Legal personhood for Taranaki: transformative or tokenistic?
Legal personhood oversimplifies indigenous cosmological relationships. From a Māori perspective, natural entities such as maunga are tuakana – our evolved, senior kin.
It is, therefore, both ironic and audacious to impose upon them a legal framework originally designed for teina – junior kin, in this case, humans. Instead, we should aspire to elevate our own values and actions to align with the guardianship principles of our atua, ensuring that manaakitanga and kaitiakitanga are embedded in all that we do. If this became New Zealand’s norm, the colonisers’ so-called protective laws and regulations would be rendered unnecessary.