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This paper emerges from a Marsden project, Let the River Speak, focused on the Waimatā River in Gisborne, bringing insights from mātauranga and wānanga together with a wide range of disciplines to produce innovative and engaged understandings of ki uta ki tai-the life of rivers from the mountains to the sea. In Te Ao Māori, waterways are relational knots/nodes/strands in a meshwork of whakapapa that arises from exchanges between earth and sky, land and sea. This approach acknowledges the relations between the atmosphere, surface water and groundwater, vegetation cover, land use, water quality and quantity, the sea, plants, animals, micro-organisms and people; and rivers as beings in their own right, with their own rights. Let the River Speak is codeveloped with the river by a team including iwi researchers, scholars from earth system science, geomorphology, microbiology and infectious diseases, forest ecology, anthropology, creative practice, and business studies. It is holistic, working across different knowledge systems to understand the full complexity of waterways in relationship with people and other life forms over time. At the same time, it is hopeful, providing a relational framework for actions to restore river and estuarine communities to a state of ora (health, well-being, flourishing). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aotearoa New Zealand's environmental policy and legislation recognises Māori Indigenous principles and values, and gives prominence to Te Mana o te Wai (the authority of water itself). However, current policy, legislation, and practice are inadequate for enabling Māori rights and interests in water takes and instream flows and levels, in terms of both involvement and specific allocation mechanisms supporting Māori values. We argue that a policy and implementation space needs to be created that ensures indigenous Māori engagement and outcomes in freshwater governance, planning, and management. This space should provide for an integrated, precautionary, and bicultural 'First Principles' approach, ensuring that Māori rights and interests consistent with Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) are enabled, including the exercise of mātauranga Māori (knowledge informed by Māori worldviews), tikanga (Māori customs and lore), and kaitiakitanga (guardianship). We outline a potential water allocation framework, Ngā Puna Aroha, that could provide direction and give confidence and certainty to the implementers of national water policy. Such an approach would need to be supported by a broader bicultural policy and we suggest an overarching philosophy Ngā Taonga Tuku Iho, which would encompass all natural 'resource' management, providing a korowai (cloak) for the management of each particular 'resource' or taonga (treasure) including freshwater. This type of bicultural proposal could inform freshwater and wider natural 'resource' management policymaking, regulatory frameworks, and implementation nationally and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]