Three years after the Waitaha Water Gathering opened its doors to the world, the waters of Aotearoa spoke again, and this time the law of the land listened. In March 2017 the Parliament of New Zealand passed Te Awa Tupua, the Whanganui River Claims Settlement Act, recognising the Whanganui River, from the mountains to the sea with all its physical and metaphysical elements, as an indivisible and living whole with legal personhood of its own.
Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au. I am the river, and the river is me.
Whakataukī of the Whanganui iwi
For more than a hundred and forty years the iwi of the Whanganui River held to this knowing in the courts and in the halls of government, and now two guardians, one named by the iwi and one by the Crown, speak with one voice as Te Pou Tupua, the human face of the river, so that the river can be heard on its own behalf.
When Para PachaMama shared the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010, and stood with Polly Higgins in the call for Earth law, it was this we were dreaming of: a world where the waters, forests and mountains are known again as relatives, with a standing of their own, and where to harm them is to harm family. In Aotearoa that dream has become law for one great river, and the waters everywhere are listening.
Go to your nearest river this week, sit at its edge, and ask it, as you would ask an elder, what it would love from you.
Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017. Read the Rights of Mother Earth and the story of the Waitaha Water Gathering.