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Drawing on a Critical Physical Geography perspective, this paper problematises conceptualisations of the Anthropocene landscape of the Waimatā catchment on the East Cape, Gisborne district of Aotearoa New Zealand, through three lenses: forestry, restoration and indigeneity. Historical practices of arbitrary land division and resultant unsustainable forestry have caused multiple environmental, social and cultural problems within the catchment. Despite significant efforts of restoration groups and volunteers to remedy this, as yet programmes do not align with holistic Māori ideologies of seeing themselves as the land from which they trace their tribal identity. Fragmentation of the land has disrupted senses of identity and place. A kinship‐based worldview between humans, the universe and everything in it suggests a more holistic lens through which humans are conceived as inseparable from nature. Such a more‐than‐human lens exposes a critical flaw in interpretations of the Anthropocene. Even when only considering its lexical construction, the word ‘Anthropocene’ innately centres the human. Continued use of such framings extends inequitable and unjust practices that imprint colonial forcings on the landscape and its people in ways inconsistent with intertwined Māori views of people, land and ancestors. No matter the lens through which it is interpreted, the Anthropocene term has little practical value in Aotearoa New Zealand, especially when considered in relation to emerging socio‐natural river‐centric perspectives. [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]

The complex interactions and ruptures between contemporary settler colonialism, environmental ethics, and Indigenous rights and worldviews often emerge in projects of civil engineering. The continued capture, control and burial of natural water courses in Aotearoa-New Zealand is a case in point, and exemplifies a failure to stay abreast of evolving understandings and renewed relationships we seek with our waterways, our ancestors. Wai-Horotiu stream used to run down what is now Queen Street, the main road in Auckland, Aotearoa-New Zealand's largest city. Treasured by Māori as a source of wai (water) and mahinga kai (food), it is also the home of Horotiu, a taniwha or ancestral guardian--a literal 'freshwater body'. However, as Tāmaki-Makaurau transitioned into Auckland city, Wai-Horotiu became denigrated; used as an open sewer by early settlers before being buried alive in the colonial process. How, now, can we know this buried waterway? Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 that affords the Whanganui River juristic personality and moral considerability offers one possible solution. It acknowledges that waterways, incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements, exist in existential interlinks with Māori as part of their whakapapa (genealogical networks). This paper asks, can a corresponding and appropriate ethics of association and care be fostered in and expressed by the political descendants of British settlers (Pākehā) and later immigrants who live here under the auspices established by Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840? Here is a conversation between a Māori earth systems scientist and a Pākehā interdisciplinary scholar. Where Hikuroa speaks from and to direct whakapapa connections, beginning with pepeha, Lythberg's narrative springboards from public art projects that facilitate more ways of knowing Wai-Horotiu. Together, we contend that a regard for Indigenous relationships with water can guide best practice for us all, and propose that creative practices can play a role in attaching people to place, and to waterways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The granting of rights to the Whanganui River in 2017 emerged as an outcome of Tribunal hearings relating to breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed between Māori chiefs and the British Crown in 1840. As this expression of a river as having legal personhood with rights reflects a distinctively Māori perspective upon river systems, it offers the prospect for a new era of sociocultural approaches to river management in Aotearoa New Zealand. Using the Whanganui River as a case study, this paper explores prospective geomorphic meanings of river rights. The paper asks, "What role can geomorphology play in identifying, articulating and protecting the rights of a river?" Ancestral Māori relations to the river based upon mutual codependence (reciprocity) are juxtaposed against geomorphic understandings of a river's agency as expressed through self‐adjustment, diversity of form, evolution, and catchment‐scale connectivities. Relations between river science and indigenous concepts of rivers, framed under the auspices of river rights, present opportunities for different approaches to river management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]