‘Wáahlaal Gíidaak, who is Indigenous Haida, Tlingit, and Ahtna Athabascan, grew up on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska that was home to about 6,000 people.
She spent her career working in government and public policy advocating for Indigenous peoples and when she was first approached to work for the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting oceans, she initially hesitated.
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“A lot of our conservation organizations in the U.S. and Alaska have not always had a great history of working with Indigenous peoples in a healthy way,” she said.
She eventually took the job and is now the vice president of the Ocean Conservancy’s Arctic and Northern Waters program where she’s helping to convene conversations about what it would mean to create an Indigenous Law of the Sea.
The Law of the Sea typically refers to international law described in a 1982 United Nations Convention that governs what states can and can’t do in the ocean, and it serves as the basis for modern-day international law governing the ocean. The newly ratified “high seas treaty” creating a framework for ocean conservation builds upon the foundation set by the Law of the Sea. But like other U.N. treaties, only recognized states were able to sign onto that law, and not Indigenous peoples like Gíidaak’s. The U.N. system prioritizes the perspectives and voices of governments that are internationally recognized, which makes it difficult for Indigenous peoples who have lost their lands and political independence to ensure their concerns are considered.
Gíidaak thinks that vacuum leaves opportunity for Indigenous peoples to organize and create their own version of international law that governs the oceans. Inspired by the Māori law of the sea in Aotearoa New Zealand, Gíidaak envisions a more expansive document that spans geographies and nationalities that could help Indigenous peoples more effectively organize and advocate around critical ocean issues like climate change and deep-sea mining.
Grist spoke with ‘Wáahlaal Gíidaak about what an Indigenous Law of the Sea might entail, why it’s important, and what is being done to create it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How would you describe your own personal connection to the sea?
A. In our historical retelling of our islands, it is where ravens found a clam shell and pulled humans out of the clam shell. This is our story from time immemorial that tells of when humans first came to these islands This imperative and this connection to these islands has been one that’s existed for a very long time, and our connections to the nonhuman beings that exist in the ocean are part of our DNA and part of the thing that keeps us going.
About 20 or so years ago they found one of our ancestors in a cave in Prince of Wales island, and that ancestor was about 10,000 years old. They tested the DNA for our ancestor against the population of today and sure enough it matched. But the thing I found interesting was the DNA they found in the stomach of that ancestor was salmon. So for over 10,000 years we have had a connection with salmon that preexisted any laws that dictated how we harvested our salmon today. The salmon that existed back then were saber-toothed salmon.
We are starting to see the salmon disappear from our homelands and it is the last, largest wild salmon stock on the planet. Many of our communities have gone without being able to harvest salmon for at least five years now because the salmon populations have been so mistreated that our people cannot sustain our way of life and our relationship with salmon like we have always done.
Q. How is climate change affecting that relationship that you and your people have with the ocean?
A. Big ice sheets are melting at four times the rate that they would historically. As our ice sheets melt in the Arctic and in the central Arctic Ocean, it’s creating a rise in the ocean that’s impacting the rest of the world.
We’re seeing our glaciers really receding at an exacerbated rate and we need those glaciers to continue to provide for everything in our ecosystem. The glacier melts every year are what provides for our rivers. We need them to be at a steady pace and not one that’s exacerbated as it is today.
Folks have been talking about turtles coming into our waters, which is crazy to think about these species that are typically subtropically making their way to Alaska, which is the last place you’d assume a subtropical species would be. We’re also seeing the changes in our ocean and our seaweed, which is a main part of our diet.
Q. Why are you interested in compiling an Indigenous Law of the Sea?
A. My sisters in this work realized there is a space for Indigenous people at these big convenings where they’re making decisions about our homelands, and usually the space for Indigenous people is an afterthought. We get a seat at the table sometimes. It’s not a voting seat. It’s not a space where Indigenous voices are front and center. And so thinking through and realizing that our laws still carry through to today in how we operate on the ocean, how we operate in our waters — not only state and federal laws but an ancestral way of caring for the ocean that goes beyond those spaces. We were realizing that if the world uplifted those same principles and protocols for how they operate on our waters, we could get a little further down the road of caring for our ocean and our waters and caring for beyond-human beings in those spaces, if we were to uplift the truths and protocols of our people in all spaces.
Q. How would the creation of an Indigenous Law of the Sea interact with existing international law?
A. As we set out to create an Indigenous Law of the Sea, it’s not to say that we’re just going to replicate the U.N. Law of the Sea and then just put Indigenous names and faces and words in there, but to create our own Indigenous law. We’re not saying that this should replace the U.N.’s Law of the Sea. What we’re saying is that this can be an additive: to share with the world the protocols by which Indigenous peoples have always held a relationship with waters, what the protocols have taught us for thousands of years on how to treat these oceans and our relatives that exist in these oceans, how do we live in a balance and how have our ancestors taught us how to have this relationship with the ocean? What is our taboo that still exists today for how we go out on the water, and how our children and our children’s children will be taught to respect and have that care for the place that has always sustained our way of life?
Just writing those down, getting those stories out to the world so that the world can have a better understanding of what that protocol would look like.
We’re just having that conversation in Alaska right now, but we’re also in conversation with our relatives in Aotearoa New Zealand, in Hawaiʻi, with our brothers and sisters in Canada. What does it look like if we were to collectively pull into one document some of our similar stories and protocols for how we treat the ocean, and then just shared that with the world? This is a better way of being than what has currently existed, a way and a relationship that predates any government coming into these spaces that is not our own. And what would the world look like if everybody started to operate the way that Indigenous people have, and the way Indigenous people have cared for these places?
Q. Why is this important?
A. There is an opportunity for Indigenous people to say, “These are our laws,” and putting those front and center because we’ve never done that before.
We see so many different countries, so many different leaders trying their best to push things forward. And the laws that they’re creating are important, and the laws they’re taking a stand on are important. But we’ve never flexed our sovereignty as Indigenous people and said, “These are our waters.” They were our waters long before a lot of these government folks decided to step into these places, and our laws have had a reciprocal relationship in this space for a long time.
The sovereignty we carry is inherent. We have an inherent sovereignty. We had a sophisticated form of governing for our people, taking care of our communities long before any of these other governments decided that they wanted to be here. And so thinking through what it looks like for us to continue to uphold those sovereignty as nations of people across the country, across the globe, what does it look like for us to start flexing that sovereignty and saying, “Whatever’s happening over there is fine, but these are our laws, and this is our negotiated table. You can come and you can be an observer at our table. This is our table to finally have a conversation with just Indigenous people collectively standing on our own ancestral DNA and imperative for what the future protection and caring of these places should look like.”
Q. Where are these conversations happening?
A. We’ve held one gathering so far in Alaska. We invited all of our tribes and all of our native entities and leadership throughout Alaska to come sit down with us for three days. We invited our family from Aotearoa, our Māori brothers and sisters, to help us be catalyzers. The Māori are way ahead of us, like they always are. And they’ve already developed their own Indigenous Law of the Sea. And some Hawaiian folks and then some folks from Greenland and other places came to help us be catalyzers in this space. As it grows beyond Alaska, I would love to see something a little more formalized. We sat down at the U.N. Ocean Conference in France as an impromptu, informal gathering of what we ended up calling the Indigenous Peoples Ocean Alliance. I’m not sure where it’s going to take us, but I want to see us continue to grow in creating our own table.
Q. What should Indigenous peoples know about who can participate in this process?
A. A lot of our people think that they don’t carry the knowledge that can go into something like an Indigenous Law of the Sea, because so much has been lost as a result of colonization. And what we’ve shared with them is that you’re upholding those practices, and you know whether you have been told these are our traditional stories or not. The way that our people go out on the ocean, the way that people go in our waters, and the way they’re operating and treating these waters is part of that Indigenous Law of the Sea. I think that a lot of our people think that they have to be an expert in our traditional languages, or an expert in our traditional oratory or our traditional stories in order to come to these spaces and to speak the truth that we’ve always known of how we care for these places. And that’s absolutely not the case. I just want our people to feel that this is an opportunity for so many to share, especially those who are out on our waters day in and day out, what their relationship is with the water, what they’ve always been taught, how the world should be treating our oceans as a result of the lessons that they have learned over time.
Our DNA tells us it’s our responsibility to care for these places, with or without funding, with or without support. We are going to fight for the future of these places. This imperative will last for the next 15,000 years in our responsibility to care for these places. We’re always going to be here. We’re always going to be in our homelands and in our home waters. We’re not going anywhere.