A mountain in New Zealand is now legally recognised as a person after being granted all the rights and responsibilities of a human by the government.
The new law offers extra protection for Mount Taranaki – now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Maori name – and means it has all the rights, powers, duties and responsibilities of a person.
It is part of an agreement between New Zealand‘s government and the indigenous Maori tribes, which have long considered the 8,261ft mountain an ancestor.
The mountain’s 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”.
Four members of the local Maori iwi, or tribes, and four others appointed by the country’s conservation minister, will make up a new entity that acts as “the face and voice” of the mountain, the law rules.
The legal recognition also acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Maori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonised, and fulfils an agreement of reparation from the country’s government to indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.
The legal rights essentially give the tribes more power to uphold the mountain’s health and wellbeing in an era where it has become a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.
Despite the new bill, which passed unanimously through parliament, the mountain will remain a publicly accessible destination.
“The mountain has long been an honoured ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place,” Paul Goldsmith, the politician responsible for the settlements between the government and Maori tribes, told parliament in a speech on Thursday.
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Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, a co-leader of the political party Te Pati Maori and a descendant of the Taranaki tribes, said the law released the mountain from “the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate”.
It comes amid significant tension in the country over Maori rights, which led tens of thousands of people to march on parliament in November last year.
Colonisers of New Zealand in the 18th and 19th centuries took the mountain from the tribes after British explorer Captain James Cook spotted the peak from his ship and renamed it Mount Egmont.
In 1840, Maori tribes and representatives of the British crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi – New Zealand’s founding document – in which the crown promised Maori would retain rights to their land and resources.
However, the crown breached its agreement.
The mountain and land nearby was confiscated in 1865 to punish Maori for rebelling. Over the next century, hunting and sports groups had a say in the mountain’s management, while the Maori did not.
Traditional Maori practices associated with the mountain were banned while tourism was promoted, and it wasn’t until a protest movement by the tribes in the 1970s and ’80s that their language, culture and rights began to be recognised in 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.
Mount Taranaki joins Te Urewera, a vast native forest on the North Island, and the Whanganui River in being recognised as people under law.
