New Zealand Mountain Granted Personhood, Recognizing it as Sacred for Māori

FILE - New Zealand's Mount Taranaki, also known as Mount Egmont, has a warm glow lighting the snow peak, June 12, 2011. (AP Photo/David Frampton, File)

A mountain in New Zealand considered an ancestor by Indigenous people was recognized as a legal person on Thursday 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 New Zealand, 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 2,518 meters (8,261 feet) and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports, The Associated Press reported.
The legal recognition acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Māori 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.
How can a mountain be a person? The law passed 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 the country's Conservation Minister.
Why is this mountain special? “The mountain has long been an honored ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place," Paul Goldsmith, the lawmaker responsible for the settlements between the government and Māori tribes, told Parliament in a speech on Thursday.
But colonizers 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 — New Zealand'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 rebelling 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 New Zealand 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.
How will the mountain use its rights? “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 co-leader of the political party Te Pāti Māori 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.
The mountain's legal rights are intended to uphold its health and wellbeing. They will be employed to stop forced sales, restore its traditional uses and allow conservation work to protect the native wildlife that flourishes there. Public access will remain.