Lauren Jacquemard’s story of Taranaki Maunga, a mountain ‘at the bottom of the world’, counters Eurocentric narratives and charts complex relationships between colonial power, Indigenous rights and the ‘natural’ world. Sacred to Māori but captured in power and legal systems that objectify nature and people, it now possesses legal personhood.
Museum of the Anthropocene: Taranaki Maunga
E rere kau mai te Āwanui, Mai i te
Kāhui maunga ki Tangaroa. Kō au te
Āwa, kō te Āwa kō au.
“The great river flows from the
mountains to the sea.
I am the river, the river is me.”
By definition the Anthropocene is a global phenomenon. In actuality, people and places on the periphery of the world are often relegated to the sidelines of a Eurocentric narrative. By telling the story of a mountain at the bottom of the world, I would like to demonstrate the breadth of the Anthropocene across space and time.
Sitting as an isolated peak on the North Island of New Zealand, Taranaki Maunga was highly sacred to Māori iwi (tribes) of this region. In 1865, it was seized by the Crown as retribution for conflict with Māori iwi defending their ancestral land. This is a sequence of events that has transpired across the globe since the exploration of the ‘New World’, the imposing of colonial power and legal systems to the detriment of the environment and people.
Forest was burned and cleared, as agriculture and farming became established on the arable, volcanic soil. However, an almost perfect circle surrounding the mountain was designated to be a protected national park. This created an abrupt division between the human world and the natural world that also worked to sever a cultural connection between Māori people and their mountain. Environment served purpose.
Taranaki Maunga was thus conquered and commodified. Photographs, cartographs and artworks were used to promote the continued migration of Europeans to this ‘exotic’ land. Tourism, recreation and conservation became widely established. The mountain became an object.
Colonialism, environmental destruction, erasure of indigenous geographies and commodification all make up the history of this natural wonder. But it is now a landmark of the Rights of Nature debate.
For 150 years, the Crown ‘owned’ this mountain. A significant political shift occurred in recent years, as Taranaki Maunga was granted the legal rights of a person. This law asserts that the mountain has value unto itself, beyond the value that humans can derive from it. It aligns with Māori perspective, whereby Taranaki Maunga is an ancestor; a living being with mana (integrity) in its own right and also gives Māori the right to ‘speak’ for the mountain.
Recognition of the mountain as an entity bearing the same rights as a human being complicates a distinction between the human and natural world; the living and the non-living. Colonialism and subsequent exploitation of natural resources defines the beginning of the Anthropocene, but significant shifts can always occur in the future. This mountain charts the complex relationship between colonial power, indigenous rights and the ‘natural’ world. This is an entanglement at the heart of what we define as the Anthropocene and highlights the ways humans have shaped, altered and built the environment we see today.
Taranaki Maunga speaks to both the past and future of the Anthropocene and human entanglement with nature. Are we lords, guardians, stewards, or something else entirely?
Notes
Taranaki Maunga was contributed by Lauren Jacquemard.
Lauren says: “Through this module, I have explored how the global processes that have shaped the Anthropocene can be understood and felt more deeply through a local context. This knowledge is something I will carry forward and build upon when studying a Master of Environmental Science at the University of Auckland this year.”