A mountain in New Zealand considered an ancestor by indigenous people was yesterday recognized as a legal person after a new law granted it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.
Mount Taranaki — now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Maori name — is the latest natural feature to be granted personhood in New Zealand, which has previously declared that a river and a stretch of sacred land are people.
The pristine, snow-capped dormant volcano is the second-highest on New Zealand’s North Island at 2,518m and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.
Photo: AP
The legal recognition acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Maori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonized. It fulfills an agreement of redress from the country’s government to indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.
The law passed yesterday gives Taranaki Maunga all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. Its legal personality has a name: Te Kahui Tupua, which the law views as “a living and indivisible whole.” It includes Taranaki and its surrounding peaks and land, “incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements.”
A newly created entity would be “the face and voice” of the mountain, the law says, with four members from local Maori iwi, or tribes, and four members appointed by the country’s conservation minister.
“The mountain has long been an honored ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place,” Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Paul Goldsmith told the New Zealand Parliament in a speech yesterday.
“Today, Taranaki, our maunga, our maunga tupuna, is released from the shackles, the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate,” said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, a coleader of the Te Pati Maori party and a descendant of the Taranaki tribes, using a phrase that means ancestral mountain.
“We grew up knowing there was nothing anyone could do to make us any less connected,” she added.
Colonizers of New Zealand in the 18th and 19th centuries took first the name of Taranaki and then the mountain itself.
In 1840, Maori and representatives of the British crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi — New Zealand’s founding document — in which the Crown promised Maori that they would retain rights to their land and resources, but the Maori and English versions of the treaty differed — and Crown breaches of both began immediately.
“Traditional Maori practices associated with the mountain were banned, while tourism was promoted,” Goldsmith said.
A Maori protest movement of the 1970s and 1980s led to a surge of recognition for the Maori language, culture and rights in New Zealand law.
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