Rivers and Rights

When researching the historical religious significance of rivers, I stumbled on the idea that some rivers in recent cases have actually been given legal status as a living entity.

This brought to mind the (not so distant) past where some humans were not even treated as humans.

The same mindset that allowed people to be owned as property is what drives environmental destruction. When we pollute nature, we're essentially poisoning ourselves—making ownership thinking a form of suicide. The Māori understanding that "I am the river, and the river is me" offers a path beyond the destructive ownership mentality. We do better when we do not dominate others. Our survival depends on moving from ownership thinking to recognizing our fundamental interconnection with all life.

From Owning People to Rivers Having Rights: A Reflection on Sovereignty and Self-Pollution

The Whanganui River represents a remarkable inversion of historical power structures. In 2017, a river in New Zealand was granted full personhood. A natural feature was given the same legal rights that had been systematically denied to many people since we started recording history.

The Architecture of Ownership: Who Belonged to Whom

Women as Property: The Legal Erasure of Half Humanity

In America, the doctrine of coverture legally erased married women from existence for centuries. Under coverture, a married woman was included in her husband's legal identity. In the eyes of the law she did not exist as an individual, but was instead "covered" by her husband. As legal scholar William Blackstone wrote in 1765: "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband."

This meant married women couldn't own property, sign contracts, control their wages, or even make wills. They had no rights to their children, and husbands were assumed to have sexual access (there was no marital rape). Certain aspects of coverture survived as late as the 1960s in some states of the United States, and in 1979, Louisiana became the last of the states of the U.S. to have its Head and Master law struck down.

Even unmarried women faced restrictions. In many societies, women's testimony carried less weight than men's in legal proceedings—echoing biblical and religious traditions that, while often misinterpreted, reflected deeper assumptions about women's reliability and worth as independent agents.

The Caste System: 2,000 Years of Human Untouchability

In India, the caste system created an elaborate hierarchy where more than 160 million people are considered "Untouchable"—people tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them impure, less than human. Beginning around 400 AD, due to the struggle for supremacy between Buddhism and Brahmanism, this system classified people as inherently pure or polluted based purely on birth.

Dalits were excluded from the fourfold varna of the caste hierarchy and were seen as forming a fifth varna—literally outside the social order entirely. Despite India officially abolishing untouchability in 1950, the 2,000-year-old social hierarchy imposed on people by birth still exists in many aspects of life.

European Serfdom: Bound to the Soil

Medieval Europe's feudal system treated serfs as property bound to the land. Medieval serfdom really began with the breakup of the Carolingian Empire around the 10th century, creating a system where serfs could not be bought, sold, or traded individually, though they could, depending on the area, be sold together with land.

The essential additional mark of serfdom was the lack of many of the personal liberties that were held by freedmen. Chief among these was the serf's lack of freedom of movement; he could not permanently leave his holding or his village without his lord's permission. Children born to serfs inherited their status, creating generations of people bound to serve others.

The Holocaust: Scientific Dehumanization

Nazi Germany perfected the art of legal dehumanization with chilling efficiency. Adolf Hitler announced the Nuremberg Laws on September 15, 1935, which only people of "German or kindred blood" could be citizens of Germany.Under the law, Jews in Germany were not citizens but "subjects" of the state.

These laws transformed the definition of Jewish identity from religious to racial, stripping rights systematically and creating the legal framework for genocide. The precision of this dehumanization—defining people by genealogy, removing citizenship, restricting movement and marriage—shows how law can be weaponized to erase human dignity.

Apartheid: Racial Engineering as State Policy

South Africa's apartheid system, lasting from 1948 to 1994, created one of history's most comprehensive systems of racial classification and control. The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified South Africans as Bantu (black Africans), Coloured (those of mixed race), or white; an Asian (Indian and Pakistani) category was later added.

The Group Areas Act of 1950 established residential and business sections in urban areas for each race, and members of other races were barred from living, operating businesses, or owning land in them—which led to forced removals of hundreds of thousands of people. The system was so thorough that it determined where people could live, work, go to school, and even whom they could marry.

Children as Economic Property

Perhaps most disturbing was the treatment of children as their father's economic assets. William Blackstone, an 18th-century English jurist, noted that a child is the property of his father. During the Industrial Revolution, estimates show that over 50% of the workers in some British factories in the early 1800s were under the age of 14.

In the United States, there were over 750,000 children under the age of 15 working in 1870. Children worked in mines, factories, and mills, often in dangerous conditions, with little to no education. It wasn't until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a national minimum wage for the first time that significant federal protections emerged.

The River's Rights: A Mirror to Our Contradictions

Against this historical backdrop, the Whanganui River's legal personhood takes on profound significance. The river received the rights that humans had been systematically denied: legal standing, representation, protection from exploitation, and recognition of inherent worth beyond economic utility.

The Māori saying "I am the river, and the river is me" represents a radically different understanding of relationships—one of interconnection rather than ownership. Where Western legal systems spent centuries defining who could own whom, Māori worldview recognized that we belong to the river as much as it belongs to us.

The Pollution of Self: When Ownership Becomes Suicide

This brings us to perhaps the most important insight: treating anything as merely property to be exploited ultimately becomes a form of self-destruction. When we pollute rivers, we poison our own water. When we degrade the environment, we undermine our own survival. When we dehumanize others, we diminish our own humanity.

The same mindset that allowed people to be treated as property—the belief that some beings exist solely for others' benefit—is what drives us to treat nature as a limitless resource. We are discovering, often too late, that this approach is literally suicidal. Climate change, environmental degradation, and ecological collapse are the inevitable results of ownership thinking applied to natural systems.

Sovereignty as Relationship, Not Domination

True sovereignty—whether human or natural—isn't about the right to dominate or own, but about the right to exist with dignity and integrity. When we recognize the river's rights, we're not just protecting water; we're acknowledging that healthy relationships require recognizing the agency and value of others.

The history of denying personhood to humans reveals the profound damage caused by ownership thinking. Women under coverture, people in caste systems, enslaved individuals, and children in factories were all harmed by being treated as means to others' ends rather than as beings with inherent worth.

When we granted legal rights to the Whanganui River, we took a crucial step toward recognizing that the web of life requires relationships of respect rather than domination. The river's personhood challenges us to see that our wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of the natural world.

The Wisdom of Interconnection

The Māori understanding that "the river is me" offers a path beyond ownership thinking. When we truly understand our interconnection with each other and with the natural world, exploitation becomes impossible because it would be self-harm.

This doesn't mean we can't use natural resources or that all relationships must be identical. It means recognizing that sustainable relationships require acknowledging the inherent worth and agency of others—whether human or more-than-human.

Conclusion: From Property to Partnership

The journey from denying human personhood to granting it to rivers reveals both our capacity for moral blindness and our potential for moral growth. Every system that treated people as property eventually collapsed or was overthrown, often at enormous cost. The environmental crises we face today suggest that treating nature as property will meet the same fate.

The Whanganui River's legal personhood represents more than environmental protection—it represents a fundamental shift toward relationships based on respect rather than domination. As we face the consequences of centuries of ownership thinking, perhaps it's time to listen to what the river has been trying to tell us all along: true health comes not from owning others, but from recognizing our profound interconnection with all life.

In the end, the river's rights teach us something essential about human rights: both flourish when we understand that sovereignty means the right to exist with dignity, not the right to dominate others. W get to choose: continue the suicidal path of ownership thinking, or embrace the life-giving wisdom of relationship and mutual recognition.