Indigenizing wild animal sovereignty

I encountered a turtle midway through crossing the road. I stopped the car and waited for her, but she had seized up. I got out and gently lifted her to the side of the road. It was a face-to-face encounter with a wild animal who had unknowingly entered a “human” world. Her action disrupted my naive attitude that a road is a place for me to drive along, a place for cars, and not a place for turtles. But, she just needed to get to the other side; the road cut through her world. My naive attitude that the road is not a place for turtles fails to acknowledge the turtles' jurisdiction over their habitat on both sides of the road. In this article, I explore how Indigenous political ontology, from the First Nations¹ of Canada and the northern United States, allows us to conceive of a world where animals have jurisdiction over their land. On such an account when roads or other interventions cut through their territories without providing accommodations we have done something wrong.

Wild animals have their place in the world as part of autonomous communities outside human institutions like industrial agriculture, laboratories, zoos, and our homes. In order to restrain human interventions in the places and practices of autonomous nonhuman animal communities, some have suggested that wild animals be understood as “sovereign” (Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011; Goodin et al., 1997). Designating wild animals “sovereign” is one way to establish the jurisdiction of nonhuman animal communities. In line with the norms of international relations, recognizing wild animal communities as sovereign limits foreign (in this case, humans and domestic animals) access to their spaces and establishes limits on the human ability to intervene when it affects their jurisdiction.

A sovereignty conception of jurisdiction is missing something, namely that wild animal communities have no sovereigns—there are no kings of lion prides, ministers of owl parliaments, or presidents of salamander congresses. Wild animals can only be “sovereign” through human institutions. Recommending a novel institution fails to capture the jurisdiction of wild animals that goes unrecognized when humans fail to appropriately limit their interventions. After all, some humans already advocate for limited interventions in wild animals' territory, for example, when activists and environmental government agencies challenge the construction of highways through wetlands or when Indigenous water protectors and land defenders refuse to allow oil pipelines (Sainato, 2021) or the destruction of old-growth forests (Larsen, 2021). These advocates are usually not defending the supposed rights of a sovereign nonhuman animal community. Instead, they often defend the rights of First Nations to govern land shared with more-than-human beings.²

The shared jurisdiction, attested to in some traditional Indigenous thought, offers a paradigm for understanding what jurisdiction nonhuman animals already have. There are two sides to this sharing. First is valuing and preserving ecological relationships, central to a wide range of Indigenous thought and widely advocated in western environmental philosophy (Callicott, 1982, 2000; Leopold, 1949; Rolston, 1988). Second, sharing jurisdiction implies that nonhuman animal communities also have jurisdiction. The latter is the jurisdiction referred to in Anishinaabe stories of negotiating and creating treaties with nonhuman animal communities (Simpson, 2017). I will explain how we might conceptualize this shared jurisdiction as an indigenized version of Wild Animal Sovereignty.

Section 2 outlines how sovereignty as a jurisdiction might extend to wild animals. In Section 3, I contrast Wild Animal Sovereignty with what Pasternak (2017) calls Grounded Authority in her description of traditional Algonquin jurisdiction. I conjecture that Grounded Authority can describe wild animals' jurisdiction bottom-up from their ecological relationships rather than establishing jurisdiction top-down from a “sovereign.”

There are three layers of justification behind Grounded Authority. In Section 4, I explain how ecosystems give jurisdiction to multiple communities who must share that land. In Section 5, I explain that this jurisdiction relies on a continuous practice of reciprocal respect, where shared ecological gifts are reciprocated by respecting the others (rivers, nonhuman animals, spirits, etc.) who give them. Such reciprocal respect is practicable by more-than-human beings. In Section 6, I address a central objection that interspecies relations may be fraught with hunting or predation that may seem contrary to respect, ordinarily understood. Finally, in Section 7, I consider how humans may negotiate treaties that limit their authority, such that we do not wrongfully monopolize gifts given to more-than-human beings. The result is an account of Indigenized political ontology that describes nonhuman animals' shared jurisdiction with humans.

Since the political turn in animal rights, political theorists (Hadley, 2005; Nibert, 2002; Nussbaum, 2006) have started to explore how we should construct a political theory that includes nonhuman animals. The political turn is a complementary project to traditional animal rights projects fighting for minimum standards of ethical treatment (Regan, 1985; Singer, 1974). The political turn asks us to go beyond established structures that might protect wild animals and ask, “how those structures, institutions, and processes might be transformed to secure justice for both humans and animals” (Cochrane et al., 2018, p. 273).

One such political structure, which might secure justice for wild animals specifically, is “sovereignty.” Goodin et al. (1997) suggest that it is arbitrary to exclude great apes from sovereignty, where “sovereignty” is understood in the traditional Westphalian sense—independent nations have absolute control within their borders. The Westphalian system aims to understand sovereignty as the sole and absolute authority of a community's leaders within their borders (p. 827). Goodin et al. (1997) explain that the requirements of the Westphalian system are so minimal that it is arbitrary to exclude great apes. Like humans, great apes have communities that exercise authority over a distinct territory. Therefore, nonhuman great apes are wrongly excluded from the global political community.

A problem with their view is that the legitimacy of the great apes' claim to sovereignty rests upon similarity to humans. Our understanding of sovereignty takes the human case as paradigmatic. Animal communities without a distinctive hierarchy and permanent territory may not fit this well. That is to say, Goodin et al. (1997) are still reifying an anthropocentric and plausibly Eurocentric view while challenging the speciesist exclusion of great apes.

Founding Wild Animal Sovereignty on interests is a departure from a Westphalian account, wherein appropriate authorities with clearly demarcated territories are the sovereigns with jurisdiction. Instead, Donaldson and Kymlicka are explicitly interested in applying international norms to govern the overlapping jurisdictions of wild animals and humans. In this sense, Wild Animal Sovereignty is only an extension of “sovereignty” in so far as that status invokes international protections; however, Wild Animal Sovereignty may take the shape of a new form of jurisdiction. By distinguishing Wild Animal Sovereignty from Westphalian sovereignty, we also differentiate the establishment of a jurisdiction for wild animals from human communities' struggles for autonomy, self-governance, and sovereignty.

Before I advocate for views rooted in Indigenous thought, I must make clear that I am not Indigenous. I am a settler who grew up in the area known as Tkaronto (from which Toronto derives its name) it has been cared for by the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Huron-Wendat, and the Métis, and is currently home to many Indigenous Peoples. I acknowledge both this history and the current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. This territory is subject to the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the Great Lakes region.

As a starting place for reconceptualizing jurisdiction outside of Westphalian sovereignty, I look to the Algonquin of Barriere Lake. Their political ontology has a form of jurisdiction that is justified partly by the shared flourishing of humans, nonhuman animals, and the ecosystem. Pasternak calls this form of jurisdiction Grounded Authority,⁴ which offers an ecological justification of jurisdiction that does not rely on the legal institutions of a community. I argue Grounded Authority describes the sort of jurisdiction advocates of Wild Animal Sovereignty might want to attribute to wild animal communities; one which shares territory instead of being exclusionary, relies on leaving enough for others instead of being adversarial, and focuses on respect for ecosystems and intercommunity kinship rather than justifying coercive power. This authority is “grounded” insofar as chiefs or landholders are justified, partly, by relationships with and knowledge about that land. The traditional knowledge of the land is kept alive in stories called “Onakinakewin.” A chief has a duty to protect the Onakinakewin, and candidates for leadership are evaluated partially on their knowledge of the land through a process called “blazing,” where they must learn the Onakinakewin from their elders. With this knowledge, a chief is traditionally responsible for the appropriate movement and deployment of people on the land. To fulfill this responsibility, a chief looks to two major considerations. First, distribution depends upon the abundance of the land such that each family can sustainably thrive. Second, the relationships between particular families and the places where those families have traditionally lived and hunted should be respected. These traditional relationships between particular families and places suggest those families have especially careful knowledge of those places—how to live, hunt, and preserve nature there.

However, I am not recommending that human communities all adopt Grounded Authority. The focus of this article is not to issue another call for ecologically minded recognition of the needs of more-than-human beings. Grounded Authority may be a kind of “land ethic” by Leopold's (1949) account, wherein “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (p. 224). However, Grounded Authority is especially interesting because it justifies jurisdiction through respect for sustainable ecology. Further, in principle, this justification is available to wild animal communities with sustainable ecological know-how.

Pasternak explains that there is an Algonquin saying that wild animals can speak the Algonquin language because the Algonquin language is the language of the land. She recounts recounting a story where an elder speaks out to some wolves in Algonquin and asks them to leave, and the wolves comply (Pasternak, 2017, p. 96). The transformative idea behind thinking that wild animals can speak the language of the land is that wild animals are conceived of as knowledgeable agents who belong on this land—agents with whom humans must negotiate a sustainable way of life. The idea at work here is related closely to the view that wild animal communities' knowledge, or what is sometimes called animal culture (Brakes et al., 2021), is part of what enables those communities to live on their land. Equipped with this knowledge, we can think of wild animals as also having Grounded Authority and holding the land. This claim goes beyond Pasternak's account of Grounded Authority, which is a conception of human jurisdiction as shared with nonhuman animals. However, an implication of that shared jurisdiction is that others, with whom jurisdiction is shared, also have jurisdiction. This independent sense of jurisdiction is illustrated in Anishinaabe practice of negotiating with nonhuman animal communities, discussed in Section 8. However, there are some missing steps between suggesting Grounded Authority may be a shared form of jurisdiction, and negotiating with nonhuman animal communities.

First, I want to explain that nonhuman animal jurisdiction is not authorized by humans, but by their own relationships to ecosystems; the same sort of relationships that justify human jurisdiction. To fully explain this I need to elaborate on how Indigenous political ontology ascribes agency, and a prelegal authority to ecosystems; this is the task of Section 5. Second, the ecosystem's jurisdiction relies on a condition of respecting the gifts provided. In Section 6, I will explain what this kind of respect means in the human context. However, this tells us little about how that respect operates among nonhuman animals. In Section 7, I introduce a distinction between the individual animals and their community, or spirits, such that the interests of individuals are not necessarily the interests of their communities. This will help us explain how communities of nonhuman animals exercise the appropriate political agency needed to respect the land and enter into negotiations with humans.

To better explore how jurisdiction is shared, let us think about what it means to have multiple overlapping jurisdictions in an Indigenous context. The Settler government of Canada has claims to share some of the lands of Canada through treaties⁵ with First Nations. These treaties offer one important way of connecting the British common-law tradition, which founded Settler Canadian law, to the pre-existing Indigenous legal traditions. Borrows (Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation) interprets treaties as part of Indigenous legal traditions and, through a resurgence of understanding Indigenous law, aims at reconciling Indigenous and Settler jurisdictions.

Borrows starts with a famous promise from Canadian treaty law: the treaties were to endure “for as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow, and the grass grows” (Borrows, 2018, p. 63). From an anglophone Settler's point of view, this sounds like the treaty should endure forever because the sun will always shine, rivers cannot help but flow, and grass cannot help but grow. Borrows explains that some of the language takes on a different meaning when we consider the grammar of Anishinaabemowin⁶ (the language of the Anishinaabe), wherein ecological features that anglophones would describe as inanimate objects count as animate subjects. The animacy of the world is accompanied by a sense of respect for the animate.

Borrows suggests that when we understand rivers as subjects acting on the world, “so long as the rivers flow” should direct attention to the contributions of a flowing river, the abundance it brings, and the environmental wealth that sprouts at the river's mouth. Here we see something about rivers often missing from a western conception of rivers. As an anglophone, I usually think of rivers as water in motion; the same way water moves through the plumbing to my tap and down my drain; this misses all the other vitality in and around the river.

Borrows (2018) explains that the Anishinaabemowin word for water is nibi, related to nipy, which means life. The vitality of the rivers and lakes is part of the concept of water itself. Further, the word for the mouth of river zaagiin is closely related to zaagi, meaning “love” (Borrows, 2018, p. 65). With the animacy and etymology of the river in mind, Borrows suggests the life-sustaining love of the river ought to be respected since its contributions and abundance are acts of love from an animate subject. Life and love are given to those more-than-human communities who depend upon that river. The river does not require life from us; our role in our reciprocal relationship with rivers is to respect them and the gifts they have given. Including the river in the treaty between human societies suggests that the river is a way of understanding their relationship. In addition to respecting the river, we should treat each other with the same love, the same giving without taking, embodied by the river.

This respect is emphasized in Mississaugas⁷ name for themselves. Borrows explains that the word micha means large, and zaagin means river mouth, so Mississauga means large river's mouth, but it also means place of great love. We might add that in context, the “love” of this place is the river's love.

I grew up in this same place, on both treaty and unceded land of the Mississaugas, where many rivers feed into the great lakes, yet I have always thought of myself as belonging to a civilization that spawned in ancient Greece, spread through the Roman Empire, and finally took over the world through western Europe's imperialist expansionism. However, my body was given life by the rivers and the land. I have always thought of wild animals and the land as something we must care for in the spirit of charity or stewardship, but they were still lesser-than-human.

If I was taught to appreciate the “gifts” of the land, they were gifts from God (or gods) to humans (or God's chosen people). There was no mention of the activity of the land itself, the gifts rivers give, and the fact that these gifts are given to humans and wild animals. I was taught only to respect the river instrumentally, including its aesthetic values, which still ignores all the other relationships that a river has. It is helpful to recognize the divisive, ecologically naive narrative mythologies of the West, as they may still form a background of intuitions for our more professional meditations.

Changing how we think about land and rivers might change how we think about our relationships with wild animals. My brother was crossing a bridge over the credit river in the city of Mississauga (named after the First Nation whose lands were colonized and settled). From the bridge, he saw a beaver. He noticed a couple walking on the bridge nearby and pointed out the beaver. They responded with disgust and lamented, “that thing will probably go after our trees,” by which they meant the beaver might fell some small decorative trees planted along suburban streets. This sort of thinking fails to recognize that the land is also the beaver's land; those trees are also the beaver's. This land is a gift to all of us (a gift which suburban development disrespects in the first place). Grounded Authority suggests that whatever policies we develop to coexist with animals like the “suburban” beaver must respect that the beaver belongs here too. My suggestion is that when we understand that the “beaver belongs here too,” we attribute that beaver and their community a legitimate jurisdiction, not sovereignty necessarily but a jurisdiction nonetheless.

The prelegal authority of rivers to “give” life and justified jurisdiction goes beyond the intrinsic value western thinkers like Rolston (1988) have attributed to ecosystems. Ecological gifts, like a river's life and love, provide a prelegal sense in which the world is shared. The way that the treaties use references to entities like rivers to show a shared gift from the land to multiple human communities also offers us a way of understanding how the land can be understood to give jurisdiction to multiple interspecies communities.

Rivers are a kind of being that give themselves, and the recipients of that gift all take part in the jurisdiction of that gift. Those recipients owe respect to the river and the others to whom the river gives itself. However, we might distinguish that the river, while capable of giving, may not be capable of respecting, or the sense in which rivers might respect is unlike the sense in which organic beings respect those gifts on which their life depends. Since the gift must be respected for jurisdiction to be legitimate, we will now turn to explain what sense of respect is operating in this type of eco-centric jurisdiction.

The language of respect and reciprocity is common to many Indigenous people throughout North America. It is a core part of many Indigenous moral philosophies involved in the resurgence of Indigenous self-governance against the Settler governments of Canada and the United States. Beginning with an ontology where the life of all communities is given by the land, rivers, wind, and so forth, and the jurisdiction of communities depends upon their respect for this wellspring, we might now ask what it means to respect the land in such a way that it could inform political practice.

I want to examine what sort of respect and reciprocity is involved here. In this story, western intuitions might track a sense of respect and reciprocity in the relationship between hunter and raven. There is a reciprocal give and take—the raven gives information to the hunter, and the hunter leaves meat for the raven in exchange. The raven is treated as informative and deserving of a choice piece of fatty meat, which shows the hunter's respect for the raven. However, we might be alarmed that those two moose in the story may not be being respected or benefit by the reciprocity at work. Further, it is unclear how the raven shows their respect for either the moose or the hunter. To understand both of these, we will have to explore a division between the individual animal and the ecologically intertwined communities in which they participate.

In order to understand what reciprocity means in these cases, we must first explain how these Indigenous concepts of “respect” and “reciprocity” are not identical with their use in western moral traditions. The goal in this section is exegetical; I want to explain what might be meant by the Indigenous accounts of respect, so that we can better understand the kind of agency that nonhuman animals must have to hold a jurisdiction, respect others, and be respected by human communities. My intuition when I hear “respect” in western animal ethics is to think of respecting the rights of nonhuman animals, like bodily autonomy. However, respect for a right to bodily autonomy is incompatible with killing. So “respect” in Indigenous philosophy is not identical to respecting the rights of individuals.

The tension between traditional animal rights and Indigenous moral systems creates a space where animal rights movements may be co-opted and misconstrued to undermine the autonomy of Indigenous communities (Kymlicka & Donaldson, 2015). To mitigate such conflicts, we may want to highlight the animal ethics discussions within Indigenous communities to understand why respect is morally valuable even if it only partially overlaps with the rights of individual wild animals. For such an exploration, I turn to Robinson's (Lennox Island First Nation) view of Animal “personhood,” which explains that while Indigenous thought may be compatible with sustainable subsistence hunting, outside of that lifestyle (in cities where most Indigenous people live today), decolonizing food practices likely requires abstaining from meat, at least the farmed meats found in our grocery stores. However, her explanation of traditional Mi'kmaq⁹ respect and reciprocity for hunted animals does not rely on something like individual rights even though it arrives at a similar vegetarian conclusion. Stories about hunting relationships can coherently indicate one important sense of respect—respect for our shared ecological relationships.

When we understand land and water as given to more-than-human beings and insist that we ought to respect nonhuman animals and reciprocate the gifts of land and wild animal communities, then we enter into a new political ontology. As Coulthard (2014) suggested, this ontology is informed by land—conceived as a myriad of relationships between humans, wild animal communities, and other beings. Operating within such an ontology, Brian Noble (2018) explains that political treaties rest on an ecological ground.

Noble offers an example of how two tribes use their shared relationship with a broader ecological whole to negotiate jurisdiction. He explains that the Piikani and Ktunaxa communities had their separate territories and between them was a shared zone. Ktunaxa hunters were found transgressing this understanding as they had followed a community of black-tailed deer through the shared space into the distinctly Piikani territory. The Ktunaxa had also performed a ceremony to aid in hunting these deer; through this ceremony, they took the deer to carry a powerful spirit and medicine.¹⁰ Respect for the deer entailed following them not just for meat but to follow their medicine. When the Piikani found them, the Ktunaxa admitted they were in Piikani territory and came to an agreement. They transferred the medicine to the Piikani; thereafter, both the Ktunaxa and Piikani would follow and hunt the black-tailed deer where the deer would lead them (Noble, 2018, pp. 317–321). This relationship between the land, the deer, the Piikani, and the Ktunaxa is a complex system of relations involving respect for each other and the deer. In this case, the deer's autonomy was essential to negotiating how to share the land.

The deer were conceived as knowing the land, being free to move on it, and even leading the humans. The land is given to the deer, and the deer give themselves to the hunters. The Ktunaxa and Piikani understand that they depend on and respect the deer. This mutual respect for deer forms the common ground upon which they can negotiate flexible and mutually beneficial boundaries. Noble (2018) stresses that Indigenous understandings of how human communities and ecosystems relate are built on giving and not taking. The land gives vitality to human and wild animal communities. This gift is shared from the beginning; humans do not have privileged authority.

If we consider wild animals as having their own jurisdiction, which overlaps Piikani and Ktunaxa jurisdictions, we can see the deer's jurisdiction is also being respected here. The deer are not penned in, and humans are not giving themselves incentives to overhunt or control the migration of the deer. While, in this case, the deer were not explicitly represented in the negotiation, respect for the deer, including their freedom to move through their territory, was implicitly part of the human negotiations.

We might take this one step further and describe human communities as having treaties with wild animal communities. Simpson (Alderville First Nation, 2017) describes just such an interspecies agreement and suggests it is part of an underlying value for “Internationalism.” She describes her own experience as an Indigenous scholar, who relies on the teachings of many nations. Traveling between nations learning and respecting the similarities and differences in these practices is an important part of her experience.

This sense of internationalism suggests human and wild animal communities have relationships that in some ways are best thought of as “between nations,” without presupposing exclusive, adversarial, and coercive powers. Instead, interspecies internationalism ought to presuppose an always already shared territory. This Grounded Authority is something that both human and wild animal communities possess, such that they must leave enough so other communities can “avoid not having enough.”

Representatives of Hoof nation describe the situation to the Nishnaabeg without appealing to the sovereignty of Hoof nation. Instead, they start with the deers' behavior. Hoof nation left, driven out by disrespectful human behavior. leaving is a political activity deer can do. The overlapping jurisdiction of Hoof nation is implicit in the acknowledgement that humans did wrong in driving them out.

This form of representation might better capture the aims of Donaldson and Kymlicka's (2011) Wild Animal Sovereignty than “sovereignty” does. Representatives should be able to advocate for wild animal communities by representing the activities of those communities. Behavior, like Hoof nation's leaving depleted or dangerous land, indicates their intolerance of disrespectful behavior by humans, and it was the behavior of Hoof nation that is described by the humans who represent them. The behavior of Hoof nation was what set a limit on how humans interact with them, in this way Hoof nation participates in a negotiation and that participation is then interpreted and represented. It is ontologically distinct from representing the interests of nonparticipants, even if it largely results in the same recommendations.

Meijer (2019) suggests that persistent conflicts with wild animals caused by their occupying a particular place or migrating are a plausible form of political communication. To better understand how animal behavior communicates, we might work with animal scientists toward coexistence that respects the agency and autonomy of wild animal communities (Caro & Sherman, 2013; Greggor et al., 2014; Santiago-Ávila & Lynn, 2020).

Grounded Authority merely fills in a gap here. In order to understand the political implications of movements, behavior, and occupation of places by wild animal communities, we must understand those communities' as having political standing. A jurisdiction based on their shared receipt of and respect for the gifts of land provided such a standing. Let me offer an everyday example; I mentioned that a turtle crossing the road disrupted my normal view that roads are not for turtles. In that encounter, I moved the turtle to the side of the road it came from, the side with a lake where I presume she lives. Blanding's turtles in lake Scugog nest on higher ground and, therefore, must have access across roads to get from their lake to their nesting sites. I presumed that as the human I knew better, I moved her off the road but back to where she started, forcing her to cross the road again. I could have respected her agency and her knowledge of the land by recognizing roads are the sorts of things turtles are supposed to cross. As a community, we could take persistent road crossings as a sign from a wild animal community that the existing relationship is not working.

We might look to repair that relationship and better share the land we all need access to by building tunnels and fences to help creatures like the turtles safely cross major roads. Such projects are already underway to protect Blanding's and other turtle and amphibian species (Boyle et al., 2021; Longwell, 2021; Markle et al., 2017). The representatives we need are already here; they are often activists. Understanding the jurisdiction of wild animals shows that activists and environmental agencies could represent shared jurisdiction by attending to wild animal behavior. Wild animal behavior, like crossing roads, offers a site for us to negotiate how to share. The land is theirs already, given to them by the land; we must respect that.

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research reported.