Constructing Law, Space, and their Subjects:
Realities of Law and Governance among the North American Indians and Australian Aboriginals

Realities of Law and Governance among the North American Indians and Australian Aboriginals

Both the work of anthropologists and ethnographers on the one hand, and increasingly the evidence of Aboriginal people themselves on the other, has demonstrated that Aboriginal people had complex political and social systems, in which the spiritual and material, the natural and the human and the communal and individual were inextricably bound together in a mutually reinforcing system.

Consider the following passage from Patricia Olive Dickason's Canada's First Nations (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992):

Amerindians and Inuit perceived the universe as an intricate meshing of personalized powers great and small, beneficial and dangerous, whose equilibrium was based on reciprocity. While humans could not control the system, they could influence particular manifestations through alliances with spiritual powers, combined with their knowledge of how these powers worked. Such alliances had to be approached judiciously, as some spirits were more powerful than others, just as some were beneficent and others malevolent; every force had a counterforce... Keeping the cosmos in tune and staying in tune with the cosmos called for ceremonials, rituals, and taboos that had to be properly observed or performed if they were to be effective... Even the construction of dwellings and the layout of villages and encampments reflected this sense of spiritual order, with its emphasis on centers rather than boundaries. (p. 80)