Are MOTH rights and private property compatible?
Coalition building is a powerful tool that can empower political communities to protect more than human rights.
The movement to endow more-than-human life (MOTH) with legal rights aims to counter the ecological destruction caused by human activity by affirming that MOTH lives deserve consideration and legal standing. This changes the legal status of more-than-human entities from property that can be owned, and thus exploited and destroyed, to beings who are owed justice, protection, care, and reparations.
One manifestation of the MOTH approach is the effort to grant legal personhood to rivers and watersheds. In 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, was granted the status of legal personhood and given rights in a joint declaration and parallel resolutions by the Innu Council of Ekuanitshi in Nitassinan, the ancestral territory of the Innu people, and the Minganie Regional County Municipality (MRC) in Côte-Nord, Quebec. This approach to protecting the Mutehekau Shipu challenges the view of land as a commodity and the prioritization of private property in settler colonial societies, illustrating the importance of political communities in recognizing and upholding MOTH rights.
In settler colonial states, settlers violently repress Indigenous people’s rights and cultures through erasure and replacement, producing private property through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and species from lands with which they have longstanding, deep, reciprocal relations.”
Settler-colonialism and the liberal capitalist project
In her essay “Can the Rights of Nature Transform the Way Rights Are Conceptualized in International Law?,” Emily Jones considers how expanding human rights to include nature may uphold “problematic gendered, colonial, and neoliberal norms” and evade questions about capitalism, colonialism, and other “structural forms of oppression.” Human rights are not evenly and universally applied. For example, political rights are enforced more often than economic rights, and in many cases, there are observable disparities between the treatment of those whose rights are considered worthy of protection and those whose rights are ignored (landowners versus unhoused people, for instance). Jones argues that rights of nature interventions should transform existing legal systems rather than simply adding nature as an actor within flawed existing structures.
The expansion of private property—foundational to the liberal capitalist order—is a central component of this dilemma. In settler colonial states, settlers violently repress Indigenous people’s rights and cultures through erasure and replacement, producing private property through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and species from lands with which they have longstanding, deep, reciprocal relations. But beyond this animating need, as Brenna Bhandar argues, “to control the land base” and grow settler economies, the intentional destruction of homes, habitats, and lifeways is also a means of expelling humans and more-than-humans from political community.
Glen Coulthard, a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, characterizes Indigenous struggles as “not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship . . . ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitive way.” This conception of land encompasses more-than-humans and humans alike. Human beings are as much a part of the land as other elements, and as such, they have ethical obligations to the land and its ecosystems. This way of thinking is incompatible with a worldview that values property rights over rights to flourishing, well-being, and community care that are inclusive of multiple species.
Recognizing MOTH rights through collaboration and coalition
In her book Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood argues for a rethinking of private property in order to respond to ongoing violence against the Earth. As she puts it, a “system of commodification . . . is destroying the earth.” She calls for a wide-scale reimagining of human relations with “earth others” that includes recognizing the agency of more-than-human beings and considering them as collaborators in all human activity. Indigenous political values, in contrast with modern colonial values, view more-than-humans as subjects rather than objects, and interventions to establish MOTH rights for rivers, forests, glaciers, and other ecosystems bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal orders into a potentially generative assemblage.
In collaborating to establish rights for the Mutehekau Shipu, the Innu of Ekuanitshit and residents of Minganie—in alliance with other groups—acted to undo the settler colonial property framework that expels more-than-human beings from the political community.”
In 2021, two culturally and politically distinct communities came together to fight for the survival of the Mutehekau Shipu/Magpie River ecosystem and their relations with it. This coalition collaborated to pass sister resolutions recognizing nine rights for the river: to live, exist, and flow; to have its natural cycles respected; to evolve naturally; to maintain biodiversity; to perform essential functions; to maintain its integrity; to be free from pollution; to regenerate and be restored; and to take legal action. Guardians from both the Innu and Quebecois communities will work together to attend to, speak for, and initiate legal proceedings on behalf of the Mutehekau Shipu, protecting it from threats such as large-scale hydroelectric development. Such joint action on behalf of the river contests its status as property and emphasizes the Innu view that “rivers belong to no one.”
The political community that formed in concern for the well-being of the Mutehekau Shipu is fundamentally important. Hannah Arendt’s argument that political belonging is necessary for the protection of rights suggests that more-than-human beings may not be protected by the law unless there is a community to affirm their belonging and recognize their rights. Exclusion from the political community renders all entities (ecosystems, plants, waterways, animals, and humans) precarious and vulnerable to violence and abuse. In collaborating to establish rights for the Mutehekau Shipu, the Innu of Ekuanitshit and residents of Minganie—in alliance with other groups—acted to undo the settler colonial property framework that expels more-than-human beings from the political community.
Toward a multi-species political community
Notably, guardians of the Mutehekau Shipu are appointed by the Innu Council and the MRC to act as protectors, not owners, of the river. The declaration of personhood and rights for the Muehekau Shipu is an expression of the cosmology of the Innu of Ekuanitshit, who believe that, in the words of Uapukun Mestokosho, “rivers do not belong to anyone, rather it is the Innu (humans) who have the obligation to protect them.”
This intervention challenges settler colonial views of nature as commodified property, honors Indigenous political values and inherent rights, and practices collaborative governance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous political bodies without subsuming Indigenous rights within colonial constructs. It has the potential to shift the way Canadian common law understands waterways: not as provincial or territorial property, but as a shared responsibility that recognizes the rights and agency of more-than-human and multi-species political communities.
