The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person. A nearby forest is too. Soon, the government will grant a mountain legal personhood as well. Here’s how it happened, and what it may mean.
This article by Kennedy Warne appeared in the April, 2019 edition of National Geographic. The photographs were taken by Mathias Svold.
“The great River flows from the mountains to the sea. I am the River, the River is me.”
With these words, the Maori tribes of Whanganui, New Zealand, declare their inseverable connection to their ancestral river. The river rises in the snowfields of a trio of volcanoes in central North Island. The tribes say that a teardrop from the eye of the Sky Father fell at the foot of the tallest of these mountains, lonely Ruapehu, and the river was born.
Swelled by myriad tributaries, it twists like an eel through mountainous country—part of it a national park—on its 180-mile journey to the sea. Travel the precipitous River Road, and far below you will see canoeists drifting down the placid reaches, at one with the current and its cargo of flotsam and foam, then digging their paddles deep to hurtle through a rapid.
This is the river that for more than 700 years the Whanganui tribes controlled, cared for, and depended on. It is their awa tupua—their river of sacred power. But when European settlers arrived in the mid-1800s, the tribes’ traditional authority was undermined—and finally extinguished by government decree.
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