By Aric Sleeper, originally published by Resilience.org
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
The United States was founded on the declaration that all people are inherently endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what about the rest of life on the planet?
With climate-change-fueled droughts and environmental exploitation in the form of oil pipelines causing the depletion and contamination of watersheds and endangering plant and animal species, some in the legal community have decided to swim against the current of conventional law. They are fighting not only for the inalienable rights of humans but for the legal protection of nature.
Proponents of the Rights of Nature movement, which has been gaining momentum since 2006, believe that legal systems should ensure the rights of Earth’s natural environment, which includes all the flora and fauna in any given ecosystem, and put an emphasis on protection, restoration, and stewardship of nature instead of exploitation.
Bibeau, a member of the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe people, based in the White Earth Indian Reservation of northern Minnesota, has become an effective champion for the Rights of Nature because the concept is also a tenet of the Anishinaabe’s spiritual beliefs.
After serving as a journalist for nearly two decades, Bibeau was encouraged by his friends to switch gears and attend law school.
His legal questions centered not around constitutional law but Indian law, which serves as a way for Native Americans to govern themselves and interact legally with the U.S. government on a federal and state level.
Bibeau points out that although his people are the Anishinaabe, “Indian” is still the catch-all title used in the U.S. legal system for Indigenous Americans, however inaccurate.
Early in his career, Bibeau was encouraged by his friend Winona LaDuke and Rights of Nature attorney Thomas Linzey to fight for the rights of the Mississippi River against the Line 3 pipeline replacement project, but for all of his effort, Bibeau couldn’t find a legal foothold to stop it.
Manoomin, or wild rice, is a culturally and spiritually significant plant for the Anishinaabe and serves as a staple food source alongside fish and maple syrup.
Through an 1837 treaty between Bibeau’s ancestors and the U.S. government, the Indigenous people ceded large portions of their land to the nascent country but kept the right to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice there.
Wild rice then became the legal foothold that Bibeau was searching for because as he learned in law school, treaties are recognized by the federal government as the supreme law of the land.
Bibeau and others were able to codify manoomin’s rights into law in December 2018, when the White Earth Band of Ojibwe adopted the rights of manoomin tribal law, which recognized wild rice as having the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as establishing its inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.
Later in August 2021, the Tribal Court of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe filed an action on behalf of wild rice, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and several tribal members, represented by Bibeau and Linzey, to stop the State of Minnesota from allowing Enbridge Inc. from using 5 billion gallons of water for the construction of the Line 3 pipeline.
The plaintiffs argued that the diversion of the water for the oil pipeline would interfere with the rights of manoomin, and the rights of tribal members to use the land covered in the treaty to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice.
Bibeau’s legal strategy to use treaty law and tribal law to sue entities outside of tribal land in the name of a sacred plant or animal has little legal precedent, and ultimately the case was dismissed by the White Earth Tribal Court of Appeals. Bibeau filed for reconsideration of the case, but that was denied in the summer of 2022.
Bibeau and his colleagues are now back in the legal library, trying to dial in the Rights of Nature law and judicial procedure.
Rather than citing wild rice, Bibeau is devising ways to fight for nature’s rights on behalf of animals, specifically fish, which are sacred to a number of Indigenous groups and more well known to the general public than manoomin. He says the public can expect to see a legal action filed on behalf of fish in the next year, against a yet-to-be-determined target.
Although the manoomin case was dismissed, Bibeau feels that it has brought much-needed attention to him and other Indigenous people fighting for nature’s rights, such as the Tohono O’odham people of Arizona who gave the saguaro cactus legal personhood in their tribal court in May 2021.
He says that with the growing number and interest in these cases, the Rights of Nature movement will continue to exist, flourish, and evolve into the future.
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This post was previously published on Resilience and is republished here with permission from the author.
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