A mountain in New Zealand has been granted legal personhood in an historic move that ends years of dispute. It means the geographical feature now “owns itself” and its interests are represented in law by a coalition of local tribes, peoples or iwi, and government.
Taranaki Maunga (or Mounga in the dialect local to the region), is the second-highest peak on New Zealand’s North Island and, like Japan’s Mount Fuji, is a distinctively symmetrical, snow-capped, volcanic cone. The Māori from the Taranaki region hold it as sacred in accordance with their belief system (like other First Nations people elsewhere) that natural parts of land and waterscapes are ancestral living beings.
Righting historic injustices
The mountain was given a colonial name (Mount Egmont) by explorer James Cook during the 1700s and in the 19th century it was effectively confiscated from New Zealand’s indigenous population along with over a million acres of land in a breach of the founding treaty of modern New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi. Now, the Taranaki Maunga Collective Redress Bill aims to acknowledge the injury this caused by that breach.
Though access to the mountain, which is said to boast some of New Zealand’s most popular walking trails, will remain unchanged, the new agreement attempts to provide redress for historical injustices inflicted upon the Taranaki iwi and give them back more say in the management of the resource.
We must acknowledge the hurt that has been caused by past wrongs, so we can look to the future to support iwi to realise their own aspirations and opportunities.
Paul Goldsmith, negotiating government minister for the Taranaki Maunga Collective Redress Bill
Formal apology
As well as officially giving back the mountain’s ancestral name (Taranaki Maunga) and renaming and protecting the surrounding national parklands, the parliamentary bill comes with a formal apology for the way the indigenous people were treated. Hundreds of Māori attended parliament to mark the occasion and sang traditional waiata as the bill was passed into law.
“Today, Taranaki, our maunga, our maunga tupuna [ancestral mountain], is released from the shackles, the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate,” Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader of the Te Pāti Māori political party, told press. The settlement recognises that the mountain “never was a crown asset” Ngarewa-Packer added. “It is the living, breathing embodiment of our identity.”
It is the third time in New Zealand’s recent history that parts of the natural world have been given legal personhood. The first was in 2014, when the Urewera native forest gained the recognition, while the second was the Whanganui River, given personhood status in 2017.