Hi! I’m John Green and welcome to Crash Course Religions. So, this is the Whanganui River.
To the Māori people of New Zealand, it’s not just water. It’s a living being connected to themselves. An ancestor.
European colonizers didn’t see it that way, of course. Over a hundred years, they and their descendants would deplete the river’s fish, pollute it with farm waste and sewage, and legally cut it to pieces, which is hardly how you’d treat something you respect. But from the day the Europeans set foot on the shores of the Whanganui, the Māori were ready for a fight—one that would last over a century and become the longest-running legal battle ever seen in New Zealand.
They were going to try to convince the world of what they already knew—that the Whanganui River is a person. [THEME MUSIC] Before Europeans arrived, there was no formal separation between the sacred and the secular, or the physical and the spiritual, among the Māori. They—and many Indigenous peoples—don’t have a direct equivalent for the English word “Religion.
” In fact, the closest concept to religion even today is a word introduced by European missionaries, “whakapono,” which means “faith” or “trust. ” Likewise, English has no direct equivalent to Te Awa Tupua, a Māori term that describes the whole Whanganui river system’s physical and spiritual essence as a being with its own interests. So as we’ve already discussed, beginning in the 15th century, a relatively small set of European countries took their own religion on the road, colonizing, displacing, and subjugating Indigenous people.
As colonizers encountered local traditions and cultures, they dismissed and suppressed beliefs that didn’t fit their own Christianity-shaped ideas of what counted as “religion,” even as traditions and beliefs in those indigenous communities shaped European religion. In the 19th century, several countries justified the forced assimilation and Christian conversion of Native peoples based on the so-called “inferiority” of their native traditions. Like, in the U.
S. , for example, this happened for decades—despite the First Amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. ” The point is, the word “religion” has long reflected a particularly Western and Christian way of thinking about the world and the self.
So if we were to ask, “Are Māori beliefs part of a religion? ” some would argue it’s what the Buddhists call “a question wrongly put. ” It’s like asking your Grandma if she was a crunchy mom, a silky mom, or a scrunchie mom—like sure, you could ask her to retrofit her life into those invented internet categories, but that would be… weird, although my grandma was the very paragon of a five martini and send the kids out to play mom.
Sorry, Nanni. I don’t like to disrespect the ancestors, but, well… you know. Anyway, this is why even though some Indigenous peoples embrace “religion” as a label, others reject it as a distortion of their own traditions, which in many cases predate the invention of the word “religion.
” Today, many people prefer the term Indigenous religious traditions over just “religion. ” These traditions are diverse and dynamic, constantly changing with the particulars of a time and place. Still, there are a few common themes across many Indigenous cultures’ traditions, which can help us understand the Māori concept of Te Awa Tupua, and how a river can be viewed as a person.
First, many Indigenous religious traditions recognize a diversity of gods and spirits, embedded in their creation stories, and rituals, and the order of society. Some recognize spirits of place, nature, and animals; others shapeshifters, tricksters, and ancestors. Some traditions are polytheistic, meaning they recognize many gods, while others take a pantheistic perspective, where everything is a manifestation of the divine.
Even sweet potatoes. There’s no all-inclusive belief here; every Indigenous community has its own traditions and customs which can vary from location to location and even person to person. But there is a popular theme: which is that humans aren’t the only spiritual beings bopping around the universe.
Which can start to make us think differently about rivers… and a lot of other things. Like, in Mesoamerican traditions, there’s the nagual: a guardian spirit linked to a person from birth, usually taking the shape of an animal. Often, whatever happens to a person’s nagual—good or bad—is believed to shape the course of that person’s life.
And in many Indigenous African traditions, diverse spirits are viewed as active forces that, like, do things in the world. Like, take Haitian Vodou—with roots tracing back to West and Central Africa, and communities of enslaved people forced to work on Caribbean plantations starting in the 16th century. Vodou recognizes tons of different spirits called lwa.
Spirits of water, love, trees, death. Lwa are the spirits that people can have a personal relationship with—unlike the higher god that people can’t talk to directly. Lwa are so accessible, in fact, that venerating them with their favorite foods and dances can bring the honor of being possessed by a lwa, which doesn’t have the negative connotations you might expect.
Vodou practitioners liken the experience to becoming a horse the lwa is riding. Then there’s the importance of kinship: those bonds we form with each other that bring structure and order to our social and spiritual lives. To many people in the Kanyen'kehà:ka, or Mohawk, tradition, kinship is seen as something you do, not just a status you have.
You take care of your kin, your kin takes care of you. And that kinship extends to the place you live and everything that lives there with you. And in many Indigenous African traditions, that sense of reciprocity extends to ancestor spirits, who are thought to occupy a separate realm from the living but are still linked to us.
When ancestor spirits are honored with offerings, those spirits can help good things come to their living kin. And some Indigenous Hawaiians contend that everything—humans, animals, land, sky—shares a kinship. Ancestor spirits known as ‘aumakua are viewed as guardians for their descendants, often taking the form of an animal such as a lizard, owl, eel, or shark.
It’s thought that kinship is a bond even the separation of death can’t break. The living can call upon their ancestors through prayer, and ancestors can make their presence known in dreams. Finally, many Indigenous traditions hold strong connections to the landscapes they call home, and that’s gonna take us back to the river story, I promise.
Native American communities often use the phrase “since time immemorial” to convey just how deep their ties to ancestral lands go. And that’s a very different relationship to place—and to time, really—than me saying, “I grew up in Orlando. ” Orlando didn’t even exist two hundred years ago, and with any luck may not exist two hundred years from now.
Just kidding, Orlando. I love you. Kinda.
So this connection since time immemorial is why Indigenous peoples sometimes speak of not being from a place, but of a place. The Māori, with whom we began this episode, describe themselves as “people of the land,” tangata whenua. That word “whenua” means “land” but also “placenta,” the organ that nourishes a fetus before birth.
So when the Māori call themselves “tengata whenua,” they’re invoking a bond to the land that’s like a mother and child. At the same time, the Māori—and many other Indigenous people—often find themselves displaced from the ancestral lands that they’re connected to. Many also have traditional practices restricted by governing nation-states that don’t always recognize their beliefs as legitimately “religious,” much less legal.
Like, consider the ceremonial use of peyote—a type of cactus that contains mescaline, a psychedelic chemical. For centuries, Indigenous peoples in what’s now Mexico and the southwestern United States used peyote in their traditional medicine and ceremonies. By the end of the 19th century, dozens of Great Plains tribes had adopted peyote into their own traditional practices.
And a movement called the Native American Church formed around an ethic of kinship and taking peyote as a sacrament. But federal and state governments, churches, and even some tribal groups didn’t consider peyote ceremonies “religious. ” Decades of legal battles ensued.
And it wasn’t until 1994, with an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, that previous laws were overruled, granting legal protection to Native peoples’ ceremonial use of peyote. So, Indigenous people have had to fight to gain recognition for their practices and perspectives, working within the confines of the Western concept of “religion. ” But at the same time, they’ve often drawn upon their unique perspectives to find creative solutions to legal challenges.
And that brings us back to the Whanganui River. In the Māori traditional view, the river has a life force inextricable from their own lives, which is often expressed through the saying: “I am the river, and the river is me. ” When the river is disrespected, like in the ways the Europeans treated it, the people are, too.
Not only did the colonizers disrespect the land, but they took control of it through violence and some extraordinarily rotten deals. Like, an area the size of Manhattan was traded for some umbrellas, muskets, and musical instruments. For over a century, the Māori fought for their view of the river to be recognized.
At first, they worked within the construct of ownership as prescribed by New Zealand law, citing an 1840 treaty that hadn’t been honored. But after decades of deadlock, the Māori shifted their strategy. In 2008, they began to push for a different legal construct, one that actually reflected how they view the Whanganui River: as a single, indivisible being—a person.
And if you think a river can’t be a person, I would encourage you to think again. The US Supreme Court found that corporations can be people. There have been other species than humans who were people.
In other religious traditions, gods are people, or giants are people. So, they knew it could be done. And in 2017, their efforts paid off.
New Zealand granted The Whanganui River legal personhood, recognizing it as Te Awa Tupua—a living being with rights of its own. Now there are limits to this; like, nobody can sue the river. But personhood means the river is now legally recognized as a connected whole, with appointed guardians who can speak on its behalf.
And even though this is a new perspective for the government of New Zealand, for the Māori, it represents the end of a long struggle to have their belief recognized. So, is this Māori belief a religion? Well… of course, that’s tricky.
As we’ve seen, Indigenous religious traditions are dynamic and fluid. Sometimes they've fought for their traditions to be recognized by aligning their practices with the Western construct of “religion. ” But their own languages don’t always have a word for “religion”—and forcing these diverse traditions into a single box leaves a lot to be desired.
I would argue that rather than asking communities to squeeze their belief systems into one definition of religion, we should instead expand our definition of religion to include the many ways humans have of grappling with kinship, interpersonal responsibility, and the sacred. So, perhaps the question we should ask is, “Are these beliefs as real, as important, as any religion—regardless of whether they carry the label? ” And for that I do have a simple answer: Yes.
Next time, we’ll explore the complexities of Judaism. I’ll see you then. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions which was filmed here at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana and was made with the help of all these nice people.
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