Understanding the Lake Winnipeg lawsuit

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This article was published 05/10/2024 (728 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Southern Chiefs’ Organization has filed a lawsuit to declare Lake Winnipeg a person with constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of person. That may strike non-Indigenous Canadians as unusual. But it fits well with an Indigenous view of the planet.

As reported in this newspaper, the lawsuit is being brought as a way to force the provincial government to conduct an environmental assessment of how Manitoba Hydro regulates lake levels for power generation.

In bringing the lawsuit, Grand Chief Jerry Daniels said: “the lake has its own rights. The lake is a living being.”

He went on to describe the lake’s current state as like that of an ill person, someone who is “so sick that she is dying.”

Symptoms of this illness include declining or disappearing fish species, birds and other wildlife, while algae blooms and E. coli bacteria levels have increased.

In the Anishinaabemowin language, the chiefs refer to the water in Lake Winnipeg as “moowaakamiim” (the water is full of feces) or “wiinaagamin” (the water is polluted, dirty and full of garbage). This is the result, the lawsuit says, of how Manitoba Hydro’s management of the lake waters prevents it from flushing itself clean every year.

“She is unable to go through her natural cleansing cycle and becomes stagnant and struggles to sustain other beings like animals, birds, fish, plants and people,” the document says.

For Indigenous people, seeing the lake as alive fits with their worldview. It’s also the way Indigenous Christians read a verse like John 3:16: “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.” While that verse has traditionally been read as being about personal salvation, Indigenous Christians don’t see it that way; they see it as meaning that God came to save the entirety of creation. (“World” in Greek is “cosmos.”)

As Christopher Hoklotubbe, an associate professor of Religion at Cornell College and a member of the Choctaw Nation in the U.S. put it: “Indigenous people would see the cosmos as including all of creation, which includes non-human persons like animals, plants, and even rocks.”

Reading about the lawsuit reminded me of Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. Leopold, considered the father of wildlife management in the U.S., coined the idea in his classic essay of the same name in 1949. In it, he argued that just as humans had morally evolved to grant rights to every person, we needed to expand our definition of rights to include the earth — that the earth has rights, too.

This land ethic, he said, “simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, animals or, collectively: the land.”

Pope Francis voiced a similar idea in his 2015 in Laudato Si, a papal letter on the environment and climate change. Instead of viewing humanity as having “dominion” over the earth, he said, humans must see that everything is interconnected and that all of creation is a “kind of universal family.”

God, he went on to say, “has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement.”

And now we have Manitoba chiefs saying that Lake Winnipeg is also like a part of our family, and just as with any member of a human family who is ill or being taken advantage of we have a moral obligation to care for it and defend its rights.

Already I can hear people sighing; the lawsuit won’t make a difference. But then I remember that over 200 years ago William Wilberforce, a Christian politician in Great Britain, faced a similar uphill battle in his effort to extend human rights to those caught up in the slave trade.

The argument used by opponents to the trade was how stopping it would have negative economic consequences — jobs would be lost and whole economies devastated. Some even used the Bible to justify its continuation.

But Wilberforce was not swayed. Saying he felt called by God to end slavery, for 20 years he advocated tirelessly for an end to the buying and selling of human beings. In 1807, his efforts were rewarded when the slave trade was abolished in that country.

During his campaign to end the practice, he made a speech in Parliament in 1791 where he laid out the horrors of the trade. As part of the speech, he told his fellow politicians: “Having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way. But you can never again say you did not know.”

In their stand for Lake Winnipeg, it seems to me that Indigenous people are the new Wilberforces of our time. Their lawsuit may not succeed. Like for him, it may take many years before they see any results. But also like for Wilberforce and his efforts to end the slave trade, when it comes to the health of Lake Winnipeg from now on we can never say we didn’t know.

faith@freepress.mb.ca

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