Te Puna Rangahau o Te Wai Ariki - Waipapa Taumata Rau

22/08/2026

22/08/2026

03/08/2026

Meet Raffaele Sindoni, a Yale PhD candidate who moved to Whanganui to investigate what nearly a decade of legal personhood has meant for Te Awa o Whanganui and its people.

On paper, says Raffaele, granting legal personhood to a river appears to profoundly challenge colonial-capitalist understandings of land as property, water as resource, and humans and nature as separate. But, he points out, there’s a caveat.

“Rights of nature frameworks still operate within and engage with the very Western legal systems they seek to challenge. This poses an important question: how are Indigenous worldviews being translated into forms that the state recognises, and how does such a translation affect centuries of embedded legal and political Western colonial power structures?

“My research sits at this fault line. The Te Awa Tupua Act is an important entry point into scholarly and political inquiries across the world concerned with the expropriation of land, the objectification of water, climate change, and, of course, decolonisation and Indigenous sovereignty…”

Read more here: https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2026/07/22/what-happens-after-a-river-becomes-a-legal-person-.html

24/07/2026

Yale University research is the latest sign of the continuing international interest in Te Awa Tupua nearly a decade after the landmark law.

10/07/2026

How native plants are strengthening Northland’s vulnerable dunes.

06/07/2026

This coming week in Geneva, Switzerland, the 19th session of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) begins.

This event is in partnership with theInternational Institute for Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Policy. The Institute is a collaborative initiative between the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, the University of Auckland, Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the University of British Columbia, and the DoCIP Indigenous Peoples' Centre for Documentation, Research and Information.

Through this partnership, the summer programme includes an intensive immersion programme providing an overview and analysis of the major questions in Indigenous affairs and their emergence. The Institute has an interdisciplinary approach and incorporates lectures and workshops on the most recent and innovative academic research and policy debates on Indigenous Peoples’ issues. This programme brings together discussions with United Nations officials, Indigenous Peoples’ rights leaders, students, and practitioners to engage with international Indigenous rights advocacy at the United Nations. We have global experts on the rights of Indigenous peoples teaching into the programme, covering topics from self-determination to business and human rights to climate change.

Auckland Law School offers a scholarship for a student to attend this event, this year being Byron Stewart-Leatau.

05/07/2026