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.
His research examines both the possibilities and limitations of the Act.
“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 told Te Ao Māori News his research was still in its early stages and cautioned that his findings were preliminary.
He also stressed that when discussing the awa and iwi, he drew on the perspectives of iwi and hapū connected to Te Awa o Whanganui, saying it was not his place to offer his own views on kawa and tikanga.
However, he said an emerging finding was a slow cultural shift in how people relate to the awa.
“What I am finding, at this early stage of this rangahau (research), is that the Act’s most significant impacts at this point are unfolding through a slow cultural shift – new kinds of relationships, conversations, and deliberations that the Crown rarely tracks.”
He says there are already signs of that shift.
“Indeed, the Act is quietly reshaping how people relate to the awa together – from local government officials reconsidering their obligations to the awa, to Pākehā farmers rethinking their relationship with land and waterways. Sometimes, this happens with openness and curiosity. In other times, it happens more reluctantly and with struggle. Both are important parts of the story.”
Sindoni says the shift is not necessarily about any single outcome.
“More than any one distinct outcome, what seems to be emerging is a gradual shift in how people — Māori and Pākehā alike, often working through questions together — understand what it means to be responsible to the land and water they live alongside.
“Some of these shifts are very thought provoking and impactful, which I will be tracing in my research through specific stories and experiences shared with me over many months ...”
He 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.
That tension is 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.”
Over the next year or two, Sindoni plans to work through his interviews, archival research and community conversations from his time in Aotearoa, with his findings to be published in a publicly available book.
Sindoni is a visiting fellow at the University of Auckland’s Te Wai Ariki New Zealand Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law, where he works closely with Professor Claire Charters (Ngāti Whakaue, Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi, Tainui), an expert in Indigenous peoples’ rights in international and constitutional law.
This article was updated at 2.30pm on Friday, 24 July 2026, to include additional comments and preliminary findings provided to Te Ao Māori News by Raffaele Sindoni.
