The legal recognition of Te Awa Tupua, the Whanganui River, as a living entity has been celebrated internationally as a paradigm-shifting development in western environmental law.
But while such legal recognition is symbolically powerful, it still operates as a mechanism that reinforces colonialism, argues Hemopereki Simon.
The recognition of Te Awa Tupua as a legal person is widely celebrated as a pioneering step in legal reform. It seeks to reconcile Māori relational cosmologies with an imported western legal system by embedding the river’s whakapapa and tapu within a new statutory identity.
Nonetheless, despite its symbolic value and innovative legal language, the framework underpinning Te Awa Tupua increasingly appears insufficient for confronting the injustices of colonialism.
Settler/invader colonialism is characterised by permanent settlement and the erasure of Indigeneity. It’s a structure, not an event. In Aotearoa New Zealand, this structure has operated through legal mechanisms such as the Native Land Court, where dispossession is justified through narratives of progress, peace and colonial order.
Settler/invader colonialism here has evolved from explicit violence to more insidious forms of cultural and legal racism. The 1860s–1880s period of land confiscation and invasion gave way to 20th-century assimilationist policies and, eventually, to biculturalism as a state-promoted policy ideology based on Te Tiriti.
Biculturalism emerged in the 1970s–1980s as a state response to Māori political mobilisation and protest. This expression of biculturalism focuses on Treaty-based partnership, often translated into legal instruments guided by Treaty principles rather than by Te Tiriti o Waitangi itself.
In the case of Te Awa Tupua, this manifests as a co-governance arrangement that privileges the state’s definitions of ecology and guardianship while translating Māori cosmologies into forms that are palatable to western legal understandings.
The legal framing of Te Awa Tupua, like other bicultural policy tools, prioritises symbolic alignment and cultural representation while excluding Māori from substantive control of land and water. Thus, the legal architecture advances a reconciliatory narrative while failing to address the deeper issue of mana motuhake or Māori sovereignty.
Consultation processes under the law acknowledge Māori perspectives, yet decision-making power remains with the state. This results in managed inclusion rather than structural decolonisation. The Crown enables Māori participation while retaining ultimate jurisdictional control.
Settler states such as Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and Australia often integrate Indigenous art, language, and narratives into national branding. The Te Awa Tupua Act functions similarly. It elevates Māori concepts such as iwi, awa, and whakapapa, but only within the confines of state recognition. Māori values are reframed as tools of environmental stewardship rather than as expressions of constitutional order.
This obscures the foundational injustice of colonisation and frames Māori identity as cultural heritage rather than as sovereign authority. Recent debates over haka and political expression offer a parallel. Māori culture is celebrated when depoliticised, but challenged when it asserts mana.
In contrast, genuine decolonisation requires the return of authority to Māori, the transformation of governance, and the centring of Indigenous philosophies and responsibilities.
While invoking relational language, the Act sustains a Crown-controlled narrative of environmental and cultural management. It avoids confronting the legal fiction of Crown sovereignty and reaffirms the state’s ultimate authority. Collective and cultural memory is curated through legal and political instruments that tell a “reconciliatory story” of partnership. The Whanganui River’s legal personhood thus serves as a tool of symbolic reconciliation and recognition that suppresses ongoing struggles over land, water, and mana motuhake.
Te Awa Tupua Act recognises the river’s metaphysical status but does so within a legal architecture that reaffirms anthropocentric control. The creation of Te Pou Tupua, human representatives who act as the voice of the river, illustrates this paradox. The role is rooted in Māori traditions and simultaneously subjects the river’s agency to state-sanctioned mechanisms of representation. The river becomes a legal subject only through human proxies, thereby reaffirming the centrality of human (and state) authority.
In this sense, the Act illustrates the complexity of partial recognition: it offers a model of environmental governance that resonates globally yet remains tethered to the settler/invader state’s authority. It raises the possibility of alternative legal futures while enclosing those futures within the machinery of the white possessive state.
But true transformation cannot occur without rupturing the underlying structures that define legitimacy and order.
For Māori, this means not merely having our cosmologies acknowledged, but having them form the basis of law, governance, and authority. Yet the Te Awa Tupua settlement leaves the artificial framework of colonial law intact. Mātauranga Māori is praised, but only to the extent that it aligns with the government’s ideas about what it is to be a citizen and how to “protect” the environment. This turns Māori knowledge into a product, while ignoring the deeper political realities of mana motuhake.
What might a new path look like? It would require moving away from settler/invader-defined and symbolic ideas of collaboration and partnership, and towards governing structures based on Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and living.
A fully relational paradigm would aim for governance based on mātauranga Māori and real-life historical events. It would concentrate on the ethics of reciprocity based on place, creating knowledge through interactions rather than taking advantage of other people or animals. From this point of view, our connection to the land — in this case, the river — leads to political systems based on tikanga that can promote real constitutional transformation instead of simple recognition.
Using this kind of system would have much greater effects on how Te Awa Tupua is managed.
The way I describe it to my students is like this: Te Awa Tupua erects an invisible fence on both sides of the river to protect the racial capital investments of resource users, such as farmers. It gives personhood to the river but embeds economic priorities on the land side of the fence.
If Aotearoa was serious about protecting the environment through legal personhood, then, according to tikanga, carving up the collective whole into fenced-off bits here and there would not be permissible. And the main legal person that should be protected is Papatūānuku, our earth mother.
The selective translation of tikanga into western legal form corresponds to a settler/invader colonial logic of co-option and capture, wherein Indigenous frameworks are absorbed only to the extent that they can be operationalised without threatening settler/invader sovereignty and racial capital.
Despite its rhetorical alignment with Māori relational ontologies, the Act remains subordinate to the Resource Management Act — a regime that continues to reflect Pākehā and neoliberal assumptions about land, ownership and state authority. Thus, although the river is recognised as a legal entity, the broader system of settler/invader environmental control remains intact.
Legal personhood can even expand, rather than undermine, state authority by converting Indigenous relationality into state-regulated classifications. Te Awa Tupua is granted a “voice” solely through state-recognised intermediaries who remain accountable to governmental institutions. Māori cosmology, by contrast, is acknowledged but not authorised to serve as an alternative constitutional framework.
If biculturalism fails to achieve justice, and the recognition of legal personhood under the law ultimately perpetuates white possessiveness, then authentic alternatives must originate elsewhere.
Within the framework of Te Awa Tupua, this entails re-envisioning the river as an ancestral entity within a Māori polity. Authority would originate from the river’s descendants rather than from representatives appointed by the Crown. Such a transformation calls for a fundamental constitutional realignment whereby mana belongs to the people of the river and to the river itself.
The co-governance model of Te Awa Tupua works as a deliberate way to limit Indigenous sovereignty because the Crown avoids dealing with its long-standing refusal to recognise Māori ownership rights to water by framing the settlement as partnership and shared guardianship.
As Te Awa Tupua garners international recognition, there is a concern that other jurisdictions may replicate its structure without adequately considering its underlying power relations. The Whanganui model should not be promoted as a universal framework for Indigenous or environmental governance unless its limitations are fully understood.
For worldwide initiatives, rights-of-nature should be complemented by constitutional transformation — acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty rather than simply bestowing legal recognition on ecological entities within settler legal frameworks.
Indigenous peoples have long recognised rivers, mountains, forests, animals and oceans as kin, with their own mana, agency and responsibilities. The belated embrace of these truths within colonial frameworks remains constrained by racial capitalism and white possessiveness.
For Te Awa Tupua to be more than a bicultural compromise, it must become a platform for the genuine exercise of Māori authority over ancestral lands and waters.
This is an edited version of an article first published here.
Dr Hemopereki Simon (T**ūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Tainui, Hauraki, Mataatua) is a senior lecturer at the Wollotuka Institute at the University of Newcastle and Senior Indigenous Fellow at the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies at the University of York.
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