RIVYAYR PIMICÎWAN: We Are Always Somewhere
| indigenous | 3,049 words
TAGS: personal essay, lyric essay, Indigenous, Métis, Two-Spirit, Queer, rights of nature, water, law, ecology, colonialism, identity, history
ORIGINAL: https://brennan.day/rivyayr-pimiciwan-we-are-always-somewhere/
Four days ago marked 157 years since nineteen unarmed Métis riders, led by Louis Riel, confronted a Canadian government survey crew south of the Forks and compelled it to withdraw. The crew had been running a base line across Métis river lots for a township north of Ste. Anne. Nobody fired a shot. No weapons were seen. According to the surveyor's own memorandum, the riders stopped the work "by standing on the chain."
The riders put their boots down on a length of metal meant to ensure the land was measured properly into squares. They refused to move.
A boot on a chain. It was the first public act of the Red River Resistance, and it led, less than a year later, to the creation of the province I was born in.
In 1836, the Red River Settlement had been surveyed according to the river lot system. The long, narrow strips inherited from seigneurial Québec, three kilometres deep. Every family had frontage on the water. Fish, transportation, drinking water. Then, a wood lot. Then, the hay of the open prairie behind it.
The land was organized around the river. And when Ottawa's surveyors arrived with a square township, the grid did not respect the water.
In 2019, volunteers with Heritage Saint-Norbert went through Manitoba Archives microfilm by hand and transcribed who lived on which St. Norbert lot between 1869 and 1875. On Lot 130 is Antoine Pilon, who got his land from the Hudson's Bay Company around 1850 and died in the spring of 1869. Elsewhere, under a list of the Pilon children, between Emile of Duck Lake and Angelique who married Joseph Normand, is a single line:
Marie - Rat River Settlement - Wife of Alexis lamirand
I've written those names before, as genealogy and as ceremony. These are my people, transcribed from land records, lives measured out in changes and frontage along the Red.
I come from the river.
Ko au te Awa: A Timeline
Let's take a look at legislation on the other side of the world. In March 2017, New Zealand passed the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act. Section 14 states:
Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.
The river is alive, the river is a person. The Whanganui iwi fought for recognition of their river as an ancestor for 140 years. The Crown's Treaty minister called it the longest-running litigation in New Zealand's history. Gerrard Albert, the lead negotiator for the iwi, said they "fought to find an approximation in law so that all others can understand that from our perspective treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as an indivisible whole, instead of the traditional model for the last 100 years of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management."
The Act holds the river's intrinsic values, Tupua te Kawa:
Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au: I am the River and the River is me.
Ngā manga iti, ngā manga nui e honohono kau ana, ka tupu hei Awa Tupua: the small and large streams that flow into one another form one River.
It's one example of many.
Three years earlier, Te Urewera, the Tūhoe homeland and a former national park, was also declared a legal entity.
In November 2016, Colombia's Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River, its basin, and its tributaries as an entity subject to rights after Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities of the Chocó brought a case against illegal mining pouring mercury into the water.
In March 2017, the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga and the Yamuna living entities. By July, the Supreme Court of India had stayed the order.
In 2019, the Yurok Tribal Council passed a resolution declaring that the Klamath River "possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve," later codified as the Rights of the Heyhl-keek 'We-roy Ordinance. In 2024, after a tribally-led campaign lasting decades, four dams came down in the largest river restoration project in American history. That year, biologists in Oregon identified the first Chinook salmon to return to the Klamath Basin since 1912.
Returning here, in February 2021, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the regional municipality of Minganie adopted parallel resolutions granting the Magpie River nine legal rights, the first such case in Canada. The Innu call it Mutehekau Shipu, "the river where the water passes between square rocky cliffs." Hydro-Québec blocked protection for years. The first right on the list is le droit de vivre, d'exister et de couler. The right to live, to exist, and to flow.
That August, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe filed suit in tribal court against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources over a permit letting Enbridge divert nearly five billion gallons of water for its Line 3 pipeline. The first named plaintiff was Manoomin. Wild rice. "The food that grows on water." Reuters called it novel.
What's the precedent, here? Well, back in 1972, law professor Christopher Stone published an article titled "Should Trees Have Standing?" Its introduction is subtitled "The Unthinkable." He writes: "I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called 'natural objects' in the environment." Unthinkable to whom?
It seems there are people who are more accepting of the idea that a corporation can be a person than a river. In 2020, a federal court struck the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in Ohio. And Florida slipped a clause into its Clean Waterways Act declaring that a local government "may not recognize or grant any legal rights to a plant, an animal, a body of water, or any other part of the natural environment." Orange County voters approved rights for the Wekiva and Econlockhatchee rivers anyway, though a judge later struck the amendment down.
And when we say the river is a person, it is only within the legal threshold of the word. In a 2018 article in the Journal of Environmental Law, Katherine Sanders of the University of Auckland argued that a primary purpose of these grants is to regulate human relationships of who has authority, who is entitled to act on behalf of the land and the river.
I'm here to really, actually speak of the river's personhood.
A Bay Is a Noun Only If Water Is Dead
Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells a story in "Learning the Grammar of Animacy" about nearly giving up on her ancestral language. Only 30% of English words are verbs. In Potawatomi, it's 70%. She's flipping through a dictionary, frustrated, finding verbs for things that should obviously be nouns. To be a hill. To be red. To be a long sandy stretch of beach. And then: wiikwegamaa. To be a bay.
A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa--to be a bay--releases the water from bondage and lets it live.
A liquid has a definite volume but no definite shape. It "takes a shape dictated by its container." The vessel, such as a cup, decides. Or maybe the riverbed, or pipeline.
In zero gravity, with no container at all, a liquid pulls itself into a sphere. Freed from every vessel, water makes itself into a world.
Over half of an adult human body is water. Your lungs are 83% water. I've written before about the sixty thousand miles of river inside you. Up to half of the water on Earth is likely older than the Sun, formed as ice in the cold molecular cloud our solar system was born from.
The water inside you has been ice between stars. Glacier, cloud, the Bow, the Red, the inside of countless living beings for millions of years. The shape of everything.
The Fluid of Water and Identity: Niizh Manidoowag
In 1990, at the Third Annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian Conference held in Winnipeg, the activist Albert McLeod proposed a term to replace berdache, the slur missionaries and anthropologists had been using for centuries. Fisher River Cree Elder Myra Laramee came up with Two-Spirit. An Anishinaabemowin translation, niizh manidoowag, was constructed to honour the people whose territory they were gathered on..
I would like for our people to understand that Two-Spirit came to us in a dream for our people and community, and I was merely the vessel. I did not coin this term, word, or phrase, it came from the Creator or the Great Mystery... When Two-Spirit is used, it invokes our sacredness and reminds us that we have always been here, and we will always be here. As a result, with Two-Spirit comes a great responsibility, to those who use it, as we walk and work in a sacred way with and for our people.
― Myra Laramee, via the CBRC's Two-Spirit Terminology Guide
The vessel. This was only six years before I was born, in my hometown built where two rivers meet.
It's one word of many. The University of Winnipeg Archives lists six in Cree. Ayahkwêw: a man who dresses, lives, or is accepted as a woman. Înahpîkasoht: a woman who dresses, lives, or is accepted as a man. Iskwêhkân: one who acts or lives as a woman. Napêhkân: one who acts or lives as a man.
These are words about living. About acting. Being accepted. A practice in relation to a community, not a box ticked on a form.
In September 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa and his men crossed the isthmus of Panama into the territory of Quarequa, killing hundreds. In the cacique's village, they found around forty people "dressed as women," and Balboa brutally and mercilessly set his dogs on them. The Spanish had a verb for this: aperrear. Historian Jonathan Goldberg called it merely "an originary moment in the history of the making of America."
And still, they survived. In 1886, We'wha, a Zuni lhamana, a weaver and potter and ceremonial leader, spent six months in Washington, demonstrating Zuni weaving at the Smithsonian, and on June 24th, shook the hand of President Grover Cleveland. Washington society believed We'wha was a woman, a "Zuni princess." As PBS put it, We'wha "never indicated otherwise."
In 2018, Joshua Whitehead, Oji-nêhiyaw from Peguis First Nation, was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award in the Trans Poetry category for full-metal indigiqueer. He withdrew. In his letter to the award organizers, he wrote:
I think of myself like I think of my home, manitowapow, the strait that isn't straight, fluid as the water, as vicious as the rapids on my reservation, as vivacious as a pickerel scale.
Fluid and vicious, no different than the running waters of the river. Later, "Two-Spirit is a home-calling, it is a home-coming."
Manitowapow. The name of my home province most likely comes from the Cree manito-wapow or Ojibwe manito-bah, "strait of the spirit," a reference to the sound of the water along the narrows of Lake Manitoba. Manitoba is named for a noise water makes against the shore. A province named after a voice.
Billy-Ray Belcourt, from Driftpile Cree Nation here in Alberta, writes in This Wound is a World:
the cree word for a body like mine is weesageechak. the old ones know of this kind of shape-shifting: sometimes i sweat and sweat until my bones puddle on the carpet in my living room and i am like the water that comes before new life.
The Island and Stolen Water
Colonialism is, among other things, a theory of containers. The square township, the reserve boundary. The two boxes on a census form. Built on the backs of missionaries and their attack dogs.
Construction on one of these containers, Winnipeg's aqueduct, began in 1914. To build the intake at Shoal Lake, more than 1,200 hectares of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation's land were expropriated--a term for property a government has legally taken from its owner, typically without their consent--including a burial ground that was excavated. The band was given only $2,000 and moved to a peninsula. Then, the peninsula was cut off from the mainland by a diversion canal, creating an artificial island. The aqueduct itself was also built over an old burial ground, to pour saltwater on the wound.
For a century, Shoal Lake water flowed 135 kilometres west to the city, where it was treated into some of the best drinking water in the world. Shoal Lake 40, meanwhile, sitting on that same water, declared a boil water advisory in 1997. The advisory lasted for twenty-four fucking years. The International Joint Commission was also told that the loss of a land connection directly led to the deaths of nine community members who fell through the ice trying to cross.
The community built its own road, Freedom Road, finished in 2019. Two years later, on September 15th, 2021, a new treatment plant opened and the advisories were finally lifted. The plant's operator, Anthony Green, told CBC:
It's rough not being able to drink our own water, and knowing that hundreds of thousands of people are drinking our water without a care.
As of September 10th, 2026, there are still 38 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 36 First Nations communities.
Straightening Out
Ten years ago, Chelsea Vowel, a Métis writer and educator, wrote about territorial acknowledgements, and in her 2024 revision, she writes that acknowledgements can be transformative acts "as long as these acknowledgments discomfit both those speaking and hearing the words. The fact of Indigenous presence should force non-Indigenous peoples to confront their own place on these lands."
Article 25 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms our right "to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard." Aimée Craft, an Anishinaabe-Métis lawyer, explains through nibi, water, how "for some reason as humans we sometimes think that water is this resource--it's either going to give us power through hydroelectric generation or it's going to sustain us by being clean for us to drink, and we think of it as really fragmented resources."
Fragmented. Parcelled. Contained.
Both us, in whole, and our land must be sovereign. Not just the river, not just the body, but the relationship between them. You cannot free one and keep the other dammed and depleted.
In his 2013 TED talk, George Monbiot describes rewilding as "the mass restoration of ecosystems," and "the rewilding of human life." We must elevate our understanding of the land and the place we inhabit. For we are always somewhere.
In God Is Red, Vine Deloria Jr. made a distinction between religions oriented in time and those oriented in space. For the latter, the meaning of the sacred "is tied to specific places, not to the eternal or the historical." Not when you are. Where you are.
We are always in nature. We are never separate from nature. No amount of concrete or walls stops us from being where wild creatures and life and ecosystems and weather patterns exist.
In 1989, a pair of peregrine falcons fledged four young from a nest box on the Delta Winnipeg Hotel, now the Radisson, downtown. It was the first documented wild nesting in Manitoba in more than fifty years. A peregrine doesn't care that it's a hotel. A ledge is a cliff. Menno Schilthuizen, a Dutch evolutionary biologist, documents city birds evolving to sing at a higher pitch over traffic, and white-footed mice in Central Park are adapting to the fatty food New Yorkers drop. The wild is always here.
Water is no different. Toni Morrison, in "The Site of Memory," wrote about how they straightened out the Mississippi in places, to make room for houses:
Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Still, like water, she wrote, "I remember where I was before I was 'straightened out.'"
Standing on the Chain
Josephine Mandamin was Anishinaabe, from Wiikwemikoong, and was a residential school survivor. She decided in 2003 to begin walking the shorelines of all five Great Lakes, more than 17,000 kilometres over fourteen years, carrying a pail of water. She was known as Grandmother Water Walker. Biidaasige-ba, meaning the one who comes with the light.
She was a body carrying water, which is itself a body of water, walking the edge of a body of water, so that it would be remembered as being alive.
The nineteen riders in the October snow didn't have any court that would recognize the river lot. The riders didn't yet have a word for what they were protecting that Ottawa would accept. The riders only had their boots and metal chain on the ground. Refusal is stewardship. To stand on the land where others are trying to draw out the lines.
We will always be mostly fluid. Difficult to define, if not impossible. We will take the shape of the containers we're placed in, but the container doesn't define us. Our sovereignty can be found in the wild nature we are always surrounded by and our personhood is no different than the running, vicious waters of the river.
We will always be mostly water. Water older than the Sun. Water that has been a river and will one day be a river again. The water within me was shimmering glacier and the warm breath of my ancestors on the Red. The water remembers where it was before it was straightened out.
I am the river, and the river is me.
Small streams and large streams flow into one another until a river is born. My great grandmothers' frontage on the Red. Shoal Lake in a Winnipeg glass. The Bow pressing against its banks, remembering. Every body that has ever refused the shape it was handed.
We are always somewhere.