Nearly a decade after Te Awa o Whanganui became the world’s first river to be recognised as a legal person, the landmark legislation continues to attract international attention, with a Yale University researcher spending five months in Whanganui exploring how the Act has worked in practice.
Now back in the US, transcribing interviews and preparing a book based on his findings, Yale School of the Environment PhD candidate Raffaele Sindoni says his research seeks to understand what the legal recognition has meant for the river and its people, according to a University of Auckland media release.
The Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act came into force in 2017, making Te Awa o Whanganui the first river in the world to be recognised as a legal person.
The groundbreaking legislation, honouring te ao Māori, has inspired communities around the world to explore legal protections for rivers and mountains.
It also drew Sindoni to Aotearoa, building on research he had undertaken in collaboration with Native American tribes.
“I’m most curious about where the Act generates promising advancements, where it meets resistance, what it’s used for, and where it reaches its limits as both an expression of Indigenous relational worldviews and as an Act of Parliament operating within the structures of the New Zealand state.”
In Whanganui, Sindoni, who is also a writer and folk musician, spent much of his time learning from kaumātua, kaiārahi and rangatahi, playing guitar, and learning stories and knowledge about the region, with a primary focus on Te Awa o Whanganui.
Across five months of fieldwork, he interviewed about 40 people with unique perspectives on the Act, including leaders of Whanganui hapū, farmers, members of entities that speak with or for the awa, heads of iwi settlement entities, Members of Parliament, district and regional councillors, environmental lawyers, and foresters.
Sindoni says recognising a river as a legal person challenges colonial-capitalist ideas that treat land as property, water as a resource, and people and nature as separate.
“Rights of nature frameworks still operate within and engage with the very Western legal systems they seek to challenge. This poses an important question: how are Indigenous worldviews being translated into forms that the state recognises, and how does such a translation affect centuries of embedded legal and political Western colonial power structures?”
He says those questions are central to his work.
“My research sits at this fault line. The Te Awa Tupua Act is an important entry point into scholarly and political inquiries across the world concerned with the expropriation of land, the objectification of water, climate change, and, of course, decolonisation and Indigenous sovereignty.
“These debates about legal personhood are essential for the next generation of students, activists, and lawyers as we grapple with changing relationships between people and nature. More importantly, though, they matter for all communities working to challenge the ways Western law has long shaped land, belonging, and political power.”
While in Aotearoa, Sindoni was a visiting fellow at the University of Auckland’s Te Wai Ariki New Zealand Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law, where he worked closely with Professor Claire Charters (Ngāti Whakaue, Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi, Tainui), an expert in Indigenous peoples’ rights in international and constitutional law.
