Engaging with Indigenous legal traditions brings to light the existence of different forms of legal conscience. The Indigenous legal traditions catalyse both the ontological questioning and its response. And they also offer a response to the critique of law and the evolution of legal practice. Approaching different legal traditions requires, however, a change of perspective. This reflection considers the insights of anthropology, linguistics, literature, translation and semiotics as applied to law. Towards a ‘shared framework’ and ‘common legal sense’, the semiotic approach enables us to visualise the legal landscape, beyond the borders of modern constituted forms, on a wider horizon of legal communication. It allows us to approach the narrative semiotics of different legal traditions, such as the dances, storytelling, artefacts like Wampum belts and protocols for ceremonies in Indigenous law. Furthermore, reconnecting legal traditions contributes to recalling, re-embodying and reconnecting the legal subject with the more-than-human realm – reconstituting the legal experience in its integrity. Beyond the operation of translation, what is at stake in the evolution of the legal language and practice is the constitution of a common semiotic space, a space of legal communication and understanding.

This chapter introduces the reflection in the book and the work of the ESG Workgroup on the Representations and Rights of the Environment (ESGRREW), with its intercultural and interdisciplinary process of Research & Dialogue: a critical appraisal of how humankind conceive its relationship with the environment, towards a clear vision of how to apprehend it in law and governance. The reflection takes heed of the change in vision in different fields of knowledge and the message of Indigenous peoples with other critical voices regarding humankind’s present predicament. It champions social and environmental justice, and highlights the crisis of representations and perception of our world. Rekindling the conscience of diversity of languages, cultures and modes of knowing and being, it advocates a wide and relational approach, considering lived experience. It contends that we need to remove ‘barriers to understanding’, create and nurture a common space towards a ‘new common sense’. Reconnecting with other legal traditions will contribute to rethinking legal frameworks and practices for a new legal consciousness.