Presentation short abstract

This paper examines an Indigenous-led Rights of Nature tribunal as a space where water’s materiality is voiced through relational and plural knowledges, showing how community testimony reshapes justice and rights and challenges extractive, colonial understandings of water.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the 2024 Yesah Tribunal—the world’s first Indigenous-led tribunal on the Rights of Nature—as a site where water’s materiality was articulated through plural and relational epistemologies. Convened by an Occaneechi environmental action organization in North Carolina, the Tribunal brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members, activists, scholars, and spiritual leaders to testify against a destructive natural gas pipeline and to speak on behalf of rivers and their natural communities.

Held near the headwaters of the Haw River in North Carolina, the tribunal drew upon diverse lived experiences and worldviews of participants, who reframed water and nature not as passive objects but as subjects with rights and agency that are deeply intertwined with human systems, histories, and wellbeing. In this sense, the Tribunal was a space that allowed water’s materiality to “speak” through those in relationship with it.

Using Constructivist Grounded Theory, this research analyzes how participants narrate their encounters with extractive industry and the meanings they attribute to concepts such as justice, rights, value, and responsibility. This meaning-making emerges through multiple ways of knowing—lived experience, prophecy, emotion, traditional ecological knowledge, and empirical evidence—challenging colonial paradigms of expertise and objectivity and elevating majority-world frameworks.

By foregrounding Indigenous and local epistemologies from the U.S. South, this study traces how Rights of Nature discourse is reshaped through lived experience. These perspectives illuminate relational understandings of water that contest extractive, colonial frameworks and point toward more grounded and justice-oriented ways of engaging with the socionatural world.