Why lakes and rivers should have the same rights as humans

The award-winning story of a determined Ojibwe Nokomis (grandmother) Josephine Mandamin–ba and her great love for Nibi (water). Nokomis walked to raise awareness of our need to protect Nibi for future generations, and for all life on the planet. She, along with other women, men and youth, have walked around all the Great Lakes from the four salt waters, or oceans, to Lake Superior. The walks are full of challenges and, by her example, Josephine-ba invites us all to take up our responsibility to protect our water, the giver of life, and to protect our planet for all generations.

In Nibi's Water Song, an Indigenous girl named Nibi is on the search for clean water to drink. Though she faces repeated obstacles, Nibi’s joyful energy and perseverance shines through. She becomes a catalyst for change and action as her community, and then in widening circles the country and government, rally to make clean drinking water available for everyone.

Sustainable water management is an increasingly complex challenge and policy priority facing global society. This book examines how governments, municipalities, corporations and individuals find sustainable water management pathways across competing priorities of water for ecosystems, food, energy, economic growth and human consumption. It looks at the current politics and economics behind the management of our freshwater ecosystems and infrastructure and offers insightful essays that help stimulate more intense and informed debate about the subject and its need for local and international cooperation.

In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the United States. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources?

This book takes readers to Akwesasne — a place where decades of environmental contamination has become embodied through acts of traditional land-based subsistence. Emphasizing inescapable connections between food and health, Elizabeth Hoover suggests how environmental justice, affirmative indigenous identity, and decolonization might be achieved at individual, social and structural/political levels.

First Nations are facing some of the worst water crises in Canada and throughout North America. Their widespread lack of access to safe drinking water receives ongoing national media attention, and yet progress addressing the causes of the problem is painfully slow. First Nations have had little say in how their waters are, or are not, protected. They have been excluded from many important decisions, as provinces operate under the view that they own the water resources within provincial boundaries, and the federal government takes a hands-off approach. Climate change threatens to make matters even worse. This book is a call to respect the water rights of First Nations, and through this create a new water ethic in Canada and beyond.

Indigenous Peoples are struggling for water justice across the globe. These struggles stem from centuries-long, ongoing colonial legacies and hold profound significance for Indigenous Peoples’ socioeconomic development, cultural identity and political autonomy and external relations within nation-states. Ultimately, Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination is implicated. Growing out of a symposium hosted by the University of Colorado Law School and the Native American Rights Fund in June 2016, this article expounds the concept of “indigenous water justice” and advocates for its realization in three major transboundary river basins: the Colorado (US/Mexico), Columbia (Canada/US) and Murray-Darling (Australia).

Explore a portal based on teachings from scholars and community members who are working to protect and honor the water.

Take action and write a letter in support of water justice for Grassy Narrows.

Invest in justice and donate to the Native American Rights Fund to help support Indigenous water protection efforts.