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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 February 2023
The contributions to this Special Issue examine multispecies perspectives on the political dynamics of international life. Building on this theme, I consider the complex and manifold ways in which the subject of security can be understood in terms of more-than-human personhood. First, by thinking of more-than-human animals as phenomenally conscious persons, we might better appreciate the multispecies complexity of security as an agentic and affective experience. Second, attending to the spiritual character of certain indigenous articulations of personhood presses us to decipher how spiritual claims might inform moral and legal dimensions of multispecies security-seeking behaviour. To illustrate the significance of these moves, I first draw on more-than-human experiences of war, pathogenic viruses, and the global factory farm. I then explore conceptions of spiritual personhood in the context of Ojibwe responsibilities to protect wolves. These perspectives on personhood demonstrate possibilities for cultivating greater interest in the multispecies experience of security.
1 US District Court (Western District of Wisconsin), Declaration Of Marvin Defoe, Civil Case No. 3:21-cv-00597, 1 October 2021, p. 6.
2 Fleming, Sean, ‘Moral agents and legal persons: The ethics and the law of state responsibility’, International Theory, 9:3 (2017), pp. 466–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Krickel-Choi, Nina C., ‘The embodied state: Why and how physical security matters for ontological security’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 25:1 (2022), pp. 159–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holland, Ben, The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a very different account of personhood focused on images and trauma, see Edkins, Jenny, ‘Politics and personhood: Reflections on the portrait photograph’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 38:2 (2013), pp. 139–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Throughout this article I use the term ‘more-than-human’ rather than ‘non-human’ to avoid writing of subjects and persons in the negative.
4 Aaltola, Elisa, ‘Personhood and animals’, Environmental Ethics, 30:2 (2008), pp. 175–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DeGrazia, David, ‘On the question of personhood beyond Homo sapiens’, in Singer, Peter (ed.), In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 40–53Google Scholar; Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics (2nd edn, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Francione, Gary L., Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
5 Donaldson, Sue and Kymlicka, Will, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Rights (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. Donaldson and Kymlicka prefer to frame questions about interspecies relations in terms of selfhood rather than personhood, in part because of the latter's exclusionary history and because they believe it directs us away from the pursuit of respecting inviolable rights. For legal theories of more-than-human personhood, see Wise, Steven M., ‘Nonhuman rights to personhood’, Pace Environmental Law Review, 30:3 (2013), pp. 1278–90Google Scholar; Fernandez, Angela, ‘Not quite property, not quite persons: A quasi approach for nonhuman animals’, Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law, 5 (2019), pp. 155–231Google Scholar.
6 Youatt, Rafi, ‘Personhood and the rights of nature: The new subjects of contemporary earth politics’, International Political Sociology, 11:1 (2017), pp. 39–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tanasescu, Mihnea, ‘The rights of nature in Ecuador: The making of an idea’, International Journal of Environmental Studies, 70:6 (2013), pp. 846–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Gwendolyn J., ‘Environmental personhood’, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, 43:1 (2018), pp. 49–91Google Scholar.
7 Deckha, Maneesha, ‘Unsettling anthropocentric legal systems: Reconciliation, indigenous laws, and animal personhood’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 41:1 (2020), pp. 77–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, Margaret, ‘Animal personhood in Mi'kmaq perspective’, Societies, 4:4 (2014), pp. 672–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Cudworth, Erika and Hobden, Stephen, ‘Post-human security’, in Burke, Anthony and Parker, Rita (eds), Global Insecurity (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 65–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Youatt, Rafi, Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaltofen, Carolin, ‘Posthuman security’, in Schippers, Birgit (ed.), The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking Ethics in International Relations (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), pp. 367–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Audra, ‘Only human? A worldly approach to security’, Security Dialogue, 45:1 (2014), pp. 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Matthew Leep, ‘Toxic entanglements: Multispecies politics, white phosphorus, and the Iraq War in Alaska’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue (2022), available at: {doi:10.1017/S0260210522000158}. In this issue, for example, Leep describes certain spatiotemporal dimensions of war in terms of ancestral and multigenerational spaces for more-than-human agents and persons. See also Delf Rothe, ‘Global security in a posthuman age? IR and the Anthropocene challenge’, E-IR (13 October 2017); Cudworth, Erika and Hobden, Stephen, ‘Liberation for straw dogs? Old materialism, new materialism, and the challenge of an emancipatory posthumanism’, Globalizations, 12:1 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cudworth, Erika and Hobden, Stephen, Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global Politics (London, UK: Zed Books, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Global Indigenous Council, ‘Wolf Treaty’, pp. 43, 6, available at: {https://www.globalindigenouscouncil.com/wolf-treaty}.
11 Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, ‘Ma'iingan relationship plan 1837/1842 ceded territory’, p. 8.
12 Jason D. Sanders, ‘Wolves, lone and pack: Ojibwe treaty rights and the Wisconsin wolf hunt’, Wisconsin Law Review (2013), pp. 1263–94.
13 ‘Declaration Of Marvin Defoe’, p. 6.
14 Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel, ‘Power, world politics and thing-systems in the Anthropocene’, in Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand (eds), Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 87–107.
15 Rafi Youatt, ‘Interspecies politics and the global rat: Ecology, extermination, experiment’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue (2022).
16 Martin Coward, ‘Between us in the city: Materiality, subjectivity, and community in the era of global urbanization’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30:3 (2012), p. 468. See also Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, ‘Complexity, ecologism, and posthuman politics’, Review of International Studies, 39:3 (2013), pp. 643–64.
17 Anthony Burke, ‘Interspecies cosmopolitanism: Nonhuman power and the grounds of world order in the Anthropocene’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue (2022).
18 Claire Rasmussen, The Autonomous Animal: Self-Governance and the Modern Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
19 Kathleen Birrell and Daniel Matthews, ‘Re-storying laws for the Anthropocene: Rights, obligations and an ethics of encounter’, Law and Critique, 31:3 (2020), pp. 275–92.
20 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 353.
21 See also Nurit Bird-David, ‘“Animism” revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology’, Current Anthropology, 40:S1 (1999), pp. S67–S81; Youatt, ‘Personhood and the rights of nature’; Chris Fowler, ‘Relational personhood revisited’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 26:3 (2016), pp. 397–412.
22 Matthew Leep, ‘Specters of minks: Postcapitalist elegies and multispecies solidarities’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, (2022), available at: {doi:10.1177/03058298221131360}.
23 Sheryl R. Lightfoot, ‘Decolonizing self-determination: Haudenosaunee passports and negotiated sovereignty’, European Journal of International Relations, 27:4 (2021), pp. 971–94; Sheryl Lightfoot, Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016); Jarrad Reddekop, ‘Against ontological capture: Drawing lessons from Amazonian Kichwa relationality’, Review of International Studies (2021), pp. 1–18, available at: {doi:10.1017/S0260210521000486}.
24 Deckha, ‘Unsettling anthropocentric legal systems’. See also Fishel and Gebara and Pereira in this Special Issue. Joana Castro Pereira and Maria Fernanda Gebara, ‘Where the material and the symbolic intertwine: Making sense of the Amazon in the Anthropocene’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue (2022); Stephanie Fishel, ‘The global tree: Forests and the possibility of a multispecies IR’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue (2022).
25 Justin de Leon, ‘Lakota experiences of (in)security: Cosmology and ontological security’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22:1(2020), pp. 33–62.
26 Jonathan Fisher and Cherry Leonardi, ‘Insecurity and the invisible: The challenge of spiritual (in)security’, Security Dialogue, 52:5 (2021), pp. 383–400.
27 Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Brighton, Sussex, UK: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983).
28 Gary King and Christopher J. L. Murray, ‘Rethinking human security’, Political Science Quarterly, 116:4 (2001–02), pp. 588–9. This shift in the focus of security emerged in a broader context of IR scholarship moving away from the state-centric ideas of neorealism. See Fen Osler Hampson, Madness in the Multitude: Human Security and World Disorder (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001).
29 Richard H. Ullman, ‘Redefining security’, International Security, 8:1 (1983), p. 129.
30 Buzan, People, States, and Fear, p. 18.
31 Buzan would later accuse the shift to human security of ‘reductionism’, noting that ‘while a moral case for making individuals the ultimate referent object can be constructed, the cost to be paid is loss of analytical purchase on collective actors both as the main agents of security provision and as possessors of a claim to survival in their own right’. Barry Buzan, ‘What is human security? A reductionist, idealistic notion that adds little analytical value’, Security Dialogue, 35:3 (2004), p. 370.
32 Peter H. Liotta and Taylor Owen, ‘Why human security’, Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, 7 (2006), p. 39.
33 Lorraine Elliott, ‘Human security/environmental security’, Contemporary Politics, 21:1 (2015), pp. 11–24; Simon Dalby, Security and Environmental Change (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009).
34 King and Murray, ‘Rethinking human security’, p. 588.
35 Matt McDonald, ‘Climate change and security: Towards ecological security?’, International Theory, 10:2 (2018), pp. 153–80.
36 Ibid., p. 169.
37 See, for example, Christine Sylvester, ‘War, sense, and security’, in Laura Sjoberg (ed.), Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), pp. 24–37; Thea Waldron and Erin Baines, ‘Gender and embodied war knowledge’, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 11:2 (2019), pp. 393–405.
38 For a critique of Wendt's biological personhood claims, see, for example, Robert Oprisko and Kristopher Kaliher, ‘The state as a person?: Anthropomorphic personification vs. concrete durational being’, Journal of International and Global Studies, 6:1 (2014), pp. 30–49. See also Ringmar's critique of Wendt's claims as Eurocentric. Erik Ringmar, ‘The international politics of recognition’, in Thomas Lindemann and Erik Ringmar (eds), The International Politics of Recognition (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), pp. 3–23.
39 Wendt, ‘The state as person in international theory’, p. 293.
40 Ibid., p. 293.
41 Ibid., p. 293. This view also privileges psychological personhood over legal and moral personhood. Jorg Kustermans, ‘The state as citizen: State personhood and ideology’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 14:1 (2011), p. 5.
42 Wendt, ‘The state as person in international theory’, p. 293.
43 Aaron P. Blaisdell et al., ‘Causal reasoning in rats’, Science, 311:5763 (2006), pp. 1020–22.
44 Youatt, ‘Interspecies politics and the global rat’, p. 2.
45 Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 93.
46 Olga F. Lazareva and Edward A. Wasserman, ‘Effect of stimulus orderability and reinforcement history on transitive responding in pigeons’, Behavioural Processes, 72:2 (2006), pp. 161–72; Brigitte M. Weiß, Sophia Kehmeier, and Christian Schloegl, ‘Transitive inference in free-living greylag geese, Anser anser’, Animal Behaviour, 79:6 (2010), pp. 1277–83.
47 Guillermo Paz-y-Miño et al., ‘Pinyon jays use transitive inference to predict social dominance’, Nature, 430:7001 (2004), pp. 778–81.
48 Leep, ‘Toxic entanglements’, p. 18.
49 Ibid., p. 18.
50 Youatt, ‘Interspecies politics and the global rat’, p. 16.
51 Wendt, ‘The state as person in international theory’, p. 293.
52 Laura Danón, ‘Neo-pragmatism, primitive intentionality and animal minds’, Philosophia, 47:1 (2019), pp. 39–58.
53 John Searle, ‘Animal minds’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XIX (1994), p. 208.
54 Ibid., p. 208.
55 Ibid., p. 209.
56 Geoffrey Whitehall, ‘When they fight back: A cinematic archive of animal resistance and world wars’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue (2022).
57 Burke, ‘Interspecies cosmopolitanism’.
58 Youatt, ‘Personhood and the rights of nature’, p. 44. See also Elisa Aaltola, ‘Personhood and animals’.
59 Searle, ‘Animal minds’, p. 217.
60 Fernando Santos-Granero, ‘Beinghood and people-making in native Amazonia: A constructional approach with a perspectival coda’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2:1 (2012), pp. 181–211. See also Pereira and Gebara, ‘Where the material and the symbolic intertwine’.
61 Jacob Schiff, ‘“Real”? As if! Critical reflections on state personhood’, Review of International Studies, 34:2 (2008), pp. 363–77.
62 Adam B. Lerner, ‘What's it like to be a state? An argument for state consciousness’, International Theory, 13:2 (2021), pp. 260–86.
63 Wendt, ‘The state as person in international theory’, p. 296.
64 Ibid., p. 436.
65 David J. Chalmers, ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2:3 (1995), pp. 200–19. For an overview of recent approaches to the study of the neural correlates of consciousness, see Christof Koch et al., ‘Neural correlates of consciousness: Progress and problems’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17:5 (2016), pp. 307–21.
66 Chalmers, ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’, p. 201.
67 Ibid., p. 201.
68 Ibid., p. 201.
69 Eric Schwitzgebel, Perplexities of Consciousness (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 113.
70 Eric Schwitzgebel, ‘Phenomenal consciousness, defined and defended as innocently as I can manage’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23:11–12 (2016), pp. 224–35.
71 Eric Schwitzgebel, ‘Is there something it's like to be a garden snail?’, Philosophical Topics, 48:1 (2020), pp. 39–64. See also Jonathan Birch, ‘The search for invertebrate consciousness’, Noûs, 56:1 (2022), pp. 133–53.
72 Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, p. 441.
73 Ibid., p. 436.
74 Ibid., p. 438.
75 Ibid., p. 439.
76 Ibid., p. 442.
77 Matthew Leep, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War: Animals, Loss, and Spectral-Poetic Moments (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021).
78 Leep, ‘Specters of minks’.
79 Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, p. 442.
80 Schwitzgebel, ‘Phenomenal consciousness, defined and defended as innocently as I can manage’.
81 Lerner, ‘What's it like to be a state?’. But as I claim throughout, the language of personhood is not about determining the moral status of others; rather, it is an effort to attend more fully to interspecies experiences and more-than-human security perspectives.
82 Ibid., p. 269.
83 Schwitzgebel, ‘Is there something it's like to be a garden snail?’, p. 54.
84 Erika Cudworth and Steve Hobden, ‘The posthuman way of war’, Security Dialogue, 46:6 (2015), pp. 513-29.
85 Vanessa Romo, ‘More than 300 dogs die of hunger and thirst in a Ukraine shelter’, NPR (6 April 2022), available at: {https://www.npr.org/2022/04/06/1091159646/more-than-300-dogs-starved-to-death-at-a-shelter-in-ukraine}.
86 Matthew Leep, ‘Stray dogs, post-humanism and cosmopolitan belongingness: Interspecies hospitality in times of war’, Millennium, 47:1 (2018), pp. 45–66.
87 Benjamin Meiches, ‘Non-human humanitarians’, Review of International Studies, 45:1 (2019), pp. 1–19.
88 Oliver H. Turnbull and Annalena Bär, ‘Animal minds: The case for emotion, based on neuroscience’, Neuropsychoanalysis, 22:1–2 (2020), pp. 109–28.
89 Juliane Kaminski, Linda Schulz, and Michael Tomasello, ‘How dogs know when communication is intended for them’, Developmental Science, 15:2 (2012), pp. 222–32.
90 Isabella Merola, Emanuela Prato-Previde, and Sarah Marshall-Pescini, ‘Dogs’ social referencing towards owners and strangers’, PLoS ONE, 7:10 (2012), p. e47653.
91 Ádám Miklósi, Dog Behavior, Evolution, and Cognition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009).
92 Jaime Chambers et al., ‘Dog-human coevolution: Cross-cultural analysis of multiple hypotheses’, Journal of Ethnobiology, 40:4 (2020), pp. 414–33.
93 Christine R. Harris and Caroline Prouvost, ‘Jealousy in dogs’, PloS One, 9:7 (2014), p. e94597.
94 Min Hooi Yong, and Ted Ruffman. ‘Emotional contagion: Dogs and humans show a similar physiological response to human infant crying’, Behavioural Processes, 108 (2014), pp. 155–65.
95 Miiamaaria V. Kujala, ‘Canine emotions as seen through human social cognition’, Animal Sentience, 14:1 (2017), pp. 1–34.
96 Pereira and Gebara, ‘Where the material and the symbolic intertwine’; Fishel, ‘The global tree’.
97 Burke, ‘Interspecies cosmopolitanism’.
98 Gitte du Plessis, ‘Destructive plasticity and the microbial geopolitics of childhood malnutrition’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue (2022), p. 11.
99 Leep, ‘Toxic entanglements’; Youatt, ‘Interspecies politics and the global rat’, p. 2.
100 Bernstein and Jan Dutkiewicz, ‘A public health ethics case for mitigating zoonotic disease risk in food production’, Food Ethics, 6:2 (2021), pp. 1–25.
101 Matthew Leep, ‘Cosmopolitanism in a carnivorous world’, Politics and Animals, 3:1 (2017), pp. 16–30.
102 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘Nipah Virus (NiV)’, available at: {https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/nipah/index.html}.
103 World Health Organization, ‘R&D Blueprint and Nipah’ (10 January 2019), available at: {https://www.who.int/teams/blueprint/nipah}.
104 Juliet R.C. Pulliam et al., ‘Agricultural intensification, priming for persistence and the emergence of Nipah virus: A lethal bat-borne zoonosis’, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 9:66 (2012), pp. 89–101.
105 Ibid.
106 Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh, ‘A taste for pork helped a deadly virus jump to humans’, NPR (25 February 2017), available at: {https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/02/25/515258818/a-taste-for-pork-helped-a-deadly-virus-jump-to-humans}.
107 Ibid.
108 K. B. Chua et al., ‘Nipah virus: A recently emergent deadly paramyxovirus’, Science, 288:5470 (2000), pp. 1432–5.
109 Frances Harrison, ‘Malaysia kills pigs as virus jumps to humans’, The Guardian (29 March 1999), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/30/malaysia}.
110 Doucleff and Greenhalgh, ‘A taste for pork helped a deadly virus jump to humans’.
111 Ibid.
112 Harrison, ‘Malaysia kills pigs as virus jumps to humans’.
113 For a similar argument about minks, mink farms, and pathogenic viruses, see Leep, ‘Specters of minks’.
114 Donald M. Broom, Hilana Sena, and Kiera L. Moynihan, ‘Pigs learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information’, Animal Behaviour, 78:5 (2009), pp. 1037–41.
115 David Judd and James Rocha, ‘Autonomous pigs’, Ethics and the Environment, 22:1 (2017), pp. 1–18.
116 Michael Mendl, Suzanne Held, and Richard W. Byrne, ‘Pig cognition’, Current and the Environment, 22:1 (2017), pp. 1–18.
117 Kristina Horback, ‘Nosing around: Play in pigs’, Animal Behavior and Cognition, 1:2 (2014), pp. 186–96.
118 Adriana S. Souza et al., ‘A novel method for testing social recognition in young pigs and the modulating effects of relocation’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 99:1–2 (2006), pp. 77–87.
119 Yi Guan et al., ‘Isolation and characterization of viruses related to the SARS coronavirus from animals in southern China’, Science, 302:5643 (2003), pp. 276–78.
120 Jim Yardley, ‘The SARS scare in China: Slaughter of the animals’, New York Times (7 January 2004), p. A3.
121 Yardley, ‘The SARS scare in China’, p. A3.
122 Humane Society International, ‘Fur Farm Investigation’ (15 March 2021), available at: {https://www.hsi.org/news-media/fur-farm-investigation-reveals-distressed-foxes-raccoon-dogs-electrocuted-in-agony-and-fur-farm-carcasses-sold-for-human-consumption/}.
123 Mizuho Hirasawa, Eiji Kanda, and Seiki Takatsuki, ‘Seasonal food habits of the raccoon dog at a western suburb of Tokyo’, Mammal Study, 31:1 (2006), pp. 9–14.
124 Michael Worobey et al., ‘The Huanan Market was the Epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 Emergence’ (2022), available at: {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6299600}.
125 Sarah Temmam, et al., ‘Coronaviruses with a SARS-CoV-2-like Receptor-Binding Domain Allowing ACE2-Mediated Entry into Human Cells Isolated from Bats of Indochinese Peninsula’ (2021), preprint available at: {https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-871965/v1}.
126 Worobey et al., ‘The Huanan Market was the Epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 Emergence’.
127 Conrad M. Freuling et al., ‘Susceptibility of raccoon dogs for experimental SARS-CoV-2 infection’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 26:12 (2020), pp. 2982–5.
128 Worobey et al., ‘The Huanan Market was the Epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 Emergence’.
129 Youatt, Interspecies Politics, p. 138.
130 Ibid.
131 Leep, ‘Stray dogs, post-humanism and cosmopolitan belongingness’, p. 63.
132 Due to space constraints, I have also not examined more relational forms of consciousness. For example, see Adams, Will W., ‘Nature's participatory psyche: A study of consciousness in the shared earth community’, The Humanistic Psychologist, 38:1 (2010), pp. 15–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
133 Gupta, Ravi M., ‘Battling serpents, marrying trees: Towards an ecotheology of the Bhāgavata Purāna’, Journal of Dharma Studies, 4:1 (2021), pp. 29–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carolyn Harwood and Alex K. Ruuska, ‘The personhood of trees: Living artifacts in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’, Time and Mind, 6:2 (2013), pp. 135–57.
134 David L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013).
135 Pereira and Gebara, ‘Where the material and the symbolic intertwine’; Fishel, ‘The global tree’.
136 Moreover, the simplified categories of ‘non-Western’ and ‘indigenous’ can mask the contextual complexities of personhood. In Willerslev's study of Yukaghirs and personhood, for example, an elk can have a ‘quite different meaning depending on the context in which it is experienced’. Willerslev, Rane, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), p. 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
137 Pereira and Gebara, ‘Where the material and the symbolic intertwine’.
138 Fishel, ‘The global tree’.
139 Hutchison, Abigail, ‘The Whanganui River as a legal person’, Alternative Law Journal, 39:3 (2014), pp. 179–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
140 Kayla Devault, ‘What legal personhood for US rivers would do’, Yes! Magazine (12 September 2017).
141 It is important to remember, as Kyle Whyte reminds us, that using the term ‘Anishinaabe peoples’ is to invoke ‘broad intellectual traditions connecting Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Odawa, and Mississauga and related peoples who have diverse contemporary and ancient linguistic, cultural, social, and political connections’. Whyte, Kyle, ‘Settler colonialism, ecology, and environmental injustice’, Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 9 (2018), p. 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
142 The ‘Ojibwe Nation is one of the three largest native nations in North America’ and there are six Ojibwe bands in the state of Wisconsin. Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, available at: {https://www.badriver-nsn.gov/history/}.
143 For an early ethnographic study on Ojibwe worldviews and ‘other-than-human persons’, see A. Irving Hallowell, ‘Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view’, in Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock (eds), Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy (New York, NY: Liveright, 1975), pp. 141–78.
144 Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, ‘Comments on the DEIS for the Proposed Enbridge Line 5 Relocation Project’ (15 April 2022), p. 51, available at: {https://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/files/bad_river_band_comment_letter_to_wdnr_04.15.2022.pdf}.
145 Paul A. Smith, ‘Ojibwe tribes file lawsuit to stop November wolf hunt, saying their treaty-protected rights have been violated’, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (21 September 2021), available at: {https://www.jsonline.com/story/sports/outdoors/2021/09/21/six-wisconsin-tribes-ask-federal-judge-prevent-2021-wolf-season/5797482001/}.
146 Sanders, ‘Wolves, lone and pack’, p. 1275.
147 Ibid., p. 1274.
148 Ibid., pp. 1274–5.
149 Robert Shimek, ‘The Wolf is My Brother’ (October 2013), available at: {http://www.badriver-nsn.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NRD_Wildlife_Maiingan_Anishinaabe.pdf}.
150 Edward Benton-Banai, The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway (Hayward, WI: Indian Country Communications, 1988).
151 Ibid.
152 Ben Binversie and Jack Hurbanis, ‘Bad River Band wildlife specialist says state leaders need to learn from tribes on wolf relationship’, Milwaukee NPR (15 March 2021), available at: {https://www.wuwm.com/podcast/lake-effect-segments/2021-03-15/bad-river-band-wildlife-specialist-says-state-leaders-need-to-learn-from-tribes-on-wolf-relationship}.
153 US District Court (Western District of Wisconsin), Declaration Of Brian Bisonette, Civil Case No. 3:21-cv-00597 (30 September 2021), p. 4.
154 Declaration Of Marvin Defoe, p. 6.
155 John Myers, ‘Wisconsin tribes sue to stop November wolf hunt’, Duluth News Tribune (21 September 2021), available at: {https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/sports/northland-outdoors/wisconsin-tribes-sue-to-stop-november-wolf-hunt}.
156 Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, ‘Ma'iingan relationship plan 1837/1842 ceded territory’, p. 5.
157 Walker, R. B. J., ‘The subject of security’, in Krause, Keith and Williams, Michael C. (eds), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 66Google Scholar.
