Who has rights? What rights do they have? Can circumstances change regarding who does and doesn't have rights? And should entities other than humans have rights? These are some of the central questions posed by legislation passed in late December by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota to ensure the rights something unexpected: manoomin wild rice.

The statutes represent landmark legislation in the United States since they are the first “to recognize legal rights of a plant species,” said Mari Margil, head of the International Center for the Rights of Nature at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). The new statutes, drafted in consultation with CELDF, include provisions to allow manoomin to "exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve." Consistent with this goal is the right to have pure water and a healthy climate system, the right to be free from patents, and the right to be free from contamination by genetically engineered organisms.

In summary, manoomin wild rice is deserving of legal standing in U.S. courts — legal personhood. This would allow people, or organizations, to bring lawsuits on behalf of wild rice arguing that the grain itself was being harmed through an action. There would be no need to demonstrate that a person, or another entity with legal personhood, like a corporation, was being harmed.

The nascent legislation was deemed “necessary to provide a legal basis to protect wild rice and freshwater resources as part of [White Earth’s] primary treaty foods for future generations,” according to the adopted resolutions.

While the statutes are notable as being the first series of Western-style laws to recognize a plant species—and the ecosystem of which it is a part—the adoption of similar legislation is not new. Often stylized or named as “Rights of Nature,” these pieces of legislation extend the conceptual framework of who is deserving of rights to include the natural world.

Over the past decade, there has been a notable increase in such legislation in the United States and internationally. Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in the U.S.—including the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma, and the city of Pittsburgh—have adopted broad rights-of-nature legislation. Internationally, Bolivia and Ecuador have added rights-of-nature legislation into their respective constitutions, and New Zealand and India have given specific natural sites, such as the Whanganui River and the Ganges River, respectively, rights-of-nature–style protections.

The modern rights-of-nature movement can be traced back to 1972, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote the dissenting opinion in Sierra Club v. Morton, a case brought by the Sierra Club to try and stop approval of a ski resort in the Mineral King Valley in the Sequoia National Forest. Basing his dissent on Christopher Stone’s essay “Should Trees Have Standing,” in which Stone argued that extending rights to nature was the continuation of the development of human rights, Justice Douglas noted that “inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation…[and] so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes…or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.”

While the rights-of-nature movement is a relatively new concept for Western communities, its use by Indigenous peoples can be traced to traditional worldviews and laws that view nature as a living being. Humanity is integrated into this being, not separate from it. For example, the Whanganui community in New Zealand, which advocated for the rights of nature for the Whanganui River, otherwise known as Te Awa Tupua, has a saying to demonstrate its connectedness to the river—Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au: I am the river, the river is me.