Mian Crist

A Maori legal scholar called Jacinta Ruru sort of picked up this idea, and I'm going to give a quote here from McFarlane.

It struck her that an affinity existed between Stone's young concept of legal personhood for natural entities and the longstanding Maori relationship with rivers as living sacred ancestors.

So she kind of picks up this idea and it gets applied to certain rivers in New Zealand.

And it really is kind of linking the Maori legal system and the state legal system in an interesting kind of way.

And in 2010...

ruru and her student james morris published this article called giving voice to rivers i'll read a quote here they say the legal personality concept aligns with the maori legal concept of a personified natural world by regarding the river as having its own standing the mana or authority and maori life force of the river

would be more likely to be regarded as a holistic being rather than a fragmented entity of flowing water, riverbed, and riverbank.

And this concept of the river as a whole entity is useful in the legal sense because extractive processes taking things from different parts of the river tend to damage the river ecosystem as a whole.

And so they're using this idea to say, you know, you can't just look at a river as these individual bits that can be pulled apart and used for human consumption or human need or human wants, but that this whole river deserves some kind of understanding in a holistic sense legally and should have rights.

So seven years after publishing this article, Morris and Ruru helped to form this really extraordinary piece of legislation, which is called the Te Awa Te Pua Act.

This is March 2017.

And this act is about this one specific river, the Whanganui River.

so here's a bit from mcfarlane at the act's heart is a radical claim that the wanganui river is alive and an ancestor to the wanganui or iwi tribe the act speaks unambiguously of the river as and quote indivisible and living whole and quote a spiritual and physical entity with a life force

The Maori word that recurs in the act when describing the river is muri, synonymous with Morris and Ruri's term mauri, both of which translate as, quote, life principle, vital essence, the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity.

And McFarlane says the closest English cognate is anima, which means a current of breath or wind, the vital principle, life, soul, and which gives us the words animal, animate, animism, and animus in the sense of mind.

So this is a very different way, obviously, of thinking of a river and a very different way of being recognized as a legal person.

And we should also say that there are other entities that are recognized as legal persons in law, such as corporations, certain sacred sites, unions, and all of these have legal standing.

So they can bring lawsuits and be part of lawsuits.

So the river now has this kind of legal standing.

So as McFarlane writes, this act is really the outcome of over 180 years of conflict between the state and the Whanganui River in terms of land and water rights.