Join us for an ONLINE LEARNING SESSION for practitioners, as part of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox

Rights of Nature by Tribal and First Nations

Join us for our 14th learning session on Wednesday, June 10 at 6 pm CEST | 5 pm BST | 12 pm EDT | 9 am PDT | 9:30 pm IST.

What if the Rights of Nature were not a legal innovation, but the oldest law there is?

Rights of Nature is a growing global movement seeking to give rivers, forests, species, and ecosystems legal standing and protection. But there is a version of this story that predates the Western legal system by thousands of years: the understanding, held by Indigenous and Tribal nations across the world, that the natural world has its own inherent rights — and that humans carry a sacred responsibility to uphold them.

In this session, we explore what happens when that ancient understanding meets the modern legal system and how Tribal Rights of Nature differ from standard Rights of Nature approaches. At the heart of this discussion is a fundamental tension: how do you translate a living covenant between a people and their territory into a legal instrument that can hold in a court of law? And what is gained — or lost — in that translation?

We will explore landmark cases including the Rights of Manoomin (wild rice), a Tribal law passed by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe that gave wild rice the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve — and led to the first Rights of Nature enforcement case filed in a Tribal court. And we will look at the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe’s landmark lawsuit to protect the Rights of Salmon on the Skagit River, which in 2026 resulted in a $4 billion settlement requiring fish passage to be built past three hydroelectric dams that had blocked salmon migration for nearly a century.