OP-ED: Court asked to accept the claim that Lake Winnipeg is a “person”

Most Canadians will surely shake their heads in disbelief when they learn that on September 19, the Southern Chiefs’ Organization (SCO) announced that it’s taking Manitoba Hydro and the Government of Manitoba to court on behalf of a “living entity” named Lake Winnipeg.

Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench in Winnipeg is being asked to declare Lake Winnipeg a person with Constitutional rights to life, liberty and security.

“Decades of poor decision-making and Hydro friendly regulation have left Lake Winnipeg, known traditionally as Weeniibiikiisagaygun, on life support. SCO is launching a Charter challenge, an unprecedented move in Canada, to have Lake Winnipeg declared a living entity with all the rights and protections that entails,” its media release declared.

SCO’s Grand Chief Jerry Daniels states, “The lake has its own rights. The lake is a living being.”

Daniels said it makes sense to consider the vast lake – one of the world’s largest – as alive: “We’re living in an era of reconciliation, there’s huge changes in the mindsets of regular Canadians and science has caught up a lot in understanding. It’s not a huge stretch to understand the lake as a living entity.”

The lawsuit aims to force the government to hold public hearings on Manitoba Hydro’s licence renewal to continue regulating the lake’s waters for power generation.

Many readers would see all this as an unjustified publicity stunt. They would be wrong to do so on three grounds.

First, such an idea has existed in western science since the 1970s. The Gaia hypothesis, though still highly disputed, proposed the Earth is a single organism with its own feedback loops that regulate conditions and keep them favourable to life.

Second, the courts already recognize non-human entities such as corporations as persons.

Third, animistic beliefs continue to be widespread among indigenous peoples around the world.

The presence of animism suggests that the monotheistic Christian belief systems that also underpin Western jurisprudence need to be contrasted with the polytheistic indigenous ones that have always co-existed alongside them.

The political dimension of indigenous revivalism is now resurrecting the broader notion of traditional animistic aboriginal sacredness that reveres all of nature. 

Animism perceives everything as animated, i.e., having agency and free will. Although each culture has its own mythologies and rituals, animism is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples’ “spiritual” or “supernatural” perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to “animism” (or even “religion”). The term “animism” is an anthropological construct.

Animism is both a concept and a way of relating to the world. According to their traditional views, Canada’s indigenous people attribute sentience – or the quality of being “animated” – to a wide range of “beings” in the world, such as the environment generally, non-human animals, plants, spirits, and forces of nature like the rivers, lakes, oceans, winds, and the sun or moon.

In short, animism rejects the Western scientific distinction between “persons” and “things.”

We have seen the notion of indigenous “sacredness” many times before.

For example, Kimberly Murray, Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, has called her efforts “sacred work,” suggesting the term is so elastic that it can be used to describe any activity influential indigenous people wish to assign to it, including any time and at any place a sacred fire is lit.

Similarly, most indigenous leaders now routinely call the treaties signed by their ancestors with the British and Canadian governments “sacred agreements,” a term never used when they were enacted.

Personhood has also been claimed for two Canadian rivers.

Quebec’s Innu First Nation has claimed that status for the Magpie River, and the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta is seeking standing for the Athabasca River in regulatory hearings. The Magpie’s status hasn’t been tested in court and Alberta’s energy regulator has yet to rule on the Athabasca.

The SCO claim comes on the heels of an earlier suit against all three levels of government for the pollution of Lake Winnipeg, a 24,514 square kilometres body of water.

On May 2, 2024, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) announced that the eight Indian Bands filed a $4 billion lawsuit against the federal and provincial governments, as well as the City of Winnipeg

According to these Bands, the pollution of Lake Winnipeg and the adjoining Red River through sewage spills and continuous discharges is a recurring issue. The communities note the most recent incident took place in February when over 221.2 million litres of raw sewage spilled into the Red River.

Although indigenous spirituality was not directly mentioned by the AMC, it was still implied by its Grand Chief, the late Cathy Merrick, who opined, “As First Nations people and as to our teachings [e.g., animism], we protect the water.”

Though none of these claims has been tested in court, it needs to be acknowledged that woke judicial bodies across Canada, including the Supreme Court in Ottawa, have been increasingly sympathetic to claims based on indigenous spiritual and allied “knowings” for years now.

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.