NZ’s ‘sacred’ mountain granted personhood under new law
A mountain in New Zealand considered an ancestor by Indigenous people has been recognised 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 Māori name – is the latest natural feature to be granted personhood in NZ, which has ruled that a river and a stretch of sacred land are people before.
The pristine, snow-capped dormant volcano is the second highest on New Zealand’s North Island at 2518m and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.
The legal recognition acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Māori of the Taranaki region after NZ was colonised. It fulfills an agreement of redress from the country’s government to Indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.
How can a mountain be a person?
The law passed on Thursday gives Taranaki Maunga all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. Its legal personality has a name: Te Kāhui 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 will be “the face and voice” of the mountain, the law says, with four members from local Māori iwi, or tribes, and four members appointed by NZ’s Conservation Minister.
Why is this mountain special?
“The mountain has long been an honoured ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place,” Paul Goldsmith, the minister responsible for the settlements between the government and Māori tribes, told parliament.
But colonisers of New Zealand in the 18th and 19th centuries took first the name of Taranaki and then the mountain itself. In 1770, the British explorer Captain James Cook spotted the peak from his ship and named it Mount Egmont.
In 1840, Māori tribes and representatives of the British crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi – NZ’s founding document – in which the Crown promised Māori would retain rights to their land and resources. But the Māori and English versions of the treaty differed – and Crown breaches of both began immediately.
In 1865, a vast swathe of Taranaki land, including the mountain, was confiscated to punish Māori for rebeling against the Crown. Over the next century hunting and sports groups had a say in the mountain’s management but Māori did not.
“Traditional Māori practices associated with the mountain were banned while tourism was promoted,” Goldsmith said. But a Māori protest movement of the 1970s and ’80s has led to a surge of recognition for the Māori language, culture and rights in NZ law.
Redress has included billions of dollars in Treaty of Waitangi settlements – such as the agreement with the eight tribes of Taranaki, signed in 2023.
Do other parts of New Zealand have personhood?
New Zealand was the first country in the world to recognise natural features as people when a law passed in 2014 granted personhood to Te Urewera, a vast native forest on the North Island. Government ownership ceased and the tribe Tūhoe became its guardian.
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