Should the Yukon River be considered a 'person' with rights? Some say it's an idea whose time has come

Intrinsic to the Yukon River are skills shared and carefully honed among families, for generations. 

Nika Silverfox-Young, a citizen of the Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation in the Yukon, calls this blood memory. 

"We really travelled a lot and we used the rivers as our highways. We really needed them," she said. "We'd pick out the best parts, and listen to the land when the salmon were coming back.

"We've lost that ability to listen to what our land is telling us. She is screaming right now about how we need to protect her." 

Silverfox-Young said the river is "part of me."

"I feel like I'm legally, genetically obligated to protect this land ... I want that to continue."

Silverfox-Young is among a growing number of people who think it's time the Yukon River had more significant environmental protections — in part, by granting the waterway legal personhood.

It's an idea that already has the support of the Council of Yukon First Nations, and Alaska Native people, whose cultures are also intertwined with the river.

In the face of climate change, industrial impacts and imperilled salmon populations, advocates are now calling for dialogue and cooperation, among communities along the river and all levels of government.

There's precedent in Canada for granting environmental personhood. The Innu of Ekuanitshit and a regional municipality in Quebec granted the Magpie River with the status in 2021, to primarily defend it against hydro development. A resolution grants the river nine rights, including the right to flow, the right to maintain its biodiversity and the right to be safe from pollution. It even has the right to sue.

Calls for environmental personhood are mounting in B.C., too.

In October, the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations passed a resolution calling on the province and others to work with First Nations to advance the legal personhood of nature, "including water bodies such as rivers and lakes, forests and mountains within a First Nations' unceded traditional territory."

And in New Zealand, after more than a century-long fight led by Māori to protect the Whanganui River, the country's parliament passed legislation in 2017 that granted the waterway fundamental rights that build in Indigenous cosmologies — the first of its kind in the world.

There's a common dominator to every effort to assign legal personhood to entities found in the natural world, said Stepan Wood, professor at Allard School of Law and the director of the Centre for Law and the Environment at the University of British Columbia.