CANADA — There are few scholars whose work bridges the worlds of science, ceremony, and law as seamlessly as Dr. Deborah McGregor — Anishinaabe scholar from Whitefish River First Nation, whose life’s work has been to remind Canada that the Earth itself is alive and that justice must extend to all that lives.
This fall, the University of Calgary announced that Dr. McGregor has been awarded one of Canada’s most prestigious research positions: the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Indigenous Ways of Climate and Water Sustainability for Planetary Health and Well-being, a program funded at $1 million per year for eight years. The Chair will advance Indigenous-led approaches to climate justice and planetary health, in ongoing efforts to place Indigenous knowledge at the heart of efforts to understand and repair our relationship with the Earth.
The program’s vision is bold and urgent: to help humanity reconcile with the planet that sustains all life. It asks a question that is both academic and spiritual — what does it mean to live well with the Earth in an age of climate and ecological crisis? Dr. McGregor will explore answers that honour both scientific and Anishinaabe knowledge working toward a model of planetary well-being rooted in justice for all life.
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“I hold a Canada Excellence Research Chair at the University of Calgary, which allows me to dedicate most of my time to research,” she says. “My focus is what I call planetary well-being — it brings together everything I’ve worked on over the years: climate justice, biodiversity, and water governance.
I use the term planetary well-being instead of ‘planetary health’ because that field often separates people from the natural world. Indigenous knowledge doesn’t do that — it understands that our well-being and the planet’s well-being are interconnected.”
Before her appointment in Calgary, Dr. McGregor served as the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice at York University, cross-appointed to Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental Studies and Urban Change. Over the past decade, she has become one of the country’s most respected voices in Indigenous environmental governance, co-editing Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age and the Anishinaabewin conference proceedings, while mentoring dozens of students and community based researchers.
When asked about the work being done around the personhood of water, efforts to grant water personhood in Canada have primarily involved Indigenous communities and environmental groups, Dr. McGregor had this to say:
“A lot of this work began in New Zealand, where rivers were granted legal personhood within British common law systems,” Dr. McGregor explains. “That kind of recognition changes how people see water — not as property or a commodity, but as a living being with its own spirit and rights. It shifts us from a mindset of ownership to one of relationship.”
“In Canada, we’re beginning to see that same shift take root,” she continues. “The Magpie River in Quebec became the first in the country to be granted legal personhood in 2021 — a landmark moment for both the global rights of nature movement and the Innu of Ekuanitshit First Nation. The river was recognized as having nine legal rights, including the right to flow, to be free from pollution, and even the right to take legal action to defend itself. These kinds of initiatives — now extending to other waterways like the Gatineau River — show that change is possible when law begins to reflect Indigenous worldviews that see water as a relative, not a resource.”
For Dr. McGregor, that relationship is ancient.
“For Indigenous people who’ve lived around the Great Lakes for thousands of years, the idea that water has its own spirit, its own personality, isn’t new. Our laws and governance have always supported that understanding. Ceremonies, songs, and teachings have long recognized water as a being in relationship with us — it never needed validation from common law.”
But in a country where Indigenous law remains largely unrecognized, that understanding faces daily challenges.
“You see local efforts, like where a municipality declared a river as having rights. But without recognition by the Canadian state, those rights don’t hold up legally. Development still goes ahead,” she says. “In Canada, people are trying to bring Indigenous and common law into conversation — what some call a deliberative lawmaking process. It’s humans debating, creating something new together. But spiritual law, the law of the land and water, that’s not something we invent — it’s something we respect,remember and act upon.”
Her new Chair builds directly on that philosophy — that reconciliation must extend beyond human politics into ecological and spiritual realms. Her work stands at the confluence of Indigenous law and climate science, bringing Indigenous perspectives into spaces where they have long been sidelined.
“I work at the national level as part of Canada’s climate assessment process —as one of the lead authors of the For our Future: Indigenous Resilience Report, which is the only standalone Indigenous climate assessment in Canada,” she says. “What I’ve learned through that work is that the biggest challenges we face — like climate change — can’t be solved without Indigenous knowledge. That knowledge has always existed, but it’s often excluded from these conversations because it doesn’t fit into the science dominated assessment frameworks.”
Dr. McGregor describes her research not as the pursuit of answers, but as a shared journey of questioning and learning collectively.
“As a researcher, I don’t assume I have the answers. My job is to ask questions and work with communities to figure things out together — to document those voices to become part of the broader conversations that seek solutions. Indigenous peoples already know how to survive destruction; our stories and laws hold that memory.”
She pauses when speaking of those stories — the ones that survived everything.
“Every time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) releases a global assessment, the message is the same — we’re at a tipping point, we need transformation to change the direction we are going not just tweaks to the status quo or business as usual,” she says. “In my work, I always return to our creation stories. That’s where our laws and assumptions about your relationship with the natural world come from, and those stories always hold hope, even in the darkest times. There’s always a way through — usually with help from the natural world.”
Hope, in her view, is not naïveté — it’s responsibility.
“Our stories remind us that humans don’t have all the answers. That’s a controversial thing to say in scientific circles — people get uncomfortable when you suggest that the natural world itself carries knowledge. But that’s exactly what our stories teach. The animals, the birds, the waters — they’ve always been our teachers. The solutions have never been just human ones.”
Through her teaching, publications, and community-based collaborations, Dr. McGregor continues to build the intellectual and spiritual groundwork for a future where climate science and Indigenous knowledge and law meet — not as competing systems, but in relation to each other.
Her appointment marks a turning point not just for academia, but for the country: a recognition that survival in the climate era requires more than innovation — it requires humility, relationship, and remembering.
The work of Dr. Deborah McGregor moves steadily like the river for which her community is named, toward that remembering — toward a time when law, science, and spirit once again speak the same language.
