UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

The Poetics and Ontologies of Fresh Water in Settler Contexts

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.1093/isle/isaf023

Auteurs

Teresa Shewry · Philip Steer

Année déclarée

2025

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

article

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:04:47.761260+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:04:47.761260+00:00

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Non effectuée

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

The river is a person. —Airini Beautrais, “Spring—Black, Red and White” In mid-twentieth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Pākehā (settler) poet J. R. Hervey encounters a “squat citadel spraying power”—a hydroelectric dam—and finds that it has turned the river into “dumb, disciplined waters” (43). A decade later, the Māori poet Hone Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi) draws on his experiences as a worker on hydroelectric dam projects to also describe their environmental impact as a forcible act of silencing: “Nowhere is there greater fuss/to tear out the river’s tongue” (“Sea” 30). At first glance, the similarity between Hervey and Tuwhare’s portrayals of rivers rendered “dumb” simply attests to the far-flung extent of the modernist belief that hydroelectric infrastructure contributed to civilization’s necessary work of pacifying unruly nature. As Patrick McCully puts it in his history of large dams, aptly titled Silenced Rivers (1996), such infrastructure has come to “symbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled by nature and superstition to one where nature is ruled by science, and superstition vanquished by rationality” (237). Framed by this binary opposition, literature seems to offer a powerful vehicle through which rivers might speak against the extractivist forces that would seek to silence them. Thus, Paul Kingsnorth aligns his recent poetic response to the “wild and blue, raging and unchanneled” rivers of Patagonia, Songs from the Blue River (2018), with theologian Thomas Berry’s insight that the “modern project” is predicated upon silencing these bodies of water: “We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation” (qtd. in Kingsnorth). Yet such straightforward assertions are complicated by the earlier examples of Hervey and Tuwhare, whose distinct cultural perspectives prompt questions both about the source of a river’s speech and the ability to understand what it might have to say. The matter of riverine voice has surfaced into western consciousness in recent years as a result of various legislative attempts to recognize prior and ongoing Indigenous understandings of rivers as living, ancestral, metaphysical entities. Such gambits literalize the concept of a “body” of freshwater by deeming it to be capable of bearing intrinsic legal rights. Rights of varying kinds and extents have been attributed to bodies of water as diverse as the Mutuhekau Shipu/Magpie River in Canada, Klamath River in the United States, Komi Memem River in Brazil, Vilcabamba River in Ecuador, Atrato River in Colombia, and Birrarung/Yarra River in Australia.1 Arguably the most ambitious initiative of this kind has been undertaken in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act (2017) recognized the ancestral relationship of the Whanganui River to the iwi and hapū (tribes and subtribes) who live alongside it, known collectively as Te Atihaunui a Pāpārangi or Ngāti Hau. The Te Awa Tupua Act acknowledges Whanganui to be “an indivisible and living whole … incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements,” and declares that it “is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person” (New Zealand Government sec. 12, 14.1).2 The question of Whanganui’s voice is central to this initiative. As legal scholars James D. K. Morris (Ngāti Pukenga, Ngai te Rangi) and Jacinta Ruru (Raukawa, Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāti Maniapoto) write, “The point of recognising the legal standing of a river is to give that river a voice” (57). Yet, as Katherine Sanders points out, the voice of the river that emerges through legal personhood is not necessarily uncomplicated or even coherent because “legal personality brings with it ideas of representation and performance,” and it may be deployed in service of “competing perspectives”: “Indeed, the plastic quality of the ‘voice’ of nature might well be essential to the grant of legal personality” (210). Such insights point to the possible value of literary portrayals of rivers as expressive agents, which may provide an alternative venue for articulating and reflecting on diverse understandings of freshwater bodies. The relatively recent debates over rivers’ legal personhood intersect with and are enriched by existing tendencies within the environmental humanities to attribute expressive agency to rivers. On the one hand, scholars are willing to comprehend rivers as actively inscribing their presence and histories in landscapes. Rivers “express themselves,” according to Gary J. Brierley, in material processes such as channels, currents, and rock erosion: “A gorge may have an imposing presence, firmly etched into bedrock. Discontinuous watercourses may be subtle and ambiguous, struggling to flow” (13). Similarly, Kristina Lyons describes “the potential material force of a river’s memory” that encompasses “its capacity to remember the courses of its currents, the expanse and heights of its beds, and the areas that it seasonally occupies and may have previously occupied” (Lyons). In broad terms, such claims for rivers’ expressive agency enable a perspectival shift from subjugation to mutual coexistence. On the other hand, scholarship has also focused on fluvial media that evoke a sense of expressiveness to involve human relationality with nonhuman elements. “Water’s voice” is carried especially well in the liquid and animated language of poetry, as in the flowing word “rivière,” argues Gaston Bachelard in Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942), proposing that such language has “a direct relationship with the elemental material sources of the language” (188-189).3 Tore Størvold analyzes how Icelandic musician Björk engages the “powerful sonic presence” and “liveliness” of the Jökulsá á Fljótsdal river, “listening out for what it has to say” in contradiction to narratives about the national developmental significance of hydropower (406). Such varied analyses are united in situating nonhuman expression as an opening toward thinking about rivers as far more than “conduits for industry, agriculture, energy, and urban development” (Ryan 487). At the same time, they also emphasize that human contact with rivers and an understanding of their capacities is inextricable from cultural politics and histories. What has thus far received less attention within the environmental humanities is the relation between what a river says and why it is deemed able to speak—the ontological basis of its expressive agency—which is especially pressing in contexts of settler colonialism. Jamie Linton proposes that the ontology of water be understood as the product of specific “relations, entanglements and engagements, including its engagements with people” (“Right” 58). Settler colonies are especially marked by the clashing of multiple ontologies of water. In the first instance, Indigenous ontologies of “living waters” understand rivers not only as agential beings but as kin (Laborde and Jackson 360). As Meg Parsons et al. observe, “One of the key features of Indigenous peoples’ worldviews or ontologies (despite incredible diversity in cultural, linguistic, political, economic, historical and geographical contexts) is their conceptualisation of people being in relationships with ‘more-than-humans’ or ‘other orders of beings’” (237). Importantly, the forms of relationality that acknowledge rivers as expressive agents are themselves expressions of Indigenous law and underlying sovereignty. In contrast, the dominant colonial ontology, which Linton labels “modern water,” construes rivers in terms of a “resource that could be considered and managed in abstraction from the wider environmental, social, and cultural context(s) in which it occurred” (What 6). Although the abstracting tendencies of modern water are commonly associated with the silencing of water, they can also give rise to riverine expressiveness that justifies such treatment, as when the colonial Australian poet Henry Lawson imagines the Darling River advocating for its own infrastructural transformation: “O! Lock your river …/I want for homes on my lonely ways,/A people’s love and a people’s praise” (3). The binary opposition between living waters and modern water ontologies is further complicated by an additional Western/settler understanding of fresh water, a “wilderness ontology” that imagines water as most fully alive in the absence of human presence or connection. David A. Tschida asserts the conservationist potential of speech by a “wilderness Other” that “rejects anthropomorphism”: “[T]he recognition of this voice(s), with the related implication of an entity with voice having value inherent in itself that was not granted or bestowed by humans, implies with such recognition an ethical obligation to listen to the entity with that voice” (207-8). If it may readily be recognized that silence damages relations between people and a river, it is more challenging to confront the possibility that affirming the voice of a river enunciating as “wilderness Other” may also enact colonial harm. Literary writing offers a valuable archive of attempts to inscribe river voices, and of claims to comprehend their underlying natures and needs, with poetry proving to be a of and for the and in such We these as Pākehā (settler) from Aotearoa/New Zealand, not to silence Indigenous of river speech of understanding of their histories and and also about how to that seek to in a river’s In this we seek to understand own by of settler poetry from Aotearoa/New Zealand in from Whanganui River asserts “the a person” of personhood in one of the most and settler engagements with fresh water in Aotearoa/New Zealand literary which was in a of of the water ontologies that within the settler In by of Māori and Pākehā river poetry to ontologies of living waters and modern water, we that and expression to rivers is a and of settler literary to hydropower to the of “A of we an of hydroelectric and where the river is the and by settler writing that to acknowledge an Indigenous ontology of living waters from within the and cultural of settler colonial to water as a we even as recent literary engagements with river a shift in settler from rivers as and for the and from such a of that settler in a river’s personhood may Indigenous with rivers as as of a nonhuman thus to silence the expressive rivers that in these The between Indigenous “living and “modern ontologies was and to be central to settler in Aotearoa/New On the one hand, the Māori understanding of living water is of a of and are the the people who in a In this of rivers and people understanding is in the of Te Atihaunui a the of the Whanganui te te te te Awa river from the to the the river is the life of a river is not to that of as it a “wilderness Other” but is by ancestral connection. As (Ngāti and write, of and rivers can be an a and a living On the other hand, a modern water ontology that fresh water as a that could not be but could be and by As as the a for to the the of water,” and that the and one could to the in the and and Meg Parsons point out that legal including of Zealand … on to water,” and legal emphasize that people The literary history of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and its poetry in these water Māori have poetry to and of their relation with living rivers. A of of Te (Ngāti in the to and that been by the describes the living of the A later, and in the of hydroelectric the same river was the of Te (Ngāti Te by as the as the of the of the and on this as the hydroelectric its is in with Māori The first a of the te is the there a Te that the word as only the of river but also to the metaphysical nature of the by to its The of hydroelectric such as are the of the ancestral te a to a a the of for his representation of the River as an ancestral that hydroelectric may not a river and its expressive Hone Tuwhare’s River also the agential personality of a river, this which it by and language and a The with its with the Tuwhare’s river questions that (settler) scholars are to about it might for a river a to have its own in its own terms, with its own to and and their the by and Tuwhare that the ability to a rivers’ expressive agency is by Indigenous sovereignty. Rivers have also been a of Pākehā poetry, as well as and the ontology of modern water out in their as as of or as of other Thus, in the of “a river or a of live rivers in the first in the that to hydroelectric “The of that a river’s voice can be with a modern water River describes having the and the that my and to be and river the of settler who thus from the my but to its in my to be its in the and it than to an Indigenous water ontology, the expressive agency of river might be understood in relation to literary of and voice to the from and to and In its own as the of a to be through “The of also offers a to the of that settler that the voice of a river is not necessarily the same as its or its Indigenous If the history of settler is marked by the of an Indigenous living water ontology by a colonial understanding of modern water, settler are to with environmental understandings of fresh water about by the of Indigenous The of this cultural and in Aotearoa/New Zealand are a central for Pākehā Whanganui River which was in the of the and of the Te Awa Tupua Act and engages with the diversity of life with Whanganui over the of its history and the that it to the from the of the In the that the the Te Atihaunui a Pāpārangi of the river an indivisible living but is also to that “the significance of the relationships between Whanganui iwi and the river be by a Pākehā (13). describes as more the (13). The first of offers an of the history in the and including on a the of Māori known as Te “The of the the by The “The on the the of the river. Whanganui itself is most in the of the “A of In what these might on settler attempts to acknowledge a river’s expressive we first their of the extent of its silencing to of a modern water ontology, especially through hydropower In one of the in the attempts to the nature and extent of the silencing of Whanganui that through hydroelectric its point of The is a key of the and between and which water from rivers and over an of In to the of dams, which are a of the is a and that it (New Zealand of being of Whanganui’s are simply by and which to the from where they into the and into the to through more hydropower the The has been as a to Māori that on the river’s or both by the river and by its waters with that of and their in the river its and The nature of this environmental and cultural with a In engages with literary to silencing of water and the settler of its own agency through the and abstraction of water. The opening a of settler for to Whanganui’s be the to and of it to these as to matter how the environmental they of water also settler to their from Such on the capacity to and The infrastructure of and and water as an within The of water into the of its from and may not simply infrastructural but also of Settler to riverine the of the of hydropower as a river As of and of that hydropower are in which Whanganui in relation to settler to it, from its but for riverine and to its and and a the with of who through and who also describes the expressiveness of the nonhuman beings by the writing of a language of in a the the of of the who implication its human and environmental to the to this only a for to the who the and for hydropower this by his with of by the is only one of the central “A of and the other it collectively offer a of perspectives on the life that in and alongside the river. Yet these Whanganui itself and as a of the by the hydroelectric The the of water from the river’s to its the and living of Whanganui even in the of its As “A of the of the river, on that the to whose Pākehā who also it their contrast, the Māori of Whanganui points which they come to Pākehā Thus, the that is to the and ongoing presence of Te Atihaunui a Pāpārangi in which the of their and The are of and and as the on to observe, an question of these to a to their relationship with Whanganui or a of its over the ontological that a settler might that a settler might to the in the that most on the Māori relationship with Red and which the of life associated with with a of and that the of Māori sovereignty. of is by the in the An of brings to the and of the or national Māori are also the of the that the and of the where the opening is The of the as itself the of the an of Whanganui as a living understanding is both by its water by the of fresh water to Māori of A how the word for as the source of and also of of as an te of of the ontology of living water through The to a the presence of the that Te Atihaunui a As has a is a of when the come as In this the asserts the ongoing life of the of hydropower and the colonial of in the river’s At the same time, human in the who live in with but a Māori presence is rendered through the in a of a that In Whanganui’s silence both that hydropower has the river’s prior and relations and also expression to a that settler claims to the river could further these Whanganui River one that river is in the of a in when Whanganui’s than been and that and the river into as well as over into the of where it with water and of to river expression in by of literary The of of which is titled with the of a but one of these to the impact of the on of settler and by a in a Whanganui diverse are united in terms through of and offer a further from the other with its own of and The we on of was to as the voice of Whanganui the ancestral in opposition to a settler to its living Yet we have come to question this as and the as a more on whose voice is capable of being and by settler even a river’s personality is recognized within a western legal The of a understanding of as a the its and the that they could offer straightforward and In the first describes how the of their and to the of The of on the as by the of and this to or the but to by and for and for the that also emphasize the to as their that their are with the river’s they can be as river the river they is one of modern water as they are to Whanganui as a from themselves in … wider environmental, social, and cultural describe the river’s as and and a of rivers with and The basis from which these river is both material and cultural, as for rivers in Aotearoa/New Zealand have been from through and and as well as through the concept of reflecting their understanding of the river, settler the river and the to their of the waters to human or nonhuman On the one hand, the of the that has their describes in this of The river’s and histories in the be On the other hand, the of and an between all of settler the of to their to acknowledge or with the river. the human the river to a of as your these not that they live in the of a river, their of coexistence. of being to we against a of existing in which is not central or even as a distinct person. The to question about how nonhuman can themselves into we but that all the that we to be thinking about we being by other In and their relationships with the river. Yet what it to a and how and is as a the same as the river earlier in the describes its with and thinking the human who as of their that the voice by settler in the of If is as a nonhuman in their and as to the their own could into on of the in the settler of Aotearoa/New Zealand from to the more thinking of their what with are of of the as “a to the or into The in sense of and the presence of settler to in the it further that the source of as a is not an ontology of or of living waters but of a settler of water as a from its contexts As a of rivers and what is not but their voice offers a of with what is specific and in settler In its of expressive water, against the question of what settler would recognize the of fresh water as or and seek to its by Indigenous Such a question is in t

Identifiants

DOI

10.1093/isle/isaf023

OPENALEX

W4408587964

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Famille documentaire

Doctrine

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article

Entités naturelles mentionnées

Fleuve / rivière · Mer · Paysage

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

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OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaf023
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W4408587964

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