The River is My Kinfolk. It Deserves More Rights than Dirty Pipelines.
In this Dispatch from the Frontlines, Crystal ‘Red Bear’ Cavalier-Keck recounts her organizing journey and use of the law to demand that Indigenous and nature-based rights trump corporate rights. This powerful strategy could stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which threatens everything that she loves.
Crystal ‘Red Bear’ Cavalier-Keck stands near the Haw River with her husband, Jason ‘Crazy Bear’ Keck. © Tailyr Irvine
“If the Haw River had rights, we would be able to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline!”
These days, I find myself repeating these words as I consider next steps in our battle against the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) – and as we move forward with our campaign to pass a state law that will grant personhood to the Haw River.
The Haw River is sacred to my tribe, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. It is also the lifeblood of my community, beloved and necessary to all who live along the river: Black, brown or white; Democrat or Republican; environmentalists who cherish it as a natural resource, and hunters and fishermen who not only get their sport from it, but their food too.
We on the frontline have just lost the latest round in our battle to stop the MVP, which threatens all of this, for all of us. This inspires us to redouble our efforts to pass a law that will grant the Haw its rights to, “naturally exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve,” and to “abundant, pure, clean, unpolluted water.”
We love our river and need it too. I grew up on the Haw’s banks in Alamance Country, North Carolina. I now live in Reidsville, ten miles from the river. My current home, on ancestral Saura land, is within three miles of the approved route of the Southgate Extension of the MVP, which will carry dangerous and dirty gas across the Appalachian mountains from the West Virginia shale fields.
We don’t want or need this gas on this side of the mountains. But now, it seems the pipeline will run right alongside the Haw for about thirty miles, threatening to contaminate it further with the sedimentation that will come from the digging, and with inevitable gas leakage into the water table. We not only risk the poisoning of our water, but the constant threat of gas explosion – and, for many of us, the loss of our land through “eminent domain” expropriations.
Crystal ‘Red Bear’ Cavalier-Keck stands outside a construction site for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. © Tailyr Irvine
In the meetings we have been holding over acknowledging the rights of our river, I tell folks of all backgrounds that in our Indigenous culture we think not only of animals, but of natural resources too, as our kin. I ask them to imagine the river as our relative: “That’s our aunt. That’s our cousin or grandma. In the real world, you don’t go and assault your grandma. So why would you assault this water, which is a relative, deeply connected to the water inside us, our actual blood? And when someone else harms your grandma, you’re sure gonna take action.”
My point is that if the law acknowledged the rights of our water to flow freely – and to be free from pollution and harm – it would give us another tool to take action against the pipeline, or against the industries that pollute it. Rights of Nature legislation strengthens environmental and community protections, by evolving the status of nature from “property” – valued and protected above all else in America – to a rights-bearing entity, like a person. It transfers our life-honoring perspective of nature as kin into a Western legal framework; being granted legal rights affords our life-giving natural resources the highest protection possible under the law.
In our community meetings, I ask the question: “If corporations have legal rights, why can’t nature? Water is one of the basic necessities of life, alongside shelter, clothing and food. If we can’t protect that, how can we sustain life?”
Even in my home state, where things are so deeply divided politically, I find that almost everyone connects with this message. We see it with our eyes and feel it in our bones. The dirty water hits us in our lungs, and the dirty water poisons our bodies. Our increasing inability to use the land and the waterways as a resource hits us in our souls – and in our pocketbooks too. In rural communities, people are often dependent on hunting and fishing for their nutrition.
In North Carolina, I initiated and drafted the bill that was introduced into the legislature here, in April, as HB795, by Rep. Pricey Harrison. If passed, the law will secure the right of North Carolinians to a “healthy, flourishing Haw River ecosystem,” while protecting the “collective or individual rights of Indigenous people residing in the State.” Businesses or other entities that are found to have damaged the Haw River ecosystem will be responsible for paying restoration costs, in addition to civil penalties. At the very least, this will hold the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s owners accountable.
The Haw River, which is sacred to Crystal ‘Red Bear’ Cavalier-Keck’s tribe, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. © Tailyr Irvine
For years, we have done everything we can to stop the pipeline. Litigation has been a useful tool; courts have agreed with us, over and over again. The pipeline’s bad planning and shoddy execution violate multiple state environmental laws, as well as the National Environmental Protection Act.
But the pipeline is the sweetheart project of West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin. In August of 2022, when the U.S. Congress found itself deadlocked over the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Manchin held the entire economy and our clean energy future hostage until Congress greenlit commitments to the pipeline under a side deal. I must have spoken personally to over twenty congresspeople about the “Dirty Deal” after it was announced, and in September, I helped organize a rally outside the White House to protest the legislation that would give the Mountain Valley Pipeline special exemptions from environmental law and court review of its permits. Eventually, Manchin and Schumer withdrew their back-door agreement and Congress passed the IRA without the provisions of the “Dirty Deal”.
People power won over corporate power. For the moment.
Manchin spent the next year trying to force this pipeline through in multiple “Dirty Deals” that similarly failed. Then this summer, the Senator used his power in another deadlocked Congress to force MVP into an unrelated debt ceiling legislation. Manchin engineered it so that Republicans would support the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) if Democrats agreed to pass accompanying legislation permitting the MVP, bypassing regulatory agencies, and longstanding laws that protect communities and the environment from dangerous projects like MVP.
He finally got what he and Schumer had previously failed to pass. With one stroke of a pen, the FRA gave all the permits and legal authority for the MVP to immediately proceed.
This unprecedented legislation raised many eyebrows and two courts immediately issued pauses on construction. They argued it trampled on the separation of powers, by effectively deciding pending litigation in favor of MVP, and stripping courts of their jurisdiction over the pipeline. The legal debate went all the way to the deeply partisan U.S. Supreme Court, who ruled in favor that the MVP could start construction again. This is a dangerous assault on our democracy and climate that all Americans should feel scared about, not just those of us on the frontline who have to live, every day, with the threat posed to our lives and our lands.
As I write these words, in September 2023, construction on the MVP has begun again – as has the resistance from people in three states who will live along its route. One option we need to consider is to meet this violence to our land and our water with peaceful protest. From the civil rights movement to Standing Rock, our forebears have put their bodies on the line to prevent injustices such as this, and we need to consider doing the same. We have already begun strategizing about civil disobedience campaigns. But we also need to deepen, and widen, the peoples’ understanding of what’s at stake. It is in this context that we are intensifying our efforts to get state legislation passed that will give our river its rights.
Necklaces of Jason ‘Crazy Bear’ Keck, who co-founded of 7 Directions of Service with Crystal ‘Red Bear’ Cavalier-Keck. © Tailyr Irvine
The notion of nature having rights is deeply embedded in Indigenous traditions the world over. It has already been recognized in the Constitution of Ecuador, and in different jurisdictions in 39 countries, from Bolivia to India and New Zealand. In the United States, there are several such local ordinances, mainly on Tribal lands, but also in Orange County, FL, and Santa Monica, CA.
Here in North Carolina, the bill has several sponsors, and we are building bipartisan support around it. If it is passed – as we believe it will be in 2025 – it will be the first state-level Rights of Nature legislation in the United States. Our river will have rights, and we will be able to act on its behalf. Even if we are too late to stop the mainline pipeline, we will be able to use the new act against the Southgate Extension, which plans to run along the Haw. And we will also be able to use it against other polluting industries. So much poison has already been dumped into it that the Department of Environmental Quality advises we should eat only one fish a year coming out of the Cape Fear River (into which it flows).
Flowers bloom near the Haw River, which is threatened by the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. © Tailyr Irvine
Doing this work, I often thought back to a meeting I attended in Asheville, North Carolina, while campaigning for Tom Steyer in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Asheville is a liberal bastion — perhaps the greenest town in the South. The conversation was all about carbon neutrality — really important of course, but I remember thinking, “You guys are totally missing the point. That issue is so distant to the immediate concerns of Black and brown people and working white people on the front lines. We don’t even deal with that. We’re just trying to survive and exist and live our lives with clean water and clean air, and the way you are talking is just not going to grab people in the community.”
What I am discovering, in my daily work, is that a hands-on struggle to fight the pipeline or save our river brings people together in a way that “the climate crisis” just cannot. Republican leaders in our state, as across the nation, like to paint environmental concerns as an out-of-touch “liberal elite” agenda. The work I do at the frontlines tells an entirely different story — one where everyone, regardless of race, religion or politics, understands that if we are to survive, we all need safe water, clean air, and land to live on. Recognizing this can break down the ideological barrier that stands in the way of environmental justice. It has the power to push back both the MVP and the fossil fuel industry, by acknowledging the truth: that we need and love our land and our water just as we do our kinfolk, and that by getting this acknowledgement set into law, we will have even more powerful tools in our hands to protect them.
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