Jean-Charles Pietacho says the belief that nature is a living thing that must be respected, has been at the heart of the Innu people’s way of life for generations.
But now, that idea has been applied in a new way as the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit in February recognised the Magpie River, a 300km (186 miles) waterway in the Cote Nord region of the Canadian province of Quebec, as a “legal person”.
The designation – a first in Canada – aims to give the Indigenous community an added tool to defend the river, known as Muteshekau Shipu in the Innu language, from potential environmental harms.
“The Creator put us on this piece of territory called Nitassinan, which encompasses all these rivers, all these mountains, all these trees,” Pietacho, chief of the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, told Al Jazeera in a phone interview. “The Innu people always believed that you had to protect the earth. It’s water – it’s life.”
The Magpie River, which sits on the north shore of the St Lawrence River and is known for its strong rapids, currently has one hydroelectric dam on it, but the provincial energy authority has said it has no plans for further development on the waterway.
“Despite that, we didn’t feel secure, we didn’t have total confidence,” Pietacho said.
“It’s very, very important for us to have arrived at this protection. It might be tested, but at least we have a majority – if not the entire region – that supports us.”
Indigenous stewardship
The Magpie is the first river in Canada to be granted legal personhood rights – through twin resolutions adopted by the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and a local body, the Minganie Regional County Municipality – but it is unclear what would happen if the designation is tested in a Canadian court.
Among other things, the resolution affirms the river’s “right to live, exist and flow”, to evolve naturally, to be protected from pollution, to maintain its integrity, and to take legal action. It says “river guardians” will soon be appointed to ensure that those rights are respected.
The decision comes as a movement called “rights of nature” gains global attention.
Proponents of the idea, put forward in a 1972 paper by Christopher D Stone called Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, say current legal systems often fall short on protecting the environment.
Instead of treating nature as property under the law, they want it to hold legal standing on its own – in other words, legally enforceable rights akin to those of humans or corporations. Depending on how a specific case is framed, the obligation then falls to specific actors to ensure the legal rights of nature are not infringed upon.
Courts, various levels of government, and other decision-making bodies in countries around the world have recognised the personhood rights of ecosystems in different ways over the past few years: In 2017, a court in India ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers should be granted the same legal rights as people. Colombia’s Constitutional Court declared in 2016 that the Atrato River in the country’s northwest was a “subject of rights”.
Over a decade earlier, Ecuador in its 2008 constitution recognised the right of nature to exist, maintain and regenerate. “All persons, communities, peoples and nations can call upon public authorities to enforce the rights of nature,” the constitution reads.
Experts say Indigenous communities around the world – where the idea that nature has inherent rights is longstanding – have emerged at the forefront of many of the campaigns to grant personhood status to bodies of water and other ecosystems.
“The rights of nature, in the Ecuadorian context, is very much tied to the worldviews of various Indigenous groups … of emphasing the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the social world,” said Maria Akchurin, assistant professor of sociology at Loyola University in Chicago, who has studied the Ecuador case.
Akchurin told Al Jazeera that while Ecuador is one of the region’s major oil exporters and has a growing mining sector, it is also extremely biodiverse – and the constitutional recognition came amidst underlying tensions between economic development, environmental protection and Indigenous rights in the country.
Legal personhood for nature has been largely symbolic so far, she added, though it can give social groups and communities a new way to frame their opposition to extractive projects, especially as the rights of nature have begun to be applied by the courts. “But in terms of actually stopping projects it’s difficult to say if it’s been really effective,” Akchurin said.
