Standing Up for Inherent Rights: The Role of Indigenous-Led Activism in Protecting Sacred Waters and Ways of Life

ABSTRACT

Time and time again, Indigenous people throughout the world are faced with the need to reassert their way of life, and to “buck” political and social systems that continually marginalize their treaty rights. In this article, I explore the role of Indigenous activism at different scales—personal, tribal, and collective—to intervene in key moments to uphold treaty rights and protect Indigenous ways of life. In defending treaty rights, Indigenous peoples have become leaders in the social and environmental justice movement, particularly in relation to climate justice and fishing rights. The article recounts three ethnographies that illustrate how access to rights is wrapped up in geopolitics and the political economy. Highlighting these acts of resilience and leadership in the face of crisis is the central work of this article. The article concludes with a call to fundamentally rethink governance mechanisms and structures, to protect ecological and human health.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• climate justice
• fishing communities
• indigenous peoples
• Salish sea
• treaty rights
• water governance

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank those who shared their harrowing and inspiring stories that are the inspiration for this article: Thank you to Timothy Ballew II, Tyson Oreiro, and the late Justin Finkbonner, all of Lummi Nation. Thanks also to Northwest Indian College for providing an institutional home and support to undertake this work. Specifically, I appreciate Northwest Indian College’s Institutional Review Board’s review of this article and the helpful and encouraging comments provided by Dr. William Freeman and Dave Oreiro. In addition, sincere thanks to Lynda Jenson for editorial assistance, Sylvie Arques for creating the map of the Salish Sea Basin (Figure 1a), Julia Orloff-Duffy for the generous use of her photographs (Figures 1b and 1c), and Chad Norman for capturing what has become an iconic image of the ShellNo protest (Figure 1d). Thank you to Parker Norman and Luke Norman for reviewing the narratives and providing insightful comments on the flow of the vignettes. Lastly, a sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editors-in-chief, Dr. Peter Leigh Taylor and David A. Sonnenfeld, whose insightful comments strengthened this article.