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As Māori heal through nature, is ‘legal personhood’ a tool or a distraction?

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RAGLAN, Aotearoa New Zealand — The wide, steep-cliffed Whānganui River ferries spring water and snowmelt from Mount Tongariro to the west coast of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island. Tracing its length by waka (Māori canoe), the steady surge of deep-green, mist-trimmed freshwater invokes a powerful presence. For local iwi (Māori tribes), that presence is especially significant: Whanganui River is considered a literal, sentient ancestor who can be spoken and listened to. Damage to the watershed, such as pollution from agriculture and forestry and the construction of hydropower dams, thus has cultural and spiritual implications as well as environmental ones. In 2017, the Whanganui watershed — termed Te Awa Tupua — made history as the first river to gain the rights of legal personhood, granting it formal recognition as a “spiritual and physical entity” that can be represented in a court of law. Since then, there has been a flurry of attempts around the world — many of them successful — to grant rivers, mountains, forests and animals the status of a “legal person.” Some Indigenous people welcome the phenomenon as a step toward a legal system that’s more aligned with, and hopefully more likely to effectively represent, their values and worldviews. Others, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, see it as an odd sort of strategy for shifting how people relate to the natural world. But, says University of Canterbury legal scholar Rachael Evans, who affiliates with the Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Pamoana iwi, perhaps even stranger is the worldview we’ve used…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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