Te Mana o te Wai : An indigenous perspective on rivers and river management

Abstract

Abstract Rivers, lakes, streams, and springs have been described as the bloodways of Papatūānuku, earth mother. On this view of the world, water is life. We are witnesses to the importance of water for all communities when the health and well‐being of our waterways are at risk. In New Zealand, governance and management systems have not been able to cope with legacy issues nor are they coping with the complex problems of diffuse pollution from intensive farming, climate change, pest species, and population growth. In seeking ways to improve freshwater management, there are increasing calls to include tikanga (indigenous laws and values) into decision‐making frameworks. Indigenous concepts such as kaitiakitanga (the responsibility to take care of natural resources) and Te Mana o te Wai (restoring and protecting the integrity of water) have gained traction. This article will explain these concepts through a distinctively indigenous lens and highlight some of the challenges of integrating tikanga into dominant western frameworks.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 91 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.