and whatever carried power in a kind of mythic, emotional sense. Thus, the basic "ownership" -- though one didn't own but only protected and activated the objects of veneration (a kind of power) -- was assigned to a stable "married" couple.
When Bob died, I was interested in what happened to my Blackfeet law ownership of the Bundle and also the Badger Lodge which was dream-authorized and valorized. I went to the WWW court case probating Bob's will. As I say, I'm not a lawyer but a lawyer for the fourth wife was defending her ownership. I only wanted to testify rather than claim money, but was excluded on the grounds of "standing." That is, someone may be heard in a case if they have some legitimate reason to believe they will be affected.
In this case, if I had been advised by a lawyer, I would have argued that because the will was in part a matter of public charity -- gifts to Carroll College and the Montana Historical Society -- the court was obliged to hear testimony from me about that matter. I didn't know then, but later attention revealed that the charity was pretty much a cover for the lawyer and his legal ability to keep things secret, in his personal safe. This sort of thing is in the law because lawyers make laws.
The question remained about who "owned" the Sacred Objects. The tribe, not the WWW authorized people, but the newly awakened academically energized people believed that the People were the owners and their traditional rules applied, but never contacted me as the remaining "owner". (I was no longer on the rez by then.) When Bob sold his "collection" of artifacts to the Edmonton Provincial Museum (just whose museum it was -- Royal, Provincial, or part of a Consortium -- also became fuzzy), these academically and morally empowered people claimed that their law superseded the money-certified ownership of the Bundles and went up to Edmonton to seize the Bundles back.
Seizing objects that carried valorized power was a long tradition. But WWW safeguards of ownership prevailed. The curator did sit on the floor with the Browning men and take them seriously. Claiming their own natural power, one of the men cursed the curator and painted his wrists ochre as a sign. The curser was not taken seriously by the WWW world, but in a year or so the curator died of cancer. Was that some kind of natural law, "karma"? I'll quote the Amskapipikuni knowledge carrier we often consulted, though he usually gave the same answer: "Could be!"
In a while public opinion sided with the tribal men and the Bundles were put in the physical care of a respected tribal man, although he was on the Canadian side, which caused grumbling on the American side. But the Blackft according to history and what might be called natural demographic law, are on both sides of the WWW boundary. (The Bundles were a small part of the entire collection which included guns and Mountie uniforms, plus "flash" parade items like beaded white buckskin suits with matched patterns.)
There are a lot of rules about what power goes with the physical ownership of Bundles: if they are captured by an enemy, they will need to be re-energized after return. One of the most interesting aspects of the laws about Bundles is that the Bundle -- or the Pipe inside it -- are considered to have intentions and desires of their own. After Bob's death, the Bundle he didn't sell but kept personally "alive" with ceremonies as well as the Badger Lodge both simply disappeared. Stolen? Hidden? Sold by the fourth wife? When it wants to come back, it will.
In the meantime I still own the power/rights to painting that badger design on a lodge. I don't do it. I stand back. I sit down. I own the most valuable and powerful "thing" of all, unacknowledged by WWW law. It's the knowledge.
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