ABSTRACT
The United Nations continues to proclaim the increasingly serious challenges humanity faces in relation to sustainable water security. The planet and all its life now face multiple crises, including a crisis of values. This crisis of values has thus far gained relatively little attention. Decades-long efforts to improve water conservation and decrease the degradation of clean water supplies have globally made little progress. This is at least in part due to attempts to solve problems using the same underlying worldviews that caused the problems in the first place. A broader society must evolve its conception of water as a resource/commodity valued only for its benefit to humanity. Indigenous peoples around the world view and experience water as alive, a being with agency and with inalienable rights. While water does have the responsibility of nourishing life on earth, including humans, humans have in turn a responsibility to care for, and protect, water. When humanity as a whole can begin to see water as a living being, then the destructive nature of our current relationship with water may begin to change. Achieving this perspective will necessarily involve recognizing the knowledge and rights of Indigenous peoples themselves.
