Who is guarding whom?

I am currently in Aotearoa New Zealand for a three-month fellowship researching two legal persons: the river Whanganui, and the former national park and ancestral Tūhoe homeland, Te Urewera. These natural beings were recognized as persons in law, a move that has generated widespread international media coverage and fawning commentary. I will write in future posts about each of them in detail, as I learn more myself. For now, I wanted to reflect on an idea that is so widespread as to go unnoticed: that good environmentalism means humans have to become guardians of nature.

I started my immersion into the cases I am here to study with a brilliant book by Anne Salmond, the most celebrated New Zealand anthropologist, titled Tears of Rangi. Rangi in Maori cosmology is the sky-father that, after being violently separated from his union with Papa, the earth-mother, cries for her while she raises up her mists to meet him (his tears became freshwater bodies). This creation story recounts that the world started in unity, in the embrace of Rangi and Papa, and that its principle of reproduction is division, the separation of pairs. The accent does not fall on division as such, but rather on the relationships that are continuously formed between pairs (already intimated in the tears and the mists, the reaching across).

Maori philosophies develop as relational ones, where the identity of individuals is simply a knot in a series of relationships extending in space and time, forward and backwards. This is reflected in Maori art as much as cosmological stories and philosophies. Relationships with ancestors are powerfully important and, like in so many other philosophies worldwide, animals and plants, the land and the sea, can themselves be ancestors. This means that these natural entities can be entered into relations with, and human life is simply the travelling node where all sorts of life-forms interact. The sign of a good relation is reciprocity, the mutual exchange of gifts.

This kind of relational thinking is not alien to ‘western’ philosophies either. Salmond in her book shows how the very first Europeans to arrive in New Zealand were, in part, themselves steeped into relational Enlightenment science, though by far the dominant philosophy of the time (late 18^thcentury) was the Great Chain of Being: the idea that the universe was ordered on a string of increasing (or decreasing, depending which way you looked) importance, with God on top and the rest of creation strung on hierarchically. The collision of these worlds, the Great Chain and the relational one of the Maori, is still productively shooting sparks today. Though we easily sneer at hierarchical thinking today, it is so insidiously embedded that it is far from extinct.

The legal personality that was granted to the Whanganui river and Te Urewera is but a node in a process of world-collision that began with Captain Cook, in 1769. Since then, the various Maori descent lines have lost the use of much of their ancestral land at the hands of European settlers. The Whanganui iwi, the tribes inhabiting the Whanganui lands, and the Tūhoe, the inhabitants of Te Urewera, sought to obtain ownership of their respective lands by challenging the Crown in court for having breached the founding treaty of New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi (signed, by many but not all chiefs, in 1840). The iwi (tribes) claimed that they had never given the Crown exclusive rights to their lands. Predictably, the NZ government resisted granting the iwi ownership and, instead, ownership was granted to the land itself: hence, the Whanganui river and Te Urewera are legal persons.

The question of course arises – and this is where the rubber hits the road – of who is to represent the legal person in the future. The NZ legal system does not allow for natural entities to speak on their own behalf, so evidently there needs to be some form of representation put in place. The legal persons therefore each come with a detailed plan of governance, about which I will write later, as they are both incredibly interesting. What I want to pause and think about now is the idea, often repeated in news coverage of these cases, that the iwi are the guardians of the legal persons. This idea is present in most commentary on indigenous relationships to the land, whether in Aotearoa or elsewhere.

Inasmuch as the lands that are now recognized by NZ law to be legal persons in their own right are to be represented by anyone, it seems right that these should be iwi members. But does this also make them guardians of these lands? In law, guardians usually act on behalf of subjects that for one reason or another (age, health, and so on) are not capable of taking care of their own business. And this is where the idea starts to fray, at its very base: isn’t nature the archetype of self-care? Particularly from the point of view of relational thinking, it is an odd thing to claim that nature is helpless.

The idea of guardianship is very seductive, being somewhat flattering, painting a picture of responsible humans taking care of the rest of the world. It is also, on this account, deeply steeped into Great Chain of Being thinking. How could humans take care of nature without having the knowledge and the power to do so, and therefore being raised above everything else? The point of Maori philosophies, as well as other indigenous ones, is precisely that we are not above the natural order, so in that sense guardianship or stewardship becomes a logical impossibility. In fact, humans are always in debt to natural beings, trying to assuage their power through behavioural tricks (prohibitions, offerings, and so on). We are likely to rediscover the awesome power that overwhelms human agency in a world of increasingly erratic climate.

Salmond notes that, in the past, kaitiakitanga (the Maori term usually translated as guardianship) used to be exercised by non-human taniwha (supernatural spirits), such as sharks or sting-rays, whereas now it is usually understood to be exercised by people. Human guardianship is in this sense an emptying out of a world that used to be populated by beings more powerful, and more knowledgeable, than ourselves. This kind of thinking is further propagated by the idea that we live in the Anthropocene – the human age. But guardianship in human terms and the human age are, in a sense, inimical to indigenous, relational philosophies. Ancestral traditions taught that it was nature that was the guardian of people, not the other way around. It is then at least ironic that the local iwi are portrayed as the guardians of their lands, now legal persons.

The language of the acts instituting the legal persons combines both indigenous and western conceptions, but ultimately sneaks hierarchy in through the idea of guardianship. However, this does not mean that natural entities are forever subjected to the benevolent human guardian. Tāmati Kruger, an important Tūhoe leader and chairman of the board tasked with governing Te Urewera, makes the following point: “we don’t need land management plans, we need people management plans”. Nature is the definition of self-so, the very principle of self-generation, and Maori philosophies are rooted in this universal truth. For example, the regeneration of nature is a feat that nature accomplishes itself, and we are not in a position to consider ourselves guardians of processes that are still fundamentally mysterious. Instead, we can be guardians of our own behavior (ideally speaking; there seem to be practical impediments to this).

The term for land in te reo, the Maori language, is whenua. The same word is used to designate the placenta, and in Maori tradition this was buried after birth, precisely to underline the connection between the new life and the land. As the etymology of whenua suggests, the land is that which nourishes and connects people to the greater body that makes them possible. To think of ourselves as guardians of the land is, in this sense, akin to thinking of the child as guardian of her mother.

Parallels between indigenous philosophies and the idea of guardianship are well-meaning, but ultimately wrong-headed. Maori philosophies challenge this easy identification, showing it to be a continuation of hierarchical thinking. The relational mode that is present in alternative ways of being and thinking is beautifully exemplified in whakapapa, or genealogy, the practice of reciting who you are by telling the audience who you are related to, including where you’re from (who the home river, or mountain, is). The natural entity here is not under the guardianship of the person, but exactly the other way around; the natural entity is what nestles the person and gives them meaning and identity. This relationship, much closer to ecological science as well as indigenous knowledge – much closer to relational ways of thinking that shun human hubris – is what we must find ways to express. Guardians of the anthropocene not only doesn’t come close to it, it points us in the wrong direction.