A river with a legal voice: the Whanganui

No named individual could be profiled from reporting we had read, so this is a place profile built from reference and government sources. The Whanganui is about 290 kilometres long, the third-longest river in New Zealand. It is treasured by the iwi, or Māori tribes, of the river as a taonga, a treasure, and was home to many villages before European settlement.

Local iwi first petitioned Parliament about the river in the 1870s. After decades of litigation and negotiation, an agreement was reached on 30 August 2012, and Parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act on 15 March 2017, giving the river its own legal identity. It was reported to be the world's second natural resource to receive this status, after Te Urewera.

For travellers, the Whanganui Journey is a paddle through the Whanganui National Park, run as one of the Department of Conservation's Great Walks. Much of the land beside the upper river is in the park, though the river itself is not part of it. If you go, book through the official channel, use a guide or operator who works with local iwi where possible, and treat the river as a living whole in how you camp, cook and carry out waste.

The Mukki and root-bridge profiles in this issue deal with communities and their places in other ways. What links them is the idea that the people closest to a landscape are often its best custodians.