Is a River Alive? From Anthropocentrism to Relationality

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering environmental ethics, Indigenous perspectives, legal personhood for rivers, and the transition from anthropocentrism to relationality.

Netukulimk

An Indigenous concept defined in the lecture as "avoiding not having enough."

Anthropocentric register

An ethical register that understands a river merely as a resource, an experience, or a quantity of energy, owing nothing to it beyond human use.

Ecocentric register

An ethical register that recognizes a river as a living being with its own life and complexity, asserting that it is owed legal rights and protection from destruction.

Relational register

An ethical register that regards a river as a relative, an ancestor, a teacher, a healer, and a speaker, demanding reciprocity, listening, ritual obligation, and love.

Mutehekau Shipu

The Innu name for the Magpie River, which in 2021 became the first river in Canada recognized as a living, rights-bearing legal person.

Standing reserve

A concept from philosopher Martin Heidegger describing nature when reduced strictly to an instrument, commodity, or captured quantity of energy to be stored and released for human utility.

Plan Nord

A twenty-five-year scheme to industrialize the remote region of Quebec located north of the 49th Parallel.

Houle’s enframing

A critique of corporate communication wherein language performs care and salutes Indigenous resiliency while simultaneously enacting environmental destruction.

The Romaine

A river described as the Mutehekau Shipu's "ghost sister," which was drowned and effectively killed by four dams and four reservoirs along its lower 125 miles.

Strahler Stream Order

A numerical method developed by Arthur Newell Strahler in the 1940s–50s to calculate the branching complexity of river systems, reimagining rivers as arborescent, tree-like structures.

Blue highways

The historical Innu travel corridors running roughly north to south through the region, made of ice during the long winter and open water in spring, summer, and autumn.

Mirror resolution

A 2018 twin resolution passed by an alliance of Innu and non-Innu regional bodies that recognized the Mutehekau Shipu as a living legal person possessing rights to exist, flow, and evolve naturally.

Two-Eyed Seeing

A guiding principle coined by Mi'kmag Elders Albert and Murdena Marshall that involves focusing Indigenous and Western ways of knowing together for mutual enhancement rather than opposition.

Rita Mestokosho

An Innu poet, activist, healer, and cultural guardian who teaches that rivers are alive, urging people to move beyond intellect, awaken the heart, and listen to the river as a speaker.

Lydia Mestokosho-Paradis

An Innu speaker who highlighted the moral contradiction of granting legal personhood to ten-year-old corporations while withholding it from a ten-thousand-year-old river holding ancestral memories.

Innu ritual obligations

Ethical relational practices toward the river that include offering tobacco to the waters and to the spirit of William Napess, fasting for 24 to 36 hours, pitching tents facing east, tying a red bracelet to the sacred tree, and harvesting Labrador tea.