Navigating Legal Aid on Market Street: Lessons Through the Lens of Waitaha Wisdom

Walk along Market Street in Paterson NJ, and you are walking on the ancestral earth of the Waitaha people who, Stus, Bindon Cultural Resource Management Inc. and many others who have studied Waitaha history tell us, were a race of peaceable natives whose honour and respect were epitomised by the simple statement, “the Noa”.

Noa is the Waitaha word, short for noatia, meaning-to the Waitaha-peace, respect, accept the peace, be accepting, still stand, at ease, to calm, tranquil, sovereign, honour, tranquil state.

Waitaha established great stores of knowledge, scientific knowledge, and as this author well knows, legal knowledge. Today, the Waitaha people represent many thousands of citizens of Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, and of course, those northern climes of North America where the Waitaha have been integrated, and unintegrated, into those cultures for many generations.

The Waitaha also speak of their own legal assistance principles, principles echoed in those of their cultural kin, the Tohunga. This is information that no one has ever heard, and it is largely not known. Like those principles associated with the traditional Aotearoa Maori, those indigenous to Paterson New Jersey (might it be Waitaha?) follow principles of PEACE that echo those of their Aotearoa kin.

OK, you might say, where does the concept of Peace, particularly as it relates to assistance to help you out of the legal mess you might have created, fit in to that of legal aid, particularly as it is served up on Market Street in Paterson?

This is the problem: when local legal aid is offered as a free service with no strings attached, it is easily abused, as many legal aid centres know all too well. And more importantly, it defines WHO we are, as a society: do we want our people looking for simple solutions to complex problems, which legal aid often supplies? Or do we want innovative, principled, solutions that may or may not include justice, but bring that coveted, sacred sense of PEACE, preserved so long in OUR history, now more than a century old?

Quite in line with our Waitaha Books / authors’ principles of peace, legal aid has PEACE at its heart, from the top down, and particularly on Market Street in Paterson, NJ. But peace may mean we need to back off, as it has done with some of our asylum seekers, or those of our ethnic men, women, and children who have fallen foul of the law, or simple poverty.

Some of this, it turns out, is for the greater good, and healing fruition of the community, especially those around the Market Street area, Paterson, NJ. Waitaha / Tohunga cultural principles have passed on to help frames of reference, and access to legal aid that is respectful, yet protective of the individual, as well as those around that person.

It is critical Statement that the services offered in the modern day reflect their historical precedents, which were for the greater community good, guiding those in trouble with the law, or seeking to avoid trouble through guidance. The question remains as to just how far that protection, in the context of legal aid, extends. This requires self-discipline and temperance, a statement that is controversial, especially with respect to legal aid to the immigrant; however, the Waitaha / Tohunga principles, that of PEACE/CALM, must guide your decisions, unless you wish to be seen in the role of an abuser of the system, guided by those who find it in their interest to perpetuate a class of indigent litigants whose lives will be degraded, rather than elevated.

A concept driven home by the sacred values of the Waitaha people, and values that, as applied to legal aid, the Tohunga would call absence, or breach of the sacred trust of the Tohunga. The Waitaha Books offer what in some circles is called “the point”, or factual understanding of the historical roots of this approach to legal aid in Paterson NJ, as it also serves those few who visit Paterson, to see the depths of the culture of this city, and the importance of its values of PEACE as applied to legal aid.

Walking along Market Street, Paterson NJ, you walk with those who passed before you. This understanding of legal aid on Market Street allows a facility of understanding, guided largely by the Waitaha Books that will leave you, dear reader, with an encyclographic reference, not to jurisprudence, but to PEACE and CALM.

Come walk with us along this path, these the Waitaha with the legal aid principles of the Tohunga.