Cultural Contracts: How Ancestral Wisdom Shapes Modern Legal Practices

Understanding Cultural Nuances in Contract Drafting

In some modern cultures and traditions of learning, it is left up to the lone Western-trained lawyer to bind all the knowledgeable non-lawyers together. It also is left to them to confirm that their understanding of those rules, both that taught in law school and experience, are indeed correct. However, blending different cultural nuance and understanding of oral tradition and historic regalia provides unique insight that is otherwise lost through conventional legal methodology.

Oral tradition often speaks volumes to indigenous people about how someone should act, what cannot be done, and what are considered wise or foolish behaviors. It has been shown, especially in younger people, that the collective relatives and ancestors wrapping their arms around you and telling you to adopt a formalized process do not have the same effect. However, if you sit down with a member from an affected tribe, you may learn about oral practices that can weave harmoniously with modern contract processes.

Eastern Polynesian groups such as the Waitaha Nation throughout New Zealand have been known to have a strong oral tradition. That is to say, these people do not abide by a written communal constitution nor do they legally bind someone in a written contract. Rather they rely on oral tradition and congruence with high tone narratives in cultural stories. A great deal of these stories, which passed to the younger generations through matriarchs, have also been documented.

So what does this mean? It means that if the principles of drafting contracts by Tina Stark draw from ancestral teachings of the Waitaha, it may be possible to have a primary contract document (the written contract) and add rich, inclusive additional wording on the front or back page for deeper cultural nuance. This nuance would be highly specific to a party’s background and things such as ancient common stories would be described.