What happens after a river becomes a legal person?

As it winds through bush-clad valleys and farmland towards the ocean, picking up kayakers, silt and stories along the way, Aotearoa’s longest navigable river, Te Awa o Whanganui, slows as it prepares to flow through the city of Whanganui before connecting with the sea.

On its northern bank, just off State Highway four near the eastern edge of the city, sits Te Ao Hou marae, a place of connection and learning. Its main hapū is Ngāti Tupoho of the iwi Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi.

It’s here on the banks of the river that Yale School of the Environment PhD candidate Raffaele Sindoni spent much of his time, learning from kaumātua, kaiārahi and rangatahi, playing guitar and absorbing stories and knowledge about the region, particularly Te Awa o Whanganui.

Raffaele, who is also a writer and folk musician, spent five months living in Whanganui, never far from the Whanganui River, the first in the world to be recognised as a legal person in 2017.

The groundbreaking legislation, honouring te ao Māori, inspired communities around the world to explore legal protections for rivers and mountains. It also drew Raffaele to Aotearoa.

His research, in collaboration with Native American tribes and prior scholarship in the United States, led him to investigate the impact of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act nearly a decade after the river was granted legal personhood.

“I’m most curious about where the Act generates promising advancements, where it meets resistance, what it’s used for, and where it reaches its limits as both an expression of Indigenous relational worldviews and as an Act of Parliament operating within the structures of the New Zealand state.”

On paper, says Raffaele, granting legal personhood to a river appears to profoundly challenge colonial-capitalist understandings of land as property, water as resource, and humans and nature as separate. But, he points out, there’s a caveat.

“Rights of nature frameworks still operate within and engage with the very Western legal systems they seek to challenge. This poses an important question: how are Indigenous worldviews being translated into forms that the state recognises, and how does such a translation affect centuries of embedded legal and political Western colonial power structures?

“My research sits at this fault line. The Te Awa Tupua Act is an important entry point into scholarly and political inquiries across the world concerned with the expropriation of land, the objectification of water, climate change, and, of course, decolonisation and Indigenous sovereignty.

“These debates about legal personhood are essential for the next generation of students, activists, and lawyers as we grapple with changing relationships between people and nature. More importantly, though, they matter for all communities working to challenge the ways Western law has long shaped land, belonging, and political power.” 

Raffaele is a visiting fellow at the University of Auckland’s Te Wai Ariki New Zealand Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law, where he’s working closely with Auckland Law School scholar Professor Claire Charters, who specialises in Indigenous peoples' rights in international and constitutional law.

“I connected with Claire through Gerald Torres, a professor of environmental justice and law, at Yale. Gerald and Claire have worked together on and off for years, and Claire invited me to be hosted by Te Wai Ariki as I undertook this research.

“It goes without saying that the Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law has given me support, supervision, and connections to leading Māori legal scholars and practitioners working at the interface of tikanga Māori and state law, as I explore how the Te Awa Tupua Act is being carried out in practice.”

Over five months of fieldwork in Whanganui, the scholar interviewed around 40 people with unique perspectives on the Act, including leaders of Whanganui hapū, farmers, members of entities that speak with or for the awa, heads of iwi settlement entities, Members of Parliament, district and regional councillors, environmental lawyers, and foresters.

Such a breadth of voices proved invaluable, says Raffaele, who’s now back in the US transcribing interviews and preparing a book based on his findings.

“It was important to me to really enter into a relationship with the river and its people, so that mutual accountability could be developed. Such is the start of a lifelong relationship, one where I'm shaped by the place and people I engage with. I’ll be coming back again this year to visit the friends I made and continue my own learning.”

Beyond this project, Raffaele’s doctoral research explores the foundations of Western law, the colonial divide between culture and nature, and the possibilities and limits of challenging those divisions from within state legal systems.

The overarching aim, he says, is to understand whether, and how, the recent global boom of legal personhood frameworks for rivers, mountains, forests, and beyond (such as Te Awa Tupua) may challenge colonial-capitalist relationships to land and water, and what they might offer for Indigenous-led environmental governance.

"I'm interested in how humans shape the environment and, in turn, how the environment shapes us, our values, our economies, and our cultural and spiritual lives. I also look at how those relationships have evolved under different forms of government and markets, and what they might mean for the future."