Te Awa Tupua: What "legal personhood" means for the Whanganui River

In a world first, the Whanganui River was officially recognised in 2017 as a living being with legal rights. Joanna Wane dives into the sacred waters of "Te Awa Tupua".

Phil Collins — no, not that one – doesn't consider himself to be a spiritual person. Well, he's Australian, after all.

Scarred by growing up during a 10-year drought that led to farmers walking off their land, he's spent much of his life since immersed in water. Two days after landing in New Zealand to work as a guide for Canoe Safaris in Ohakune, he was out on the Whanganui River navigating a 7m flood in conditions he describes as "pretty daunting".

Collins now owns the company, and he reckons the river is much cleaner than when he arrived seven years ago, under no illusions even then that New Zealand's "100% Pure" image was anything more than aspirational.

He never used to see kōtare (kingfishers), which live here in numbers now, and trout are being caught further and further downstream. Possum raids on cook shelters in the campgrounds are less prevalent, too. He once worked as a chef in London at a trendy restaurant in Chelsea, so you can't blame his cooking for that.

There's an almost meditative rhythm to paddling the Whanganui, with its long, still stretches between the rapids and the light casting perfect mirror reflections on the water. Collins has learnt how to read the river's mercurial geography and come to know its shifting moods: hazy summers with the hypnotic thrum of cicadas; brooding winters where mist hangs low in the gorge and swollen waterfalls scour the steep, moss-covered walls.

Canoe Safaris tour operator Phil Collins on the Whanganui River. Photo / Supplied

In late February we were blessed with sunshine and swam every day. The water level was so low our paddles sometimes scraped against stones on the riverbed and shallow graveyards of fallen trees glowed an eerie shade of green. Friends who came a week later had heavy rain, a thunderstorm and a magnitude 7.1 earthquake.

Over four days, our canoes covered almost 90km, from Whakahoro to Pipiriki, only a third of the river's total length. You could say we were walking on water: the Whanganui Journey is officially one of New Zealand's Great Walks.

In a quiet moment on the last day of our trip, Collins talked of the Whanganui having a personality — a presence — that sets it apart from the many other rivers he's travelled on. That stayed with me and, back home, I emailed him to ask what he meant.

"The river for me is its own entity," he wrote. "This is not new for most people who live and work on them, but the valley that it sits in including all the trees, gorges and other parts are for us a living organism. They move, breathe, sleep, change their tempo and get angry, just like the rest of us. I'm constantly looking at it and feeling it with all my senses to be a part of it.

"The Rangitīkei River [where Collins also runs guided trips] is a lot more fresh and feisty. Things happen faster and even though the rapids are a bit larger and more technical, there are no real surprises. It's a whitewater river that is fun and beautiful, but could be anywhere in the world. For me, the Whanganui could only ever exist right where it is in New Zealand."

Canadian canoes are the main form of transport for paddlers on the river. Photo / Joanna Wane

Dan Hikuroa laughs when I read him that bit of Collins' email. "And he's trying to tell you he's not spiritual!" he says.

An earth system scientist, Hikuroa is grounded in the physical world of fluvial geomorphology, the scientific study of how rivers form over time and interact with their environment. A senior lecturer in Māori Studies at the University of Auckland, he also integrates mātauranga taiao (ancestral knowledge) into his work, referencing less tangible concepts such as mana and mauri (life force).

Travelling down the Whanganui is like going through the diary of Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother in Māori mythology, he says, because it carves through so many different layers of strata. Fossils on the riverbanks feed into the story of Māui fishing up the North Island, explaining the presence of seashells so far from the coast. "There's some amazingly exposed history there."

One of the projects he's involved in — alongside anthropologist and environmentalist Dame Anne Salmond, among others — is called "Let The Rivers Speak", which advocates for a different approach to understanding our waterways and restoring them to health.

An opinion piece Hikuroa recently co-authored for The Conversation suggests the impact of flooding could be lessened if we learned to live with rivers, instead of trying to control them. Diverting the Whanganui's headwaters for the Tongariro hydropower scheme, without consultation or input from iwi, has long been viewed as a cultural affront to the river's spiritual integrity.

Exploring a canyon deep in the gorge. Photo / Joanna Wane

"By forcing rivers into confined channels, we are strangling the life out of them and creating 'zombie rivers'," warns the article. "Unless we change our management practices to work with a river, giving it space to move and allowing channels to adjust, we will continue to put people and rivers on a collision course."

The project was inspired by the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act in 2017, which granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River. Settling New Zealand's longest-running land claim under the Treaty of Waitangi, the legislation was a world-first, recognising Te Awa Tupua — literally, a river from the ancestral realm — as a living entity, with the same legal rights, powers, duties and liabilities as a person.

The act also acknowledges the inalienable connection of iwi and hapū to the river, which is defined as "a living and indivisible whole" from the mountains to the sea. Two guardians, former Māori Party co-leader Dame Tariana Turia and Māori educator and advisor Turama Hawira, have been appointed to speak on its behalf, in the same way that legal entities such as companies and trusts are represented by a board of directors. A $30 million contestable fund has been made available by the Government - expect fireworks when the consent granting Genesis the rights to divert water for its hydroelectric power scheme comes up for review in 2039.

While it was the Whanganui settlement that captured the public's imagination, Te Urewera actually beat the river to it by three years. In 2014, the former national park became the first natural feature in the world to be granted legal personality. The same status has also been bestowed in principle on Mt Taranaki, pending a law change.

Pita Sharples, who was Minister of Māori Affairs when the Te Urewera legislation was passed, told Parliament that legal personality offered "a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world". Instead of treating natural resources as a commodity to be exploited, with the focus on ownership and property rights, relationships are expressed in terms of whakapapa — ancestral ties between the people, the land and the waterways.

"Am I inspired by the act," says Hikuroa. "You bet. Do I think it holds promise for doing things differently? Absolutely. It's important because it fundamentally shifts the way we see ourselves in the world as being a part of nature – not apart from nature. It completely flips to a Māori world view. And those different ways of living, of knowing and of being might just be one of the ways we can start redefining our relationship [with the natural world] and ship ourselves out of the climate crisis."

A detour to the famous Bridge to Nowhere, a short hike through the bush. Photo / Joanna Wane

The world is watching what's happening here, he says. A recent Unesco report on water development specifically mentions the Te Awa Tupua legislation in its foreword and a handful of similar initiatives have emerged offshore.

In 2019, the Yurok tribe in California granted personhood to the Klamath River after a catastrophic collapse in the salmon population, enabling cases to be brought to the tribal court on its behalf. And it's not only indigenous communities taking note. The citizens of Toledo, in Ohio, gave legal status to Lake Erie, after a long fight that began when a toxic algae bloom shut down city water for three days.

In Bangladesh, every single river in the country now holds legal rights. However, a landmark judgment recognising the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India as legal entities, in a bid to reduce pollution, was overturned by the Supreme Court. Not only was the original ruling deemed impractical, but there was speculation it could lead to legal claims being taken against the rivers in cases of flooding or drowning.

Could the Whanganui River really be sued? It's a possibility, says Jacinta Ruru, a law professor at Otago University and co-director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence.

"It's clear [that rivers as legal entities] have rights, which come with responsibilities and duties, so potentially they could be sued. That will be interesting to see as we move forward. This is all new ground. But that kind of claim usually involves a financial payment and the Whanganui River doesn't hold money, so I don't know what the damages would be."

There's a Māori proverb that's often used to capture the essence of Te Awa Tupua: "Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au (I am the river, the river is me)." A Whanganui elder, quoted in a project report by Let The Rivers Speak, goes one step further: "Kei te mate te awa, kei te mate ahau (If the river is dying, so am I)."

The concept of legal personhood has been hailed by environmentalists as championing the rights of nature. In reality, the driving factor behind the legislation – at least in terms of how it's been applied here – is an ancestral connection that's specific to place, recognising the rights of iwi in decision-making and kaitiakitanga (guardianship).

A tranquil stretch of the gorge between rapids. Photo / Phil Collins

As a national park, Te Urewera already had the greatest environmental protection available, notes Ruru. She's deeply impressed with the management plan that's been developed there in partnership with Tūhoe. Creating a vision for the Whanganui River, which has been commercially developed, will be more complex. Farming and forestry have contributed to degraded water quality and erosion.

"We're working out something really new here," she says. "I have to explain in international interviews that this is not a river out in a big empty area of the country. This is a river where people live and have made livelihood for a long time.

"There are going to be some hard decisions in the future over what is its best use and how we can best care not only for this river, but its tributaries as well. In the Māori world view, there's direct benefit to all of us from thinking about that. If the water is well, we are well as a people. That health and wellbeing is so intricately linked."

Ruru sees the legislation as an act of reconciliation with Māori and believes tangible differences will evolve over time. "It's incredibly exciting," she says. "This is a really important moment in our history and a huge opportunity as a country to really think about what it means to be a New Zealander, and to love and be in these places that have a deep Māori history."

For tour operators like Collins, fears their businesses could be under threat were allayed at pre-season hui where they were assured the initial focus would be on water quality and the environment. He thinks being able to bring legal action on behalf of an ecology like the river will be a huge step forward, if it's managed right. "And from a practical sense, this is such a large area and there are so many different water quality rules, why not have it managed by one group?"

The Whanganui River's mighty Autapu rapid, where many paddlers come to grief. Photo / Joanna Wane

On our last day, as we're hauling out the canoes at Pipiriki, a young woman is watching her children play in the water. When her grandmother was a young girl, it was her job to wash and water the horses here. She's glad to see people coming to the river, she says. It's a taonga that should be shared. Later that evening, the woman who takes our drink orders back in Ohakune tells us her people are from a village on the river, and is moved to tears.

There are more than 200 named rapids on the Whanganui River, many of them after ancestral chiefs. The story goes that if you capsize in one, it's not because you're a terrible paddler, says Collins. The chief just wanted to meet you. "Everyone I've told that to has looked at the rapids differently."

The biggest rapid, Autapu, is colloquially known as "50:50" because those are the odds of keeping dry. "Apparently he's particularly friendly, because he seems to meet a lot of people." For now, that's about as spiritual as Collins is prepared to get.