Cultural Relationships to Land and Environment
Cultural Relationships to Land and Environment
Native Studies 30 | Unit 3, Lesson 11
Native Studies 30 | Unit 3, Lesson 11
I Can: I can explain how an Indigenous relationship to the land differs from a Western view of land as a resource to be owned or extracted. I can give at least two specific examples of how a community's worldview shapes how they care for, use, and relate to the natural world.
For many Cree people, land is not property. It is relative.
The Cree word wahkohtowin means "everything is related." It describes a natural law that extends kinship beyond human family to include the land, the animals, and the water. Under wahkohtowin, a person owes the land the same kind of responsibility owed to a grandparent or an aunt: respect, care, and reciprocity. The University of Alberta's Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge, a research centre built around this principle, describes wahkohtowin as a central tenet of Cree governance and philosophy, passed down through language, song, prayer, and storytelling for generations.
You can hear this relationship in the Cree name for the valley many of you call home. The Qu'Appelle River carries the Cree name kâ-têpwêwi-sîpiy, meaning "the river that calls." In 1804, Cree people told fur trader Daniel Harmon that paddlers on the river often heard a voice calling out, and that when they called back, only an echo answered. The steep hills near Lebret do produce a real echo, but the story is not just an explanation of sound. It describes the river as a being with a voice of its own, not a resource with a label attached to it. A map treats "Qu'Appelle" as a name. The Cree name treats the river as someone who can be spoken to.
The opposite view has a name too: terra nullius, meaning "nobody's land." Under this doctrine, land belonged to no one until a European power claimed it, at which point it became property that could be bought, sold, leased, or taxed.
The Supreme Court of Canada has said that terra nullius, strictly speaking, never applied here, because the Royal Proclamation of 1763 already recognized that First Nations held land. But Canadian courts spent nearly a century acting as though it did. In 1888, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in St. Catharines Milling and Lumber Co. v. The Queen, a case about a timber lease issued on Treaty 3 land the Saulteaux had already ceded to the Crown. The court held that Aboriginal title was only a "personal and usufructuary right," meaning a right to use the land, not to own it. The Crown, the court said, held the real title underneath. That ruling shaped Canadian land law for the next hundred years.
You can see the same logic closer to home. In 1881, a reserve was established for the Standing Buffalo Dakota, eight kilometres northwest of Fort Qu'Appelle, under Chief Tatanka-najin, Standing Buffalo. Federal policy allocated reserve land by formula: 640 acres per family of five. Standing Buffalo's band received 80. By 1901, band members had built themselves into self-sufficient farmers and wage earners despite the shortage, but in 1903 a request for more acreage was refused, even though officials admitted the land was not enough. In 1920, Standing Buffalo and his son Julius travelled to Ottawa to ask for more land directly. The increase was not granted until 1956, thirty-five years after Standing Buffalo's death. The formula treated land as a fixed quantity divided among individual families. It did not account for what the Dakota Nation actually needed: enough land to sustain a whole community across generations.
Worldview is not just an idea in someone's head. It shows up in decisions: what a river is named, how much land a treaty allocates, who has to travel to Ottawa to ask for more. When a nation understands land as a relative, land use follows a relationship. When a government treats land as a resource divided by formula, land use follows accounting. Both are worldviews in action, and the difference between them shaped where the FHQ Tribal Council communities live today.
Wahkohtowin — A Cree word meaning "everything is related." A natural law that extends kinship and responsibility to the land, water, and animals, not only to human family.
Terra nullius — Latin for "nobody's land." The doctrine that land belonged to no one before European powers claimed it, making it available to be owned as property.
Reciprocity — A relationship in which both sides give and receive. Under wahkohtowin, a person cares for the land because the land also sustains them; the relationship runs in both directions.
Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge. University of Alberta. https://www.ualberta.ca/en/wahkohtowin/about/index.html
"Wahkohtowin: Cree Natural Law." BearPaw Media and Education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTXMrn2BZB0
"Standing Buffalo Dakota First Nation." The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, University of Regina. https://www.esask.uregina.ca/entry/standing_buffalo_dakota_first_nation.html
Tsilhqot'in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44. CanLII. https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2014/2014scc44/2014scc44.html
St. Catharines Milling and Lumber Co. v. The Queen, 1888 CanLII 209 (UK JCPC). https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/ukjcpc/doc/1888/1888canlii209/1888canlii209.html