Thank you.
That’s not an easy question.
Changing a person’s vision about water is hard. For me, it took me several years. In the past, I talked about it a lot as a resource. A resource is defined as something we use for our own well-being, our own goals. The paper I’m using to communicate with you is a resource. We can think of water as a living environment. The first nations say it’s alive, whereas non-Indigenous people say it’s a living environment. In other words, it’s where life starts and where many species live.
That is what we are able to understand. Maybe we will never be able to understand that water can be alive and have a spirit, but we can agree on the fact that our species is not the only one in the world and it is part of an environment. We cannot separate it from the rest. We have a tendency to think that there’s water on one side, fish on the other, and plants elsewhere. However, it’s part of a whole. I think this somewhat neutral perspective can reconcile different visions. That way, we can see the river as a living entity or a living environment. For some people, the river is an ancestor, whereas for us, it’s a legal person.