River’s personhood status offers hope
New Zealand’s law reflects a wider rebirth of the Maori culture
WHANGANUI, New Zealand — The Whanganui River is surging into the ocean, fattened from days of winter rain and yellowed from the earth and clay that has collapsed into its sides. Logs and debris hurtle past as dusk looms.
Tahi Nepia, 61, is calmly paddling his outrigger canoe, called a waka ama in his Indigenous Maori language, as it is buffeted from side to side.
Before venturing out, he makes sure to first ask permission from his ancestors in a prayer, or karakia. It’s the top item on his safety list. He said his ancestors inhabit the river and each time he dips his paddle into the water he touches them.
“You are giving them a mihimihi, you are giving them a massage,” Nepia said. “That’s how we see that river. It’s a part of us.”
In 2017, New Zealand passed a groundbreaking law granting personhood status to the Whanganui River. The law declares that the river is a living whole, from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements.
The law was part of a settlement with the Whanganui Iwi, comprising Maori from a number of tribes who have long viewed the river as a living force. The novel legal approach set a precedent that has been followed by some other countries including Bangladesh, which in 2019 granted all its rivers the same rights as people.
In June, five years after the New Zealand law was passed, The Associated Press followed 180-mile river upstream to find out what its status means to those whose lives are entwined with its waters. For many, its enhanced standing has come to reflect a wider rebirth of Maori culture and a chance to reverse generations of discrimination against Maori and degradation of the river.
Whanganui Maori have a saying: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au: I am the river, and the river is me.
Nepia, a caretaker at a Maori immersion school, is among a group of expert waka ama paddlers who have been training for the World Sprint Champs that are taking place in Britain. He was due to compete in the over-60 age group both solo and as part of a crew of six.
Nepia learned how to swim on the river when his uncle threw him in at age 8. Roll on your back and float with the current, his uncle told him, and Nepia did, grinding to a stop where the water ran shallow over the stones beneath.
“You get back up, jump off the bank and float down again. That’s how it was,” he said.
He first paddled on the river in a traditional Maori long canoe in 1979, when he and about 20 of his buddies at the slaughterhouse where they worked got together for a regatta celebrating Waitangi Day, which commemorates the 1840 treaty signed between the British and Maori.
Considered the nation’s founding
document, the Treaty of Waitangi has long been a source of contention. For the past 30 years, New Zealand’s government has been negotiating with tribes that have brought grievances under the treaty, which guaranteed sovereignty over their traditional lands and fisheries. The Whanganui River deal is among dozens of settlements forged in recent years.
At its mouth in the town of Whanganui, the river is permanently discolored these days from the erosion that has come from turning what was once forest along the banks into farmland. The excessive sediment suffocates fish and plant life. The remains of weirs that Maori once built to fish for eel-like lamprey can still be seen, but the lamprey are gone.
“It’s the raping of the land. It’s simple. We need a reality check. We need to grow trees instead of chopping them down,” Nepia said. “The water shouldn’t be like that.”
“Rearrangement of values”
A half-hour drive inland from the mouth, Gerrard Albert points to the bucolic riverbank spot where his people live, an ancestral settlement that was never sold and is home to about 120.
He says the river and the surrounding lands have their own authority, or mana.
“They dictate the terms for human use and occupation,” he said. “And for too long, we’ve assumed it’s been the other way around.”
Albert, 54, was the lead negotiator for Whanganui Maori in getting the river’s personhood recognized by lawmakers after his tribe battled for the river’s rights for more than 140 years.
Albert said the status is a legal fiction, a construct more commonly used to give something like a corporation legal standing.
While the law states that the river enjoys the same rights, powers, duties and liabilities of any other person, there are limitations.
For instance, Albert points out, the river can’t be sued if somebody drowns in its waters in the way a homeowner might be sued for not fencing a pool.
But Albert also sees it as an opportunity for a permanent shift in thinking.
“This is a political rearrangement of values,” he said. “This is Indigenous rights. Indigenous people leading toward better change for everybody.”
So what has personhood, or Te Awa Tupua, meant in practical terms? Albert points to one example.
After the law passed, he said, the local council assumed it was business as usual when they tried to build a bridge across the river for cyclists and pedestrians. They hadn’t considered they now needed to consult first with the tribe and the community.
As a result the bridge structure ended up sitting in a field during two years of delays before it was finally dropped into place and opened in 2020. Albert says the hapu — the affected tribal clan — and the community pushed for improvements like protected fishing areas, speed limits on nearby roads and the addition of restrooms.
“These are small things, and the hapu didn’t really have a problem with the bridge going across. They had a problem with the process in the lead-up,” Albert says. “Now the expectation
is that the process will never happen in that way again.”
Albert has been involved in another, much bigger river project, a refurbishment of two wharves and other improvements at the Whanganui Port costing about 50 million New Zealand dollars, or $31 million.
This time the tribe is leading the project with the Whanganui District Council and others working with them. The council has said all decision-making will be guided by the river’s legally enshrined value system, and has pledged “to work collaboratively for the river’s benefit.”
Before personhood, Albert says, the tribe constantly had to make the case for protecting the river before an ever-changing cast of local councilors and politicians in the capital, Wellington. The people who made the rules, he says, were the planners, the lawyers and the businessfolk.
Now, he said, the tribe is more able to act like the native New Zealand pigeon, or kereru, which likes to perch contentedly after gorging on berries instead of scratching around for crumbs. Now it’s the rule-makers who are legally obliged to come to the tribe and the community with their plans and to prioritize the health of the river.
Such treaty settlements have generally been supported by conservative and liberal lawmakers, seen as a way to redress colonial wrongdoings and improve outcomes for Maori.
The Whanganui River settlement, which also included $50 million in financial redress and millions more for the river’s future health, was championed by conservative lawmaker Chris Finlayson and passed in a voice vote without objection.
But more recently, some voices are saying change risks going too far. Many conservative lawmakers oppose granting Maori co-governance over the nation’s water infrastructure.
Albert said politics is another construct and it doesn’t need to be that way on the river. He is working as part of a group of 17 stakeholder organizations to chart the river’s future.
“This is truly about giving power back to the community,” he said.
Spiritual connection
To follow the river as it wends inland, motorists turn off State Highway 4 and take the hilly and narrow Whanganui River Road. Nothing much seems to have changed here since 75 years ago, when rural towns and farms were ascendant in New Zealand.
At the Rivertime Lodge, where cyclists and walkers stay in simple cabins or pitch tents on the riverbank during the summer, manager Frances Marshall is puttering about in fluffy orange slippers. She prefers the feel of the soil beneath her bare feet but makes concessions on colder winter days.
On her chin, Marshall wears a traditional Maori tattoo, a moko kauae. She considers it an integral part of her spiritual being and her connection to the river. Although her nephew did the tattooing just a few months ago, on Marshall’s 61st birthday, she feels like it has been a part of her for much longer.
“It’s hard to describe. It’s like this person inside you wanting to get out,” Marshall said.
Marshall was elated when the river, or awa, was recognized.
“Over the years, our awa, she’s been sick,” Marshall said. “And so that happening, for a lot of us, means that things can be done now to help heal her.”