By Meg Foley Yoder
As part of Harvard Climate Action Week 2025, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights convened a panel titled Human Resources: Indigenous Leadership in Protecting Water as a Fundamental Right. The discussion, moderated by Faculty Director Mathias Risse, brought together three inspiring Indigenous leaders: Bryan BainBridge, CEO of the Great Lakes Intertribal Council Inc.; Charitie Ropati, water engineer and climate adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General; and Dr. Kelsey Leonard, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of the Environment at the University of Waterloo. Together, they explored how Indigenous knowledge, law, and lived practice shape the fight for water security in an era of climate disruption.
Risse opened the session by situating water within the human rights framework. “You need a stable climate and a healthy environment for any kind of human rights to be exercisable,” he said. He reminded the audience that the right to safe drinking water, recognized by the UN in 2010, and the more recent acknowledgment of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment represent important progress. Yet he also noted the limits of these frameworks, which often treat the environment as something external to humanity, existing for human use. Indigenous perspectives, he emphasized, challenge this division by recognizing water “among our relations, among the greater nature into which we are all embedded.”
Place-Based Stewardship in the Great Lakes
For Bryan BainBridge, an enrolled member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, the health of water is inseparable from the survival of his community. Living on the shores of Lake Superior, which contains ten percent of the world’s fresh water, his people depend on clean water for fisheries and wild rice. Yet upstream mining and industrial projects threaten these foundations of food sovereignty.
“We live in the woods. We live on the water. We know how these things function,” BainBridge said, underscoring the depth of Indigenous knowledge rooted in place. He described the importance of mentoring youth by connecting technical disciplines such as geology, hydrology, ecology with traditional practices. Taking young people to both public hearings and wild rice beds, he emphasized, helps them understand not only the science but also the responsibilities embedded in stewardship.
“It’s not just about being on the front lines; it’s about understanding why—connecting science with place, culture, and responsibility.” –Bryan BainBridge
The pandemic revealed the resilience of these community-based systems. When restaurants closed and commercial markets collapsed, BainBridge organized local fishing. Over a thousand pounds of fish were harvested and distributed without waste. “As the grass grows and the water flows—until that stops… that’s the end of our treaty obligations and way of life,” he reflected, linking ecological continuity to enduring legal and cultural commitments.
Alaska’s Frontline Realities
Charitie Ropati, who is Yup’ik and Samoan, brought the perspective of Alaska, the fastest-warming state in the United States. She spoke of disappearing salmon runs, thawing permafrost, and rising seas that threaten her home village of Kongiganak. In the 1960’s, her great-grandfather had relocated the entire community eleven miles—by boat, tractor, snow machine, and dog sleds—to escape sinking ground and encroaching waters. “The move… many considered a managed retreat, but to my people it was simply survival,” she explained.
Yet even after this dramatic relocation, her village still lacks basic infrastructure such as clean running water. Ropati described her own journey from Alaska to New York City to study engineering, ultimately becoming one of the first Alaskan Native and Polynesian women to graduate from her engineering department at Columbia University. Now she works to build water infrastructure for Indigenous communities across the Pacific and serves as climate adviser to the UN Secretary-General.
“This decision should not be made about us without us. We need to be at the table.” — Charitie Ropati
“This decision should not be made about us without us. We need to be at the table,” she insisted, stressing the necessity of Indigenous leadership in policy and planning. Her cultural perspective deepens this imperative: in her community, animals are considered people, with rules governing relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Breaking these rules risks scarcity, a truth increasingly visible as climate impacts unfold.
Ocean Governance and Indigenous Law
Dr. Kelsey Leonard of the Shinnecock Indian Nation highlighted how Indigenous voices are shaping ocean governance. Representing her nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting ocean ecosystems and coastlines, she argued that the crisis humanity faces is not merely climatic. “Are we really in a climate crisis—or perhaps are we in a human crisis?” she asked. For Leonard, the planetary emergency is rooted in humanity’s failure to live with responsibility, reciprocity, and care.
“Are we really in a climate crisis—or perhaps are we in a human crisis?” — Kelsey Leonard
She emphasized that justice must extend beyond human beings. “Justice is not something solely for humans, but justice for all living beings,” she said. Leonard described the growing global movement to recognize the inherent rights of rivers and waters—an approach already embraced by Indigenous legal systems for millennia. Examples include the Menominee River (recognized by the Menominee Nation), the Whanganui River in New Zealand, and the Klamath River in California. Such recognition, she argued, allows ecosystems not only to survive but to thrive.
Leonard also drew attention to Indigenous youth as sources of hope. Grandmothers and water walkers she has learned from told her they found no hope in governments or politicians—but hope in “those little ones, in those grandbabies” who still feel a direct and sacred connection to water. For Leonard, education and cultural renewal are therefore central to regeneration, moving beyond resilience to allow space and time for healing.
Beyond Borders, Beyond Acknowledgment
The panel also underscored the cross-border solidarity of Indigenous nations. Ropati described the enduring relationships among Inupiaq, Yup’ik, and Chukchi peoples across the Bering Strait, who continue to share knowledge about sea ice, migrations, and subsistence despite geopolitical conflicts. “We don’t have grocery stores like Trader Joe’s,” she noted. “Our grocery store is from the ocean, from the tundra, from the land.” Yet even as supermarkets in distant cities stock “wild Alaskan salmon,” Indigenous families at home face empty nets and food insecurity, a contradiction she urged the audience to confront through consumer choices.
“You need a stable climate and a healthy environment for any kind of human rights to be exercisable.” — Mathias Risse
The speakers agreed that universities, governments, and institutions must move beyond symbolic land acknowledgments to material commitments. Funding Indigenous-led projects, embedding Indigenous voices in decision-making bodies, and supporting youth mentorship programs are essential steps. As BainBridge put it, real hope comes not from “higher-level” politics but from communities, young people, and the respect that arises when people recognize their responsibilities to one another and to water.
Reframing Relationships with Water
Throughout the event, a recurring theme was the need to reframe the human relationship with water—not as a resource for human consumption but as a living relative with which humans share reciprocal duties. From BainBridge’s Great Lakes fisheries to Ropati’s relocated Alaskan village, to Leonard’s global movement for the rights of nature, each story underscored that Indigenous leadership offers not only strategies for survival but also pathways toward justice, dignity, and regeneration.
As Risse observed at the outset, human rights depend upon a stable climate and healthy environment. But as the panelists made clear, securing water as a fundamental right requires more than technical fixes or legal declarations. It requires a transformation in how we see ourselves: not apart from the waters, but as part of them.
