Natural law, the Original Instructions, and the teachings of place
Law that was here first
Long before any parliament sat or any treaty was signed, a river was already making law.
It decided where the cedar could grow and where the marsh would spread. It told the salmon when to return and the bear when to come down to the bank. It set the limits of the flood plain and the timing of the ice. Every living thing along its length organized itself around what the river allowed and what it would not tolerate. That is a legal order. It has jurisdiction, rules, consequences and a long memory.
When Indigenous Peoples speak of natural law, this is what is meant. Not a set of rules people invented and imposed on the land, but the law the land itself already holds. People did not write it. Our responsibility has always been to learn to read it.
This piece is an invitation to non-Indigenous readers to step back from thinking about law as something humans make, and to consider law as something that emerges from place: from water, soil, seasons, plants, animals and the relationships that hold them together.
The Original Instructions
Many Indigenous Nations teach that at Creation, every being was given Original Instructions: a purpose, a way of living, and a set of responsibilities to everything else.
The sun was instructed to give light and warmth. The water was instructed to give life and to move. The plants were given the work of feeding, healing and cleaning the air. The animals each received their own gifts and duties. In these teachings, none of these beings has stopped following its instructions. The maple still runs in spring. The geese still leave in autumn. The water still finds its way to the sea.
This is the foundation of natural law. Each being carries a role, and the roles fit together into a whole. Law, in this understanding, is the pattern of responsibilities that keeps that whole alive.
The difference from Western legal thinking is significant. Western law mostly begins with rights: what a person or a corporation is entitled to. Natural law begins with responsibilities: what each being owes to the others so that life can continue. A right asks, “What can I take?” A responsibility asks, “What must I give, and what must I protect, so the circle holds?”
Humans also received Original Instructions. In many teachings, we were the last to arrive and the most dependent. We carry no special authority over Creation. Our instructions are to watch, learn, give thanks, take carefully and help keep the balance the other beings already maintain.
How place makes law
Natural law is not universal in the way Western law tries to be. It is place-based. The laws of a prairie are not the laws of a coastal rainforest, and the laws of a northern lake are not the laws of a southern river valley. Each place has its own actors, its own rhythms and its own limits. So, each place produces its own law.
Three things create the conditions for that law to emerge
The actors. Every place is home to beings who co-exist and depend on one another: water, soil, fire, wind, plants, insects, fish, birds, animals and the spirits Indigenous Peoples recognize within them. Each one is a participant in the legal order, not an object inside it.
The relationships. Law lives in the connections between those actors. The wolf shapes the movement of the deer. The deer shapes the growth of the forest. The forest shapes the snowpack, which shapes the spring flow of the river, which shapes the fish. Pull on one strand and the whole web moves. Every one of those relationships carries an obligation, and those obligations together are the law of that place.
The cycles. Natural law is written in time as much as in space. Seasons, migrations, spawning runs, flowering, freeze-up and break-up are the calendar of the land. They tell every being when to act and when to rest. A law that ignores timing is not a law the land recognizes.
This means jurisdiction, in natural law, belongs to the place itself. A watershed has authority over what happens within it. People living there are not the owners of that authority. They are among the beings bound by it.
It also means consequences are real and built in. When the relationships are honoured, the place stays abundant. When they are broken through overharvesting, damming, draining or poisoning, the land responds: fish stop returning, soil blows away, fires burn hotter, water turns. Natural law enforces itself. The climate crisis is, in part, the land enforcing its law at a planetary scale.
Reading the land: laws people can learn
Indigenous legal traditions are learned by watching. Elders and knowledge keepers point to how a being lives and ask: what is this teaching us about how to live? The examples below are offered as illustrations of that way of reading, not as the codified law of any one Nation. Each Nation holds its own laws, and they are carried by its own people.
Water: the law of giving without keeping
Water gives itself to every living thing and keeps moving. It cannot be held still for long without going stagnant. From water, people can read a law that life must circulate, and that hoarding what sustains life breaks the order. Anishinaabe teachings about Nibi (water) place responsibility for water’s care with women, who carry water in the womb. The late Grandmother Josephine Mandamin walked around the Great Lakes carrying a copper pail of water to honour that responsibility.
Beaver: the law of building for others
The beaver changes a place more than almost any other animal, yet what it builds serves many. Its dams create wetlands that hold water through drought, filter it, and shelter fish, birds, frogs and moose. The law here is that any being with the power to reshape a place carries a duty to make it more livable for others, not only for itself.
Salmon: the law of return
Salmon leave their home rivers, travel the ocean, and come back to give their bodies to the place that made them. Their return feeds bears, eagles, wolves, people and even the forest itself, as nutrients from the sea are carried into the trees. The law is reciprocity across generations: what you were given, you return, and the place that raised you is owed your care.
Plants: the law of the honourable harvest
Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer has written about the Honourable Harvest, a set of teachings shared in many forms across Nations. In plain terms: ask permission before taking, never take the first, take only what you need, use everything you take, give thanks, and give something back. Sweetgrass, she notes, actually grows better when it is harvested respectfully than when it is left alone. The law is relationship, not abstention.
The shared dish: the law of enough
Around the Great Lakes, the Dish with One Spoon wampum records an agreement among Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and other Nations to share the land as one bowl. Everyone eats from it. No one takes more than they need. Something is always left for others and for those still to come, and the dish is kept clean. That agreement still applies to the land where Toronto now stands. Its law came from the land’s own limits: a dish can only feed everyone if no one empties it.
Fire: the law of renewal through restraint
Many Nations have long used carefully timed, low-intensity burns to renew grasslands, open forests and encourage berries and medicines. Fire is both destroyer and healer. Its law is that renewal needs the right timing and the right scale. When people suppress fire entirely, fuel builds up and the land answers with fires far beyond what it can absorb.
Buffalo: the law of kinship
For Plains Nations, the buffalo was a relative who gave food, shelter, tools and ceremony. In 2014, Nations on both sides of the medicine line signed the Buffalo Treaty, committing to bring the buffalo back to the land. It is a treaty with an animal, made because the buffalo’s return restores the grasslands and the relationships that depend on it. Cree teachings call this web of kinship wahkohtowin: we are all related, and relatives carry obligations to one another.
Why the land defines the people, and the law
For Indigenous Peoples, natural law is not an academic theory. It is the ground of identity. Many Nations take their names from the land, the water or the beings they live among. Languages are shaped by place: verbs for the way ice moves, words for winds that only blow in one valley, names for plants that grow on one hillside. The land is not a backdrop to culture. It is the source of it.
This is why knowledge and law cannot be separated from territory. Ceremonies follow the land’s calendar. Stories carry the land’s laws in a form that can be remembered and passed down: a story about a greedy hunter who loses the animals is a legal precedent, told so it will never be forgotten. Harvesting practices are the law applied in daily life. Every generation learns the law by living inside it.
It is also why so many Indigenous Peoples describe themselves as responsible to the land rather than owners of it. You cannot own a relative. You can only be in good relationship with them or fail to be. Anishinaabe teachings call the good life that comes from living in right relationship mino-bimaadiziwin. Mi’kmaw teachings speak of netukulimk: taking what the land offers in a way that never undermines its ability to keep giving.
And it is why the loss of land has been so devastating. When people are removed from their territory, they lose more than property. They lose access to the teacher, the classroom and the legal source all at once. Restoring Indigenous relationships to land is therefore also restoring a living body of law.
What could change if natural law were honoured
Recognizing natural law would not mean adding a few environmental rules to an existing system. It would change the starting question. Instead of asking, “How much can we use?” decision-makers would ask, “What does this place require to stay whole, and what is our role within it?”
That shift is already beginning to show up in practice.
Indigenous-led conservation. Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas across Canada are governed by Nations according to their own laws and responsibilities, often with Guardians programs that watch over the land the way their ancestors did.
Restoring relatives. Buffalo returning to the prairies, salmon returning to rivers after dams come down, and cultural burning returning to forests are all acts of putting natural law back into effect.
Two ways of seeing together. Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s principle of Two-Eyed Seeing asks us to look with the strengths of Indigenous knowledge in one eye and Western science in the other. Natural law and ecological science often describe the same truths in different languages.
For non-Indigenous People, honouring natural law is also a path into reconciliation that goes deeper than apology. Reconciliation between peoples is incomplete without reconciliation with the land. The relationships that colonization broke were never only between humans. They included the rivers that were dammed, the species that were driven out and the territories that were cut off from their caretakers.
If we let the land teach us again, we may find that the answers to the climate crisis were never missing. They were written into every watershed, every forest and every migration route, waiting to be read.
Learning to listen
Natural law asks something simple and difficult of everyone: slow down enough to notice. Learn the name of the watershed you live in. Learn which Nations have cared for it and whose laws still hold there. Watch what grows, what migrates and what has gone missing. Ask what your place needs from you.
The land has never stopped following its Original Instructions. The question for all of us, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, is whether we are ready to follow ours.
A note on respect: Indigenous laws belong to the Nations that hold them and are carried by their Elders and knowledge keepers. The teachings here are shared to open understanding, not to stand in for those voices. To learn the laws of a specific place, seek out the people of that place, on their terms.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash
The post Canada Where the Land Writes the Law appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Climate Change
FLIP OFF WOODSIDE TO SAVE SCOTT REEF: Greenpeace, Michael Caton, Thinkerbell mobilise Australia to challenge gas project at Scott Reef
6 November 2026
Greenpeace Australia Pacific has joined forces with Thinkerbell and iconic Australian actor Michael Caton on a major public movement and behaviour change initiative to save Scott Reef, calling on Australians to “flip off” gas corporation Woodside. The company plans to drill for gas at Australia’s largest oceanic reef, home to vulnerable green sea turtles, endangered pygmy blue whales, and thousands of marine species, off the coast of Western Australia.
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO HERE
At the heart of the collaboration is somebody who knows a thing or two about fighting off corporations to protect a home: Michael Caton. Set in a courtroom, Caton gives his voice to a voiceless inhabitant, a green sea turtle, and together they invite the public to show their support to save Scott Reef.
Designed to shift public behaviour and drive national debate, the movement asks the public to tag their MPs – applying direct political pressure on Environment Minister Murray Watt and Prime Minister Albanese Albanese to “flip off” Woodside’s dirty gas project, which would see up to 57 toxic wells drilled around Scott Reef off the coast of Western Australia.
Voiced by Michael Caton and set to a soundtrack provided by Radiohead, the narrative centres on our hero turtle defending her home from corporate overreach in a courtroom showdown. As the turtle defiantly flips her flippers at Woodside, Michael Caton calls on everyday Australians to take a stand and help save her home.
Michael Caton said: “I’m proud to lend my voice to Greenpeace to help save Scott Reef. The marine life out there can’t speak up, so we need to. Some things are too precious to risk.”
Glenn Walker, Head of Nature at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, added: “Woodside’s dirty gas project at Scott Reef, Australia’s largest oceanic reef, is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, threatening thousands of species, including the extremely vulnerable green sea turtles that nest there. By literally flipping off Woodside and Big Gas, Aussies are cutting through corporate spin and sending an unignorable message to Environment Minister Murray Watt and the Albanese government: save Scott Reef.”
Adam Ferrier, co-founder of Thinkerbell, said: “You can fight a corporation in the courtroom forever, but the real power to deliver lasting protection rests in parliament. Right now, our MPs hold an extraordinary opportunity to safeguard Scott Reef for generations to come. I’m proudly from WA, and I know how much the natural environment means to the people and economy of Western Australia. I’m also sure Woodside wants to do the right thing, and with enough public support and government action we’ll together save Scott Reef.
Paul Swann, Chief Creative Tinker at Thinkerbell notes: “When the stakes are this high, polite ads don’t work. You need an unignorable provocation that galvanises people and puts the pressure squarely where it belongs, on our leaders in Canberra. This isn’t just about protecting a reef; it’s about holding power to account.”
Greenpeace has been campaigning to stop Woodside’s dirty gas plans for years, increasing pressure on the Australian government to save Scott Reef from becoming an industrialised gas zone. From actions aboard Woodside’s gas platform to cinemas across Australia, Greenpeace isn’t backing off in their advocacy to save Scott Reef.
Rolling out across OOH, digital, social and cinema with an interactive landing page, this project will be amplified by high-profile figures urging Australians to take action, tag their MPs, and defend Scott Reef. The movement combines cinematic storytelling with organic social mobilsation and earned media, planned via Thinkerbell’s Alchemy model to drive real behaviour change and impact.
Marking their first Australian tour in 15 years, English rock band Radiohead will play 16 arena shows across Perth, Melbourne and Sydney in May and June 2027. A $2 donation is included in every ticket price with proceeds going to Greenpeace Australia Pacific and the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Radiohead will match the final amount raised.
ENDS
WATCH NOW:
FOR ASSETS OR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Adam Ferrier | 0413 633 344 | adamferrier@thinkerbell.com
Kimberley Bernard | 0407 581 404 | kbernard@greenpeace.org
ABOUT THINKERBELL
Thinkerbell is a 9-year-old independent creative company. We practise Measured Magic – the coming together of marketing science and hardcore creativity – to help our clients build their brands and change behaviour.
ABOUT GREENPEACE
Greenpeace Australia Pacific is a global independent campaigning organisation that uses peaceful protest and creative confrontation to expose environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
Climate Change
Jimmy Barnes, King Gizz lead Aussie music supergroup on new release to save Scott Reef
SYDNEY, Monday 9 November 2026 — Australian music icons Jimmy Barnes AO, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Fred Leone, Gordi & Montaigne are among the more than 20 Australian artists who have joined forces to release a new song with an urgent message: save Scott Reef.
Released today, “If Not Now” is a reimagining of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Environmental Music Prize-winning song “If Not Now, Then When?”, and is a collaboration between Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Green Music Australia, and p(doom) Records.
Scott Reef is a 15-million-year-old ancient coral reef located 270 kilometres off the Kimberley coast of Western Australia. It is Australia’s largest oceanic reef and is home to thousands of marine animals and endangered species, but fossil fuel corporation Woodside plans to drill up to 57 toxic wells under and around the reef, threatening to turn it into an industrial gas zone.
“If Not Now” is the reef’s first and only release, out on all digital platforms and on limited edition 7” vinyl. The song is accompanied by cover art and visualiser from acclaimed Australian artist and ARIA-winning music video director Jonathan Zawada (Flume, The Avalanches).
Speaking about the track, Stu Mackenzie (lead singer, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard) said: “Why are we still digging up coal and gas? Why are we allowing this? Why is the Australian government so hell-bent on destroying our beautiful wild and untouched places? I’m proud that a King Gizz song was chosen to represent a growing movement of people who are asking these questions and applying pressure. Let’s shut it down and keep it beautiful.”
Rock legend Jimmy Barnes AO said: “Scott Reef is one of the few pristine reefs left in the world and it happens to be on our doorstep. We’re custodians of it — we’re supposed to be looking after it. It’s ridiculous. We must protect our country and look after what we value most, which is the nature and the beauty of this country.”
Hannah Schuch, Senior Campaigner for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “I’m filled with hope by the incredible musicians and artists who are using their voices and skills to amplify the voices of half a million Australians who are calling on the government to stop Woodside’s nature and climate-wrecking gas plans and save Scott Reef. Australian music has long been a powerful catalyst for change, so saving Scott Reef is a no-brainer for Australian music lovers.”
Contributing artists (in alphabetic order):
- Alex Lahey
- Brinkley Davies (marine biologist/freediver)
- Birdland
- Close Counters
- DOBBY
- Fred Leone (Artist of the Year at the 2026 NIMAs, singing in Butculla)
- Gordi
- John Butler
- Jimmy Barnes
- King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
- Leah Senior
- Mahalia Barnes
- Montaigne
- Ngaiire
- NIDALA
- Peppa Lane (Spacey Jane)
- Ruby Rodgers (2026 Environmental Music Prize winner)
- Terry Guyula (Drifting Clouds, singing in Yolgu Matha)
- Tom Mahler (The Moving Stills)
- Urthboy
Production cast:
- Becki Whitton (G Flip, Allday, Stella Donnelly)
- Stu McKenzie (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)
- Tay Blunt (FVNERAL)
- Tim Shiel (Green Music Australia)
Three generations of the Barnes family, Jimmy Barnes, his daughter, Mahalia Barnes and granddaughter Ruby Rodgers, contributed to the track.
The release comes amid growing national pressure on the Federal Government to save Scott Reef from Woodside’s gas drilling plans.
Last week, a leaked letter from WA’s environmental watchdog to Woodside revealed the agency deemed drilling risks to Scott Reef ‘serious, significant and irreversible’, while Greenpeace Australia Pacific activists occupied a major Woodside gas platform, and Perth communities delivered one of the biggest environmental petitions in Australia’s history to Woodside HQ.
The Federal Government is expected to make a decision on Woodside’s Scott Reef drilling plans in the coming months.
-ENDS-
Media contact
To arrange an interview or for more information, contact Emma Sangalli on 0431 513 465 or emma.sangalli@greenpeace.org
High res images and footage of Scott Reef can be found here (NEW) and here.
Jimmy Barnes, King Gizz lead Aussie music supergroup on new release to save Scott Reef
What might a high-school course look like if it helped students understand climate change—and see a place for themselves in responding to it?
Not simply a course about emissions or environmental problems. A course that connects science with the places students know, the decisions their communities face, and the work they might one day do.
Canadian schools already teach climate change and environmental responsibility, including through required curriculum expectations. Ontario’s Grade 9 science course, for example, asks students to assess climate change’s effects on ecosystems and communities, including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. Across Canada, however, the depth and placement of climate learning vary, and opportunities for more specialized study often sit within elective courses.
Part 1 explored how we could build on that foundation through sustained learning from elementary school onward, shaped with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis governments, educators, and education authorities.
One next step worth considering is a required senior-secondary course that brings these threads together. Imagine a course called Climate, Land, and Future Economies: a place to explore climate evidence, community resilience, Indigenous governance, practical solutions, and the possibilities of a changing world.
The idea is not to turn every student into a climate scientist. It is to give every student a stronger foundation for the choices ahead—whether their path leads to university, college, an apprenticeship, employment, entrepreneurship, public service, or work within their own Nation or community.
Start with the science—and make room for questions
A meaningful course would begin with sound science: how the greenhouse effect works, how carbon moves through living systems, how energy choices affect emissions, and how scientists study a changing climate.
But the learning could become more engaging when students have an opportunity to investigate questions close to home.
What can local weather records tell us? How do we distinguish a single unusual season from a longer-term trend? What does a climate projection mean for a community planning its roads, housing, or water systems? What can a dataset tell us—and what remains outside its scope?
These questions invite students into the process of understanding evidence rather than asking them simply to memorize conclusions.
They also create space to discuss uncertainty honestly. Students could explore how researchers reach conclusions, why findings sometimes change, and how to distinguish a legitimate scientific question from a misleading claim.
The aim would be informed curiosity: the confidence to ask good questions, find credible information, and explain what the evidence supports.
Look at climate through the life of a community
Climate learning becomes more meaningful when it moves beyond global averages and into the places people live.
A class might explore a neighbourhood with little shade, a community concerned about flooding, or the choices involved in preparing a school for extreme heat. Students could examine a local emergency plan, speak with community planners, or investigate how housing and transportation decisions affect environmental risk.
The questions soon become as much about people as about climate.
Who has access to a cool, safe place during a heat wave? Who can leave when an evacuation is ordered? What happens when roads, water systems, or food supplies are disrupted? What resources does a community need to prepare?
A course could help students explore how housing, health, income, disability, infrastructure, and access to services shape people’s experiences of environmental change. It could also introduce environmental racism and historic dispossession through carefully researched cases, giving students a way to understand why risks and resources are not always distributed fairly.
That approach would connect climate learning with civic life. Students would begin to see that resilience is not only about stronger buildings or better technology. It is also about relationships, public services, and the ability of communities to care for their members.
Recognize that climate decisions are governance decisions
Consider the questions surrounding a new transmission line, wind project, mine, protected area, or housing development.
Where should it go? Who decides? Whose knowledge informs the decision? Who benefits, and who carries the costs?
These are environmental questions, but they are also questions about governance.
A climate course offers an opportunity to introduce Treaty relationships, Indigenous rights and title, consent, and jurisdiction through specific places and decisions. Rather than presenting these concepts as a single checklist, students could explore the Nations, agreements, histories, and legal frameworks relevant to the case they are studying.
Indigenous governments and communities would enter the discussion as decision-makers with their own laws, responsibilities, and priorities—not only as people affected by projects proposed elsewhere.
Learning of this kind would be strongest when developed through relationships with the relevant Nations and Indigenous education authorities. Their participation could help determine which local examples are appropriate, who should guide the learning, and what knowledge can be shared.
The purpose would not be to simplify difficult issues. It would be to help students understand why responsible decisions require attention to authority, relationships, evidence, and rights.
Explore solutions without pretending they are simple
Students deserve to encounter possibilities as well as problems.
Home retrofits, renewable energy, public transit, ecological restoration, local food systems, repair businesses, flood planning, and community emergency preparedness all offer starting points for investigation.
A class could compare options for improving the school building. Another might study a community-owned energy proposal or explore what would make a neighbourhood safer during extreme heat.
The interesting learning lies in looking beneath the label. Calling something “green” tells us little on its own. What does it accomplish? What materials and energy does it require? Who owns it? What effects might it have on land, water, workers, or neighbouring communities?
Students could learn to ask:
- Does this reduce emissions, strengthen resilience, or both?
- What environmental benefits and harms need to be considered?
- How are Indigenous rights and jurisdiction addressed?
- Who participates in decisions, and who receives the benefits?
- What alternatives or trade-offs deserve a closer look?
These questions do not require students to become cynical about solutions. They invite them to become more thoughtful about what makes a solution worthwhile.
A good course would make room for the possibility that different approaches suit different places—and that a useful idea can still need improvement.
Help students see a future for themselves
One of the most inviting parts of this course could be the chance to explore work and livelihoods.
What might climate responsibility look like in a skilled trade, a small business, a municipal office, a farm, a financial institution, or an Indigenous government?
Students could meet people working in building retrofits, water protection, food production, environmental monitoring, emergency management, energy systems, planning, and ecological restoration. They could learn what the work involves, how people enter it, and what opportunities exist close to home.
They might also try developing an idea of their own.
A tool-sharing service. A repair-and-reuse business. A native-plant nursery. A community greenhouse. A food-waste recovery initiative. A proposal for community-owned clean energy.
The exercise would be more than a business pitch. Students could ask whether the idea meets a genuine need, whether it could support itself financially, who would need to be involved, and how its benefits might be shared.
It would introduce a different way of thinking about enterprise: not only “Can this make money?” but “Can this create lasting value without passing its costs on to someone else?”
For Indigenous youth, this exploration could include pathways into enterprises, institutions, and land-based work that their own Nations lead, own, and govern. The conversation would be about helping shape their Nations’ futures, not simply finding a place in someone else’s plans.
Give the learning room to come alive
A course like this would need more than an appealing title and a curriculum document.
Teachers would need time, resources, and opportunities to deepen their own learning. Community partners would need compensation for their contributions. Schools would need support to make practical activities accessible to students with different abilities, circumstances, and learning needs.
There would also need to be room for local choices. A course in a northern community would not have to look exactly like one in downtown Toronto or coastal British Columbia to offer equally valuable learning.
Students could demonstrate their understanding through investigations, written analysis, presentations, creative work, or community-informed projects. The shared foundation would be careful evidence, clear reasoning, sound scientific understanding, and respectful engagement with different perspectives and authorities.
The classroom should be a place where students can ask difficult questions and examine competing proposals. They would not need to agree on every policy or project. They would need to learn how to explain their reasoning and consider the consequences of a decision.
From concern to capability
No school course can carry the responsibility for resolving climate change.<