The Law Written in the Earth

Ask a jurist where their law resides: they will open a code, numbered articles, fixed words. In 2012, the Kággaba people—known outside their community as the Kogi—submitted a document to the Colombian state on how to order and protect their territory, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. One might have expected a text by experts. What one finds instead is something else: the law that governs this land is not contained in words, and writing it down is merely a stopgap to be understood by those who can only read pages.

Spanish

esta Ley de Origen no está escrita en palabras, sino en los códigos de nuestro territorio ancestral y se practica de manera diaria entre nuestros mamos y comunidades.

English

this Law of Origin is not written in words, but in the codes of our ancestral territory, and it is practiced every day by our mamos and our communities.

The statement upends the order we know. For us, the land is governed by law: first the text, then the soil to which it is applied. Here, it is the reverse. The law is the territory; it is read in the mountains, the rivers, the places that make up the Sierra. The Ley de Origen—the “Law of Origin”—is not promulgated or filed away in codes: it is practiced, day after day, as one maintains a path or tends to a spring. To write it down, the Kággaba organization says, is not even to truly express it; it is only to build “a mechanism of understanding” with institutions that demand paper.

Yet this unwritten law is not some vague sense of the sacred. It has the force of a norm—but a norm whose source is neither the legislator nor moral conscience.

Spanish

Para nosotros las normas no solamente están inscritos en los códigos legales o en los mandatos morales, sino que están consagrado desde el origen de las cosas y así está expresada en nuestra Ley de Origen

English

For us, norms are not merely inscribed in legal codes or moral commandments: they have been consecrated since the origin of things, and that is how our Law of Origin is expressed.

Here lies the divide. For the law we have inherited, a rule holds because a power has established it—a parliament, a tradition, a reason that deduces it. For the Kággaba, a rule holds because it was there at the origin of things, inscribed in the way each element of the world was given its place and function. The mamo does not legislate or invent: he reads, he recalls, he upholds. The law does not descend from above onto a silent territory; it rises from the territory itself, which is its primary text.

One might be tempted to liken this law inscribed in things to the natural law of philosophers. That would be too hasty. Western natural law is an order deduced by reason, the same everywhere, valid for all men in all places: that is why it can be taught and exported. The Law of Origin, however, is not deduced or abstracted: it is read in this Sierra, in these mountains and these waters. It does not travel, because it cannot be separated from the soil in which it is engraved.

What remains is the contrast the 2012 statement opens without closing. We write our laws so that the earth will obey us: first the text, then the territory, commanded to conform. The Kággaba do the opposite—the territory is the text, the law is read within it, and writing is only a translation for those who no longer hear it. The question, then, is not whether they are right not to write. It is what we have ceased to read, the day we placed all law in words.