Keywords: St. Lawrence Seaway, St. Lawrence River, ocean equity, Great Lakes, Akwesasne, Kahnawà:ke, Rights of Nature, legal personhood, Indigenous governance, environmental justice
The Calumet River near Sims Metal Management and Paket Corporation on Chicago’s Southeast Side, photographed from the Ewing Avenue Bridge on Sept. 25, 2026. The river is part of the network of waterways connecting Chicago to the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence system and the Atlantic Ocean. Photo by NaBeela Washington.
On July 1, 1958, water began to rise along the St. Lawrence River.
People remember it as Inundation Day. As water backed up behind the newly built Moses-Saunders Power Dam, communities along the Ontario shoreline disappeared beneath the new Lake St. Lawrence. Homes were moved or destroyed. Highways and rail lines were rerouted. More than 6,500 residents had already been relocated from communities now remembered as the Lost Villages.
Mohawk communities lost land, too. At Kahnawà:ke, roughly 1,260 acres of riverfront land were expropriated for the St. Lawrence Seaway (the Seaway). At Akwesasne, the linked Seaway and power projects flooded land and altered islands, shorelines, marshes, and fishing grounds. Canada also expropriated about 130 acres on Cornwall Island for the international bridge and customs facilities.
Two decades later, loss became harder to ignore.
By 1978, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne had tested fish from the St. Lawrence and found polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), mercury, and Mirex. Officials advised that pregnant women, women of childbearing age, and children younger than 15 to stop eating fish from the river. In a later study, researcher Elizabeth Hoover found that three-quarters of 50 Akwesasne Mohawks she interviewed had stopped or sharply reduced eating local fish. Residents described losing cultural and social connections that had formed around fishing for generations.
Those were the details I kept returning to when I began researching the Seaway as a MONA Fellow with Ocean Nexus.
I had initially been interested in the infrastructure itself. I live near the Great Lakes, hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coastline, and I wanted to understand the system that allows ocean-going vessels to travel so far inland. The Seaway is described as “a deep-draft waterway between Montreal and Lake Erie.” Fifteen locks and connecting channels allow ships to move past rapids and around Niagara Falls. Together with the Great Lakes, the shipping system stretches roughly 2,300 miles inland from the Atlantic.
This is where ocean governance physically enters my world. Ocean Nexus describes ocean governance as the collection of laws, institutions, and decisions that determine how water is used and protected. Ocean Nexus’ mission is to advance ocean equity by confronting the systemic inequalities, including racism and colonialism, that shape who benefits from ocean policy and who bears its costs.
Once I looked at the Seaway through this lens, the story stopped being primarily about cargo ships. It became a story about power.
Who gets to decide what a river is for? Who benefits — and who is disadvantaged — when it is transformed? And when the same river is a shipping route, and a homeland and a border between countries, whose relationship to that water is prioritized?
There is no single institution making those decisions. The 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty created the International Joint Commission to help Canada and the United States manage shared waters. Today, the commission sets policy for Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River water levels and flows, while a binational board regulates outflows. Seaway navigation infrastructure is operated separately by U.S. and Canadian entities. At Akwesasne, Mohawk governments also exercise authority in a territory that reaches across the international border.
I asked environmental law scholar Randall Abate, author of Climate Change and the Voiceless, to help me think through what law does when the thing being protected cannot represent itself in the conventional sense.
“Basically, it’s all about who matters under the law,” Abate shared. “And it shouldn’t just be humans.”
That is the idea behind “Rights of Nature”, a legal framework that recognizes a river or other part of the natural world as having rights of its own instead of treating it only as property or something for people to use. “Legal personhood” is one way those rights can be recognized. Depending on the law, people may be appointed to represent the river or given legal standing, meaning the right to go to court when its rights are violated.
It does not make a river human. “We’re not saying nature has human rights,” Michelle Bender, legal counsel and head of ocean rights at Ocean Vision Legal, shared. “We’re saying nature has its own inherent rights.”
That idea reached St. Lawrence. In 2023, the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador adopted Resolution No. 04-2023, establishing an Alliance for the Defence of the St. Lawrence River and supporting Indigenous guardianship, legal personhood and co-management rights for the river.
Bender pointed me to New Zealand’s Whanganui River, recognized as a legal person in 2017 after years of negotiations between the Crown and Māori. Its structure created human representatives with a legal responsibility to serve as what Bender called the river’s “human face” in decisions affecting its health. New Zealand also offers a warning about confusing recognition with power.
Other approaches focus less on giving a waterway legal personhood and more on building the power of people who can defend it. Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper groups pair local knowledge and civic participation with monitoring, advocacy and, when necessary, legal action against polluters. The model does not give a river personhood, but it creates a human constituency with tools to act on its behalf, linking the protection of waterways with the rights and well-being of the communities that depend on them.
“It’s not a one size fits all approach,” Bender said.
In a 2022 World Development study, researchers Hekia Bodwitch and colleagues examined Te Waihora, a Māori-owned and governed coastal lake with a long-running Indigenous-state co-governance agreement. Despite recognized fishing and governance rights, Māori fishers had little influence over upstream land-use decisions, including dairy expansion that contributed to declining water quality. By 2018, the lake’s culturally important eel fishery was no longer commercially viable.
The researchers separate environmental justice into three questions: Who receives the benefits and bears the harms? Who has meaningful power in decisions? Whose knowledge and relationships to a place are treated as legitimate?
Applied to the St. Lawrence Seaway, these questions exposed the ocean equity blind spot at the center of this essay. The Seaway’s benefits were often framed broadly, through trade, transportation, and economic growth, while many of the harms were concentrated in particular communities and waterways. The people asked to absorb those consequences did not necessarily hold equal power over the decisions that produced them, and their relationships to land and water were not always treated as carrying the same weight as the economic ambitions attached to the project.
Bender cautioned me that Rights of Nature cannot be applied to every river in the same way. Rights themselves come from Western legal traditions. Indigenous nations already have their own laws, governments and relationships with water, many of which long predate the modern Rights of Nature movement.
“I kind of see rights of nature as a bridge,” she said, “between Western legal systems and Indigenous legal systems.”
When I began this reporting, I wanted to understand why a waterway belonged in the conversation about ocean equity. The St. Lawrence Seaway helped me see that the ocean is more than a system of trade and infrastructure. Beneath it is a complicated web of law, power, and competing ideas about who water is for.
The St. Lawrence Seaway is easy to miss through an ocean equity lens because we tend to place the ocean at the coast. The Seaway is more often understood as a feat of engineering, a shipping corridor, or an underreported piece of Great Lakes history, but its purpose was to erase that geographic boundary, giving ocean-going ships access far beyond the coast.
Seeing the Seaway this way changes where we look for ocean inequity. If ocean commerce can flow hundreds of miles inland, then our very understanding of ocean equity must travel that far too.
About the author:
NaBeela Washington is a Chicago-based journalist, documentary photographer and editor of 15 West, an accessibility-first local newsroom covering Chicago’s West Side and nearby communities. She is a 2026 Metcalf Ocean Nexus Academy fellow, where her reporting examines water governance, environmental equity, and the ways ocean-connected systems shape inland communities. Her work often explores the intersection of infrastructure, environment, and everyday life.