Wild Rice and the Rights of Nature

Vocabulary flashcards detailing key terminology, legal cases, ecological concepts, and Indigenous stewardship practices from the article 'Wild Rice and the Rights of Nature' by Kari Traylor.

Manoomin

The Anishinaabe term for wild rice (Zizania palustris), understood in Anishinaabe tradition as a sacred relative and gift from the Creator rather than merely an extractable commodity.

Psíŋ

The Dakota language name for wild rice (Zizania palustris).

Zizania

The botanical genus of aquatic grasses known as wild rice, which includes four species, three of which are native to North America.

Zizania palustris

The botanical species name for northern wild rice, an annual aquatic grass native to shallow freshwater lakes and wetlands across the Great Lakes region.

Oryza

The botanical genus of cultivated paddy rice, which is geographically and botanically unrelated to North American wild rice.

Sheaves (Wild Rice Cultivation)

Loose bundles of wild rice stalks tied together by Anishinaabe women roughly ten days before harvest to prevent mature grains from being blown away by the wind.

Relationship of Reciprocity

The Anishinaabe cultural and ecological principle in which wild rice provides food and sustenance to humans, and in exchange, humans carefully tend, protect, and deliberately reseed the plant so it can thrive.

Anya Zilberstein

A historian who documented failed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European attempts to transplant and commodify wild rice, demonstrating the limits of colonial empires seeking to subsume local climates.

Rights of Nature Movement

A legal and philosophical movement that re-envisions ecosystems and non-human natural entities as rights-bearing subjects possessing inherent legal protections rather than property.

Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN)

An organization that defines the rights of nature as the formal recognition that ecosystems possess inherent rights to exist, regenerate, and persist just as human beings do.

Christopher Stone

The legal scholar who authored the 1972 essay "Should Trees Have Standing?", formulating the first modern articulation within Western jurisprudence that natural resources should possess legal standing to sue.

Sierra Club v. Morton (1972)

The United States Supreme Court case in which Justice William O. Douglas cited Christopher Stone's theory of legal standing for natural entities in a dissent, introducing rights of nature into U.S. legal discourse.

Tamaqua Borough

A municipality in Pennsylvania that became the first place in the world to legally recognize the rights of nature in 2006 by enacting an ordinance banning the dumping of toxic sewage sludge.

Law of the Rights of Mother Earth

A groundbreaking 2010 national law passed in Bolivia that legally recognized Mother Earth as a collective subject of public interest with specific legal rights.

Rights of Manoomin (2018)

A tribal ordinance and resolution enacted by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe representing the first legal recognition in history of an individual plant species possessing enforceable rights as a non-human person.

Line 3

A tar sands crude oil pipeline constructed by Canadian energy corporation Enbridge Inc. running from Alberta to Wisconsin across Anishinaabe treaty territories in northern Minnesota.

Manoomin et al. v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR)

A historic August 2021 lawsuit filed in White Earth tribal court naming wild rice as the lead plaintiff to challenge a state permit authorizing the withdrawal of five billion gallons of water for Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline.

Frank Bibeau

The Anishinaabe tribal attorney representing the plaintiffs in Manoomin et al. v. Minnesota DNR who argued the state violated treaty obligations and tribal laws protecting wild rice.

Plant Humanities Initiative

An interdisciplinary program at Dumbarton Oaks that places plant life at the center of humanistic inquiry to explore the historical, ecological, and cultural relationships between human societies and vegetation.