Learning session 14: Rights of Nature by Tribal and First Nations
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world
The 14th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in June 2026 explored Rights of Nature by Tribal and First Nations with Frank Bibeau, a self-described “free-range Tribal Attorney” who serves as Executive Director of the 1855 Treaty Authority — an intertribal organization formed by several Anishinaabe bands in Minnesota to protect, regulate, and exercise hunting, fishing, and gathering rights guaranteed under the 1855 Treaty — and as Director of the Tribal Rights of Nature program of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights.
A member of the Anishinaabe people of Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, he has spent his career developing the legal tools to exercise and defend treaty rights both on and off reservation — work that, over more than a decade, has produced landmark Rights of Nature enforcement cases in the United States.
The session examined what Tribal Rights of Nature is at its foundation — an obligation older than any law — and how that obligation is being translated into enforceable legal mechanisms, what those mechanisms can do in practice, and where they run into limits.
What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
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🌿 Learning Session 14 (June 2026) — Synthesis Rights of Nature by Tribal and First Nations, with Frank Bibeau (Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights)
What if the most important thing about Tribal Rights of Nature isn’t the legal innovation — but the fact that, from an Indigenous perspective, the obligation was never absent in the first place?
1. An obligation older than the law
Where it begins
In the understanding of the indigenous Anishinaabe people, the people were the last to arrive on Earth. Before they could come, they had to petition the Creator — and the Creator had to check with all of creation, because the newcomers would be living off the plants, the animals, the fish, the birds. Creation agreed to sustain them. But the agreement was mutual: in exchange, the people would carry the obligation to remember, honor, and protect their relations in perpetuity. “We remember them in our ceremonies. We remember them when we’re thankful. We remember them as our family members. And so when they’re your family members, and you don’t own them, then you have an obligation to protect them, because we have a symbiotic relationship so that we can both live in perpetuity.”
Recognition, not creation
This is the foundation that distinguishes Tribal Rights of Nature from many other approaches operating under the same name. Outside Indigenous, Tribal and First Nations contexts, Rights of Nature initiatives — constitutional provisions, legal personhood, community ordinances — are typically creating something new: a legal relationship that didn’t previously exist. Tribal Rights of Nature is doing something different. It is translating into legal form an obligation that was already carried, across generations, in cosmology, ceremony, and kinship. The law doesn’t create the obligation. It gives it a form that the prevailing legal system can be compelled to engage with.
What manoomin is
What wild rice — manoomin — is to the Anishinaabe people illustrates this concretely. Wild rice grows on the water. In the Great Lakes region, where Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada meet, it is both sustenance and story: the food at the end of a prophecy, the plant that told the Anishinaabe they had arrived where they were meant to be. It is a being with which the people are in covenant — part of the web of relations that the creation agreement established. When the White Earth Band of Ojibwe [Ojibwe is an English name give to Anishinaabe people] passed the Rights of Manoomin law in 2018, recognizing wild rice’s right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, it was not innovating. It was codifying something already understood — and giving it the legal standing to survive in a world where other legal systems otherwise hold the power to override it.
🌱 Seed:
The question Tribal Rights of Nature poses is not “how do we give nature rights?” but “how do we translate into law an obligation that already exists?” That shift in starting point changes almost everything about how the legal work is designed and what it can accomplish.
2. Wild rice, fish, and the logic of what to fight for
Wild rice as the legal foothold
Wild rice is named specifically in the 1837 Treaty, in which Anishinaabe ancestors ceded large territories to the US government while explicitly reserving the right to hunt, fish, and gather — including wild rice — on those lands in perpetuity. Under US law, treaties are the supreme law of the land. That made wild rice, as a starting point for Rights of Nature enforcement, legally very strong.
A setback in outcome, not in principle
The Rights of Manoomin case, filed in 2021 to challenge the extraction of billions of gallons of water for pipeline construction, was ultimately dismissed. But a subsequent legal analysis found that the dismissal had rested on a misinterpretation of prior cases — and pointed toward the correct legal path forward. “Someone else might have quit and thought, well, this doesn’t work. But I believe that it does work. It’s the covenants, the kinship — that’s what makes me go forward instead of giving up.”
Why fish are next
The next focus is fish. “The thing I like about fish is that almost everyone knows what a fish looks like, and everyone knows what a dead fish looks like, and everyone knows what 1,000 dead fish look like.” Wild rice is ecologically specific to a region; fish are everywhere, in every water body, in every culture. Three-quarters of the planet is water. If the water is clean enough for fish to survive, migrate, and spawn, then the plants will have good water, the animals will have good water, and the people will have good water. The shift from wild rice to fish is a strategic choice — not a concession, but a decision about where to press for the widest effect.
🌱 Seed:
What to fight for, and how to frame it, is itself part of the work. The obligation is the same. The question is which legal vehicle makes it most visible, most enforceable, and most capable of rippling outward.
3. The role of Tribal court — and why it changes what’s possible
A different evidentiary world
Rights of Nature cases brought in state or federal court face a structural problem: the cultural, spiritual, and relational dimensions that make the obligation real are largely excluded from the legal record. A state court is not interested in how a permit affects a tribe’s spirituality, or what wild rice means in the context of a creation story. By the time a decision is made, the things that mattered most may not be in the record at all — and cannot be raised on appeal.
In Tribal court, that changes entirely. The values, the spiritual significance, and the cultural context can be central to the record. Tribal judges — often from the same or a neighboring nation — bring knowledge and context that simply isn’t present elsewhere. The evidentiary world is different, and what the law is able to hold is different as a result.
The compulsion to engage
Beyond the content of proceedings, what Tribal court creates is a compulsion to engage. When the city of Seattle challenged the Sauk-Suiattle tribe’s use of Tribal law — seeking a court order to escape Tribal jurisdiction — the response was unambiguous: it doesn’t matter how frivolous you think their law is, you still have to go back to the Sauk-Suiattle and finish this in Tribal court. That mechanism — the inability to simply override or ignore Tribal process — is what changes the calculus.
Custom is enough
Worth noting too: the Sauk-Suiattle did not even have their customary law written down. “They were using customary law. They didn’t even have it written down. And custom is enough for us.” For nations without extensive written codes, the legal foundation is still there.
🌱 Seed:
Tribal court isn’t simply a different venue. It’s a different evidentiary world — one where the full weight of what’s at stake can actually be part of the legal record. And the compulsion to engage with it, rather than override it, is what gives it practical force.
4. A US$4 billion outcome — and what it demonstrates
A century of blocked passage
About two months before this learning session, Seattle signed a US$4 billion agreement to settle the case involving three dams on the Skagit River — dams that had blocked salmon migration for over a century. The settlement, reached with the Sauk-Suiattle, Swinomish, and Upper Skagit tribes after years of negotiation, commits nearly US$1 billion to fish passage, over US$100 million to mainstem river restoration, and US$75 million to estuary restoration. “That is an impressive amount of money to make corrections that maybe could have been avoided for the last hundred years.”
How the mechanism produced the outcome
The settlement didn’t come through Rights of Nature litigation alone — it came through a combination of Tribal court pressure, treaty rights, and a federal relicensing process that gave the tribes significant leverage. But the Tribal court filing was the mechanism that forced engagement. When Seattle tried to escape that process and was told it couldn’t, the negotiating dynamic shifted. The significance of the outcome isn’t only in the dollar figure or the restoration commitments. It’s in what it signals about what becomes possible when the mechanism runs properly — and in what it may mean for others who are watching.
🌱 Seed:
A century of harm. Years of negotiation. A US$4 billion resolution. The Skagit outcome shows what becomes possible when the prevailing legal system cannot simply override the Tribal legal process — and parties begin calculating differently as a result.
5. Thinking out of the colonial box
A required double fluency
Developing this legal strategy required more than legal knowledge. It required deep enough understanding of the dominant legal system to know where its logic runs out, combined with enough distance from that system to imagine something it doesn’t provide for. “It’s not just thinking outside the box, it’s thinking out of the colonial box. And that’s trickier, because I’ve been colonized. I’ve got a Bachelor’s in political science, I’ve got a Juris Doctorate degree in American law. That’s what I know, that’s what I’ve learned. It helps me to know what’s doing it to me, and what that adversary is. And it’s important, because otherwise I couldn’t have created the remedy that I have in Tribal court.”
More than a decade in the making
The remedy itself — using Tribal law in Tribal court to challenge activities happening off-reservation that threaten treaty resources — took over a decade to feel confident about. What was missing in Indian Country was legally trained Tribal members who understood both systems well enough to put them together in a new way. “People aren’t accustomed to us having rights, and they’re finding out that we have rights, and they still don’t know what to do about it.”
🌱 Seed:
The dominant legal frame doesn’t just constrain others — it shapes the thinking of those who were educated within it. Finding the remedy required simultaneously knowing the system and being willing to step outside its assumptions about what is possible.
6. The Rappahannock River — and the next wave
First contact, first treaty
The next case in development is with the Rappahannock Tribe in Virginia — a federally recognized tribe working to protect the Rappahannock River and its species: oysters, herring, shad, sturgeon, and wild rice. The tribe was in contact with English settlers as early as 1607, and a treaty from 1677 — with the Virginia colony of England, before the United States existed — explicitly preserved the tribe’s rights to oystering, fishing, and gathering, including what the document called “wild oats,” now understood to be wild rice. An expressly reserved right, documented in one of the earliest treaties between an Indigenous nation and English colonial authorities in North America.
Water rights as the legal basis
The Rappahannock don’t have much land, and they’re not all on the river. But they have water rights — and they have the right to exist as a tribe, which includes the ability to hunt, fish, and gather. The immediate threat right now is a proposed data center that would extract millions of gallons of water per day from the watershed. The Rappahannock were the only party in the entire state of Virginia who appealed the permit. The strategy — building a Tribal court, establishing jurisdiction, and bringing a case — uses the same mechanism that produced the Skagit outcome, adapted for a tribe whose power lies not in land but in long-documented relationships to water and species.
The ripple effect
If it works in Virginia, right outside Washington D.C., the expectation is that other tribes along the East Coast will look to do the same. The estimate for how many cases it would take to change how states approach permitting decisions that affect Tribal water and treaty resources: perhaps half a dozen. Not a revolution in law, but enough demonstrated cases that states begin calculating differently before the next permit is issued.
The significance is not limited to tribes. While the legal authority comes through Tribal rights, the practical effect is much broader. Water, fish, wetlands, and rivers do not recognize jurisdictional boundaries. When those systems are protected well enough to sustain treaty resources, the benefits extend beyond Tribal communities to everyone who depends on the same watershed.
🌱 Seed:
Half a dozen cases may be enough to shift how states approach decisions that affect Tribal water and treaty resources. The Rappahannock case, if it goes forward, could be the signal that opens the East Coast.
7. Recognition, and what it can and can’t do
The gap between declaration and protection
A question from participants raised something observed across Rights of Nature initiatives globally: legal recognition and ongoing ecological harm can coexist in the same framework, sometimes under the same guardian. Rivers with legal personhood continue to be polluted. Rights are declared, and the harm continues.
Dominion as the default
The response pointed to a clear analysis of institutional incentives. Regulatory agencies often assume they hold authority to decide what happens with every plant, animal, and mineral in their jurisdiction. They issue permits and licenses in one hand while claiming to protect in the other. “We’re not trying to control everybody’s rights and make everybody pay for stuff. We’re just trying to protect things so that we can all live on forever.”
Compulsion, not declaration
Legal recognition is not enough on its own. What changes institutional behavior is not declaration but the credible possibility of being held accountable by someone who has an enforceable claim. The Tribal court mechanism works not primarily through the recognition it creates, but through the compulsion it generates: the obligation to engage, to justify, to negotiate — with parties who cannot simply be overridden.
🌱 Seed:
Recognition matters. But what actually shifts behavior is the credible possibility of being held to account. Rights without enforcement remain a frame without a picture.
8. The question of allies — and what doesn’t yet exist for them
Including those outside the tribe
Several participants asked about people outside Tribal nations — recent immigrants, as well as people who feel a deep relationship to land and water but have no Indigenous background — and how they can be part of this work. The original Rights of Manoomin litigation was deliberately constructed to include people beyond the tribe. Wild rice is a recognized property right under federal law; defending it is therefore also defending property. “If our house is on fire, and we have friends there, our friends can help us defend and protect our property.” The intention was to create a mechanism that extended some legal protection to those who came to stand with the Tribal members. The case didn’t reach that question before it was dismissed — but the aspiration remains: “I think we all are friends in trying to protect those same properties and resources. We just need to use the mechanism that protects us.” And currently there isn’t one that protects allies who sit outside Tribal jurisdiction.
Why the mechanism doesn’t directly translate
For people in Canada, or elsewhere, the direct Tribal court mechanism doesn’t transfer. The strategy rests on a specific combination: inherent sovereignty, federal recognition as a tribe, and treaties that expressly reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather in perpetuity. Those particular ingredients don’t exist in the same form in many other countries — the colonial history in Canada produced different treaty frameworks and different legal structures, and recognition of analogous rights has come only recently and incompletely. But the underlying question — who holds an enforceable obligation to the living world, grounded in something older than the prevailing legal system — is one that every community and every legal tradition will eventually have to reckon with.
🌱 Seed:
The mechanism is specific to a particular legal context. The question it is asking — who is obligated to the living world, and how is that obligation enforced — is universal.
9. Law and story — the same project
Litigation as a last resort
The relationship between legal strategy and cultural revitalisation — whether one serves the other, or whether they are ultimately the same project — came up as well. The response reframed it: the legal instrument is, ideally, not adversarial in its ultimate aim. It is a negotiating register. “When you go to court, it’s adversarial — and that’s why you end up there. If you’re able to use those same mechanisms and have the state come and be your partner and try to solve those problems, that’s more desirable, because even if we’re suing somebody, we still have to go back and work with them.”
Litigation is what you do when cooperation has broken down. The goal is the place where what matters is understood and agreed upon — where the rights of the living world and the rights of people are weighed fairly together, and everyone goes forward.
What sustains the work
What keeps that long-horizon work alive — across years of setbacks, dismissed cases, slow-moving negotiations — is not the legal strategy itself. It is the covenants. The kinship. The understanding, carried in ceremony and story, that the people are not separate from what they are trying to protect. “That’s what makes me go forward instead of giving up.”
🌱 Seed:
The law is one instrument. What sustains the work across the long arc is the covenant itself — the living sense of obligation to kin that precedes the law and continues to ground it.
Cross-cutting insight threads
The obligation precedes the law
The most fundamental distinction in Tribal Rights of Nature is the starting point: the relationship with the living world is already there, already real, already obligating. The legal instrument translates that obligation into enforceable form. It doesn’t create it. This changes what legitimacy means, what implementation requires, and what it means when a case is lost.
Jurisdiction as the structural difference
Most Rights of Nature approaches are trying to carve out decision-making authority within systems that can ultimately override them. Tribal nations hold inherent sovereignty that the dominant legal system constrained but did not extinguish. What they are doing is exercising that sovereignty in ways that those systems are discovering they cannot simply stop.
What Tribal court makes possible
The evidentiary world of Tribal court is different: cultural, spiritual, and relational dimensions can be central to the record. And the compulsion to engage — demonstrated when courts declined to let parties escape to the dominant legal system — is the mechanism that changes the negotiating dynamic. Customary, unwritten law can be sufficient.
Water as the central arena
Land was largely taken quite some time ago. Water is different: it crosses every boundary, it is shared, and it is what both treaty rights and ecological survival most directly depend on. The strategic shift from wild rice to fish to rivers is also a shift in scope — from a regionally specific plant toward the most universal of resources.
The long horizon
The obligations at the heart of this work are measured in generations rather than litigation cycles. The cases being built now are not simply responses to immediate threats. They are attempts to translate enduring responsibilities into legal forms capable of operating within contemporary systems. Success, from this perspective, is not only a court victory but the gradual strengthening of the conditions that allow people and their more-than-human kin to continue living together into the future.
Frank Bibeau is Executive Director of the 1855 Treaty Authority and Director of the Tribal Rights of Nature program at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. The Rappahannock Tribe’s conservation work and fundraising can be found at rappahannocktribe.org. The NARF law review article Water Knows No Boundaries can be accessed here. The Ashley Dawn Anderson law review article Tribal Rights of Nature Laws: Fulfilling Sacred Obligations (Tulsa Law Review, 2026), which provided context for this session, is referenced in Reframe 1: Rights of Nature and The Many Faces of Guardianship.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
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