Freshwater is essential to the health and wellbeing of both human and ecological communities. Around the world, including within Aotearoa New Zealand (henceforth Aotearoa), there are increasing imbalances between freshwater demand and supplies, with notable declines in the quality and quantity of water, and issues to do with who can and should be able to access and use freshwater and freshwater biota (Bradford et al. 2016; de Leeuw 2017; Deitz and Meehan 2019; Julian et al. 2017; Larned et al. 2016; Mohai 2018; National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd 2014; Wutich 2009). Many commentators term these issues, contestations and conflicts as a water crisis, with the abilities of populations to access and use freshwater (both now and in the future) viewed by some as one of the most ubiquitous social, political, cultural, economic and ecological issues that humanity faces in the twenty-first century (Moggridge 2018; Paerregaard and Andersen 2019). In Aotearoa, which provides the case study for this book, the freshwater systems are affected by ongoing degradation directly connected to human activities over the last two centuries (Knight 2016, 2019; Larned et al. 2016). Scientists suggest that the most pressing problems include heavy metals, nutrient contamination (such as e coli. and nitrogen from effluent), loss of biodiversity, over-extraction (connected to the expansion of irrigated agriculture), flooding, and invasive species (Ballantine and Davies-Colley 2014; Biggs et al. 1990; Bollen 2015; Boulton et al. 1997; Duncan 2017; Hughes and Quinn 2014; McDowell et al. 2016; Wilcock et al. 1999). Such problems present ongoing threats to human health and wellbeing and those of other life forms within Aotearoa. Recently scholars have begun to question the efficacy of established management approaches, the extent to which current land-use practices are to blame and whether the continued environmental decline in our waterways is inevitable (Knight 2016; Salmond et al. 2014; Te Aho 2015). The continued degradation of freshwater systems under conventional management approaches, moreover, necessitates a rethinking of how freshwater systems are governed, managed, and restored.

In this book, we explore the origins of the freshwater crisis (a manifestation of multiple environmental injustices) within a single freshwater system: the Waipā River (Te Waipā Awa). The headwaters of the Waipā River are located in the Rangitoto Range (the present-day the township Te Kuiti lies to the east) within Te Rohe Pōtae district (also known as the King Country) (Cunningham 2014). The river flows through hill country where it is joined by various tributaries (Otamaroa, Okurawhango, Tunawaea and Waimahora Streams). The Mangapu, Mangawhero, and Mangaokewa streams join the Waipā River at Otorohanga. The Waipa River’s downstream journey passes the mountain (maunga) of Pirongia, where it is joined by tributaries including Maunguika, Ngakoaohia, and Turitea. The largest tributary Puniu River meets the Waipā River soon after, just south of the township of Te Awamutu; followed on by the streams Mangapiko and Mangaotama, which drain from two lakes (Lake Ngāroto and Lake Mangakawere). The journey of the Waipā River ends at the township of Ngāruawāhia where the Waipā River joins with the Waikato River (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1
figure 1

Map showing location of the Waipā River

Full size image

Te Waipā o Awa is now, in 2020, one of the most degraded freshwater systems in Aotearoa. Yet, as we argue through this book, the waters of the Waipā were not always unhealthy, nor was its degradation an inevitable consequence of the establishment of Aotearoa as a developed democratic (settler-colonial) nation-state. Instead, we demonstrate how the deterioration of the Te Waipā o Awa was a product of incremental actions taken over the last two centuries since colonisation commenced. The British and later settler-colonial authorities directed these actions, aligned interest groups, and individuals who sought to deliberately remake the existing landscapes and waterscapes that were created and maintained by Māori whanau (family, extended family), hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) over generations. The actions for radical changes were directed at the production of new waterscapes and landscapes that replicated (and in some instances improved upon) those of Britain (discussed in more depth in Chaps. 3 and 4). The results of these changes over the last one hundred and fifty plus years are that the Waipā River and its tributaries flow through environments that have been radically changed by anthropogenic activities.

The relationship between people and rivers reflects the complicated and complex dynamics of human-environment interactions whereby humans and nonhumans derive numerous benefits from rivers (including life-supporting functions, food, navigation, cultural, and spiritual values, to name a few) and rivers are affected by human activities and modifications to rivers and landscapes (Kelly 2017). The scale and intensity of human impacts on the biophysical world since the Industrial Revolution have led scholars to claim we are now amid a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the main drivers of environmental change (Crutzen 2002). River management and governance in the Anthropocene entails, therefore, finding ways to navigate the multiple, cumulative, and legacy effects associated with alterations to freshwater systems, landscape modifications, and intensive land uses. In settler societies, contemporary freshwater management and governance must also confront the consequences of colonisation on biophysical systems as well as Indigenous values, knowledges and ways of life. Indeed, Indigenous peoples around the world are actively engaging in river governance and management to protect their relationships to freshwater systems and assert their rights (Wilson 2014).

The term “Anthropocene” was invented by an atmospheric chemist in 2000 and defined a new geological epoch that followed the Holocene wherein human beings acted as geological agents that altered the global Earth systems (Steffen et al. 2011b, 2015). The whole purpose of identifying the Anthropocene is to define the end of one geological epoch and the start of a new one. The Anthropocene also indicates a period of time now or in the near future where radical climate destabilisation causes drastic environmental changes, and there is no capacity to return to past conditions (as research into tipping points emphasises) (Steffen et al. 2011b). The Working Group on the Anthropocene, which met in August 2016, recommended the mid-twentieth century as the preferred boundary as there were so many measurable changes from this time onwards. Steffen et al. (2015) and many other researchers term this period as the “great acceleration” wherein changes became globally observable and written into the geologic strata (geological markers include mass extinctions, carbon dioxide levels, and abundant use of petrochemicals including plastics) (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 81). Scientists are continuing to debate what indicators should be used to mark out and measure the Anthropocene using scientific language, levels of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), and other indicators of change within the geological records. Some scholars propose different start dates and measurements of radical environmental changes (Castree 2014; Steffen et al. 2011a, b). Countless environmental issues are tied to the Anthropocene, including biodiversity loss, pollution of land and water bodies, toxic waste and contamination, and the ongoing and worsening impacts of climate change.

While geologists are still debating the ‘ifs’ and ‘when’ the Anthropocene began (indeed some dispute the Anthropocene as an epoch), the term is widely embraced outside geological discussions. The Anthropocene—the reverberating concept that is promoting a wealth of new transdisciplinary research—is proving to be a particular intellectual meeting point for scholars from across disciplinary divides (Bashford 2013, p. 346). Scholars from across the traditional disciplinary divides of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences are all wrestling with the implications of the Anthropocene. Historian Alison Bashford writes of her puzzlement over why humanities and social science scholars continue to largely cede “the Anthropocene to climate scientists” and approach the concept as “as if it were not their territory” (Bashford 2013, p. 346). She argues that the Anthropocene does not refer to the distant past or even prehistory (to so-called “deep time”), but the last two hundred or so years (Hulme 2011; Mahony and Hulme 2018). It is the modern era (intractably linked to the Industrial Revolution, global capitalism, European colonialism). Thus, the Anthropocene is a perfectly recognisable topic of study for historians and social scientists to investigate. It is neither an issue of the ancient past or the distant future; it is a problem in and of modernity. While climate change involves biophysical phenomena, it is not a matter of geological time itself. The Anthropocene, therefore, lies firmly within the comfort zone of scholars whose investigations focus on settler-colonialism, Indigenous studies, and environmental justice.

We are not scientists and therefore cannot evaluate the question of start dates in terms of scientific accuracy or merit. However, following on from the works of scholars including Davis and Todd (2017), we suggest that the dating of the Anthropocene to mid-twentieth century overlooks the critical value of examining the concept and expanding it beyond its “current Eurocentric framing” (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 763). Scholars, both Indigenous (Todd and Whyte) and non-Indigenous (Lewis, Maslin and Davis), argue that the beginning of the Anthropocene is inextricably bound to the commencement of European colonialism (first the Americas and later elsewhere) and its compatriot, settler-colonialism (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 766). Geographers Lewis and Maslin were the first to propose the start date of 1610 AD as it was the period where large exchanges of plants, animals, and infectious diseases (Columbian Exchange) between Europe and the Americas (Lewis and Maslin 2015). These ecological exchanges radically re-shaped the landscapes (and waterscapes) of both landmasses. Such changes can be found in the biomass accumulated in the geomorphological and geological layers on both continents. The second reason for the 1610 start date, as Davis and Todd aptly write, “which is a much more chilling indictment against the horrifying realities of colonialism, is the drop in carbon dioxide levels that correspond to the genocide of the peoples of the Americas and the subsequent re-growth of forests and other plants” (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 766). In 1492, the Americas was home to between 54 to 61 million Indigenous peoples, Lewis and Maslin observe, by 1650 this number was reduced to just 6 million. In making this argument, Lewis and Maslin acknowledge that the consequences move beyond the strict confines of geology and stratigraphic measurables into the social and political concerns, particularly:

unequal power relationships different groups of people, economic growth, the impacts of globalised trade, and our current reliance on fossil fuels. The onward effects of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas also highlight the long-term and large-scale example of human actions unleashing processes that are difficult to predict or manage. (Lewis and Maslin 2015, p. 177)

Here, they acknowledge that such a framing of the Anthropocene affects how human activities on the environment are conceptualised, and more broadly human-ecological-geological relationships; this framing also explicitly recognises that the Anthropocene unleashes processes (often characterised by highly differential and unequitable power relations) that are difficult to predict and manage.

Such evidence, which records the worst offences of Euro-Western colonialism against Indigenous bodies, nations, biota, and landscapes, are only one type of knowledge of radical human-induced environmental changes (on tracer of the Anthropocene). As the works of Métis sociologist Zoe Todd and Anishinaabek philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte remind us, Indigenous stories, histories, and knowledge(s) also provide a rich body of evidence about how the colonial invasion, violence, violations, oppression of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples (in the name of the land, labour, resources, trade, and power) resulted in radical challenges to social and ecological systems. Evidence does not, typically, include the “fleshy stories” that elders tell younger family members about how once (before colonisation, hydro-electric dams, introduced species, pollution, and commercial fisheries) there was an abundance of fish that swam in the waterways. Nor do they tell stories of the fish that were caught, cooked, preserved and feed to family, friends, visitors and kin members. As Todd writes, the evidence used to record the Anthropocene precludes “the flash of a school of minnows in the clear prairie lakes I intimately knew as a child … the succulent white fish my stepdad caught from us from the Red Deer River when I was growing up” (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 767). Such lessons (evidence of human-freshwater-biological relationships) have been:

deeply erased from dominant (non-Indigenous) public discourse in Alberta [Canada] and I had not recognised the implicit ways fish were woven into my own life as more than food. This is the thing about colonisation: it tries to erase the relationships and reciprocal duties we share across boundaries, across stories, across species, across space, and it inserts new logics, new principles, and new ideologies in their place. (Todd 2016c)

But these interwoven and ongoing relationships between human and more-than-human beings and the cumulative consequences of radical social and environmental changes are precisely the risks we face in the Anthropocene, particularly in the context of freshwater crises. The Anthropocene exacerbates the existing socio-economic inequities, patterns of political marginalisation and inequitable power relations that sought to divide Indigenous peoples from their lands and waters, fish and other taonga (the word for treasured possessions in Māori), ancestors and wāhi tapu (sacred sites), all of which are interwoven with their identities, values, laws, governance structures, and ways of knowing. The stories, then, that we collectively tell about the beginnings of the Anthropocene epoch connect how we conceptualise the relations that we maintain with our waters (be it rivers, springs, wetlands, springs, lakes, seas and oceans) both now and in the future. Put simply, the naming of the Anthropocene era and its start date has implications for not just how we know the world (or plural worlds), but also this understanding holds real world (material) consequences (consequences that impact human and more-than-human bodies, waters, and lands) (Davis and Todd 2017).

It is critical, then, that we consider the appropriateness of the concept of the Anthropocene and its potential role in challenging or naturalising settler-colonial histories. If the Anthropocene began in 1610 (the Americas), 1800 (Australia), or even 1840 (Aotearoa), European colonialism is inextricably connected to all dates (indeed, it was not universally experienced in place at the same time, in the same ways). The Anthropocene is, however, the histories of ecological imperialism, of violence, of slavery, and coal (Bashford 2013, p. 347). Thus, the commencement of the Anthropocene should not be told merely as the history of the Industrial Revolution and coal, energy transitions, and the emergence of petro-carbon economies, instead it was (and is) the histories of European colonisation, the exploitation of resources were not just confined to the use of fossil fuels but also of forests, lands, waters, biota, and peoples (specifically non-Europeans).

The past—the beginning of the Anthropocene—was and is “not a foreign country at all; it is homeland” that Indigenous, colonial, and (post)colonial states continue to be embodied, to contest, and seek out better ways of living with others (be they human and more-than-human actors) (Bashford 2013, p. 347). Since settler colonisation violently and physically uprooted Indigenous peoples, whānau (the word for extended family in Māori), altered landscapes and waterscapes, and human/more-than-human relations, Indigenous peoples might be considered amongst the victims or survivors of the Anthropocene. Scholars argue that achieving justice (social, environmental, water, climate) for and by Indigenous peoples necessitates concentrating how environmental changes are intertwined with (and is anticipated on) settler-colonial practices (Davis and Todd 2017; Erickson 2020; Todd 2016a, b; Whyte et al. 2019; Zahara 2017). We suggest that decolonisation rests at the fore of rethinking freshwater governance and management, specifically in the context of settler states. Decolonisation requires us not only to rethink the temporalities of the Anthropocene (when the Anthropocene began and for whom?) but also querying and contesting the knowledge(s), values, and practices that underpin dominant ways of governing and managing rivers.

First Nation philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte, of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, argues that the Anthropocene should be seen as part of the deliberate interventions and endorsements of colonial processes which refuse to recognise specific place-based and reciprocal relations between humans, lands, waters, and more-than-human beings. In settler-colonial societies, the drainage of wetlands, the damming and straightening of rivers, the clearance of forests, and the importation of exotic biota remade the Indigenous worlds of the Americas, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand into a vision of a new displaced (supposedly improved on) version of Europe, radically altering the ecosystems (Bacon 2019; Parsons and Nalau 2016). As elsewhere, in Aotearoa settler-colonialism was (and is) characterised by process of terraforming. As Whyte argues, “industrial settler campaigns erase what makes a place ecologically unique in terms of human and nonhuman relations, the ecological history of a place, and the sharing of the environment by different human societies” (Whyte 2016a, p. 8). It involved the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous communities, and peoples being forced to adapt to radically different environments, climatic conditions, ecosystems, biota, and socio-economic conditions. These processes of coupled social and ecological transformations can be understood as a “preview of what it is like to live under the conditions of the Anthropocene” (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 771). Thus, as Whyte, Davis and Todd make clear, the contemporary environmental crises that are defined through the term the Anthropocene should be interpreted as a perpetuation of, as opposed to a definitive division from, previous periods that commenced with colonialism and encompass advanced capitalism.

From this perspective, the Anthropocene, and the uneven and highly inequitable impacts of climate change on the poor and marginalised populations around the globe, can be comprehended not just as a catastrophic and unfortunate accident, but instead as a deliberate consequence of the extension of colonial logics (Whyte 2016a, p. 12). The interventions and violence of colonialism (against humans, more-than-humans, lands, and waters) wretched apart, disrupted and re-modelled the landscapes, waterscapes, and seascapes in the places that we currently dwell in were hit with successive tidal waves or seismic shocks.

Settler-Colonialism

Settler-colonialism consists of structures of domination employed to exploit Indigenous people and other populations. As with different formulations of colonialism, settler-colonialism is interwoven with and frequently overlaps with other types of domination (including capitalist exploitation, chattel slavery, and imperialism) (Coombes 2006; Veracini 2010). Settler-colonialism is, as the work of scholars including Veracini demonstrates (Veracini 2010), distinct from other forms of colonialism in that settler aspirations are to supplant Indigenous peoples as a means to take their land and resources, rather than primarily the control to labour and resources (Coombes 2006; Hiller 2017; Veracini 2010). Settlers, scholars argue, are considered distinct from colonialists and immigrants (Pulido 2017a; Veracini 2010).

What makes settler-colonial societies distinct from other colonial societies is their aspirations to supplant indigenous peoples as a means to take their land and resources, rather than primarily the control to labour and resources (Arvin et al. 2013; Coombes 2006; Veracini 2013). Settlers are a unique category of migrant made through acts of conquest, not merely the process of migrating somewhere (Mamdani 2001, 2015). Settlers are founders and contributors to new political orders; they carry (and seek to assert) their sovereignty with them, unlike migrants who are in some regards appellants that encounter an already established political order (Veracini 2010). Settler-colonialism, Veracini (2010) observes, are collectives that claim both a “specific sovereign charge and a regenerative capacity”. Settlers, unlike other migrants, “remove” themselves to a new location to “establish a better polity, either by setting up an ideal social body or by constituting an exemplary model of social organisation” (Veracini 2010). What makes settler-colonial societies distinct from other colonial societies is their aspirations to supplant indigenous peoples as a means to take their land and resources, rather than primarily the control to labour and resources (Arvin et al. 2013; Coombes 2006; Veracini 2013). Settlers are a unique category of migrant, Mahmood Mamdani argues, made through acts of conquest, not merely the process of migrating somewhere (Mamdani 2001, 2015). Settlers are, Veracini observes, founders and contributors to new political orders; they carry (and seek to assert) their sovereignty with them, unlike migrants who are in some regards appellants that encounter an already established political order (Veracini 2010). Settler-colonialism, Veracini (2010) observes, are collectives that claim both a “specific sovereign charge and a regenerative capacity”. Settlers, unlike other migrants, “remove” themselves to a new location to “establish a better polity, either by setting up an ideal social body or by constituting an exemplary model of social organisation” (Veracini 2010).

Settler-colonialism is defined as a “situation” and is not therefore restricted to any specific group, place, or time period. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen’s theoretical definition of settler-colonialism emphasises “institutionalised settler privilege (especially as it relates to land allocation practices) and a binary of settler-native structures (especially as it relates to settler capacity to dominant government” (Elkins and Pedersen 2005, p. 18). Settler-colonialism forms are part of global history and are not limited to white or Anglo-European settler societies, or to settler minorities who occupied colonial places; however, for this chapter we refer to European settler-colonialism. Veracani suggests interpreting the settler-colonial phenomenon as a “Lacanian (imaginary-symbolic-real)”. Firstly, “there is an imaginary spectacle, an ordered community working hard, and living peacefully”. Secondly, “there is the symbolic and ideological backdrop: a moral and regenerative world that supposedly epitomise settler traditions” (Veracini 2010, p. 75) (the ‘outback’ of Australia, the ‘wilderness’ or ‘frontier’ of the US and Canada, and the ‘backblocks’ of Aotearoa). Lastly, “there is the real: expanding capitalist order associated with the need to resettle a growing number of people”, and the creation and incorporation of new products and markets. Such narratives of settlement as improving and producing productive landscapes functioned to legitimise the arrival (invasion) and continued residence (occupation) by settlers, as well as delegitimise Māori claims (of prior settlement, and continuity of place-attachments, knowledge, land tenure and usage practices, and the broader rights to resources and governance). Indeed, it is through the narrative of ‘closer settlement’, economic progress, and ecological ‘improvement’ (of land, rivers, and biota) that the settler-colonial subject always seeks to call itself into being (and justify its presence). Such narratives of legitimisation, found in other settler societies including Canada and Australia, rely on a kind of historylessness or historical forgetting. Accordingly, settler-colonial gaze was one that interpreted the landscapes and waterscapes of the Waipā through the lens of new beginnings and imagined (modernising, advancing, and always improving) communities under construction, but yet to fully come into being (Veracini 2007, 271–272).

Key facets of settler-colonialism are the structures of domination designed “deliberately to exploit one or more groups of people for the sake of one or more groups of people’s benefits and aspirations” (Whyte et al. 2019, p. 325). This domination includes legislation and institutions as well as numerous other types of “behavioural complicity in the maintenance of power and privilege” (Whyte et al. 2019, p. 325). Settler-colonial societies are premised on narrating settlement as inherently peaceful processes (with acts of violence only sporadic and unavoidable) and the erasure of Indigenous spaces, bodies, and ways of being. Central to this erasure of colonial violence and Indigenous dispossession are what Pulido terms “transition narratives”, discourses that assist in making the past more palatable. Settler-colonialism, therefore, requires that we acknowledge the “whitewashing associated with hegemonic representations of colonisation” and re-centre attention to Indigenous peoples’ experiences (Pulido 2017a, p. 2).

In this book, we focus on one settler-colonial state—Aotearoa New Zealand—and one Indigenous people—Māori; however, the key ideas are relevant to both settler states and other nations (including so-called post-colonial) in which the cultures, values, and wellbeing of the original inhabitants (the first nations) were displaced by those of more recent and numerous colonial settlers. Aotearoa New Zealand is a location in which, despite the language of post-colonialism, the decolonising project is (from the perspective of Indigenous people) just beginning. Situated within settler-colonial structures, laws, river governance and management approaches, social norms and practices are processes and assumptions that allow settlers to retain domination over the Indigenous peoples of those lands and waters.

A wealth of scholars, activists, and writers outline how settler-colonialism around the world is a form of violence that interrupts human connections with their environments. From a Māori worldview, based on one’s genealogical relationships (whakapapa) to all living and non-living things within their rohe (traditional lands and waters), violent actions are ones that disrupt or diminish the life force (mauri) of human and more-than-human beings, which includes the whenua (land), awa (rivers), taniwha (supernatural beings that live in water bodies), fish and other biotas. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang similarly observe, writing about the Canadian context, that “the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 5). Indeed we argue, adding our voices to the countless other Indigenous scholars and non-Indigenous allies, that appraisals of the history of colonial interactions with the whenua, wai, and awa reveal a history of violence wherein land, water, plants, animals, and minerals are accessed, but not learnt from nor treated as part of the whole (Bacon 2019; Tuck and Yang 2012; Watts 2013, p. 26; Whyte 2018). The settler-colonial state-supported projects to drain wetlands and the creation of resource-intensive industries (most notably pastoral agriculture) with devastating impacts that amounted to environmental violence. J.M. Bacon suggests that “colonial ecological violence” was (is) a process of disrupting Indigenous social relationships (Bacon 2019, p. 59). We investigate one component of how settler-colonialism carried out environmental injustices through acts that interrupted and destroyed Indigenous peoples connections with their waterscapes. The dimension focuses on how specific legislation, policies, institutional arrangements and actions (that all formed part of the process of settler-colonialism) worked strategically to undermine Māori resilience. A wealth of scholars, activists, and writers outline how settler-colonialism around the world is a form of violence that interrupts human connections with their environments. From a Māori worldview, based on one’s genealogical relationships (whakapapa) to all living and non-living things within their rohe, violent actions are ones that disrupt or diminish the life force (mauri) of human and more-than-human beings, which includes the whenua (land), awa (rivers), taniwha (supernatural beings that live in water bodies), fish and other biotas. Scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang similarly observe, in the Canadian context, that “the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 5). Indeed we argue, adding our voices to the countless other Indigenous scholars and non-Indigenous allies, that appraises of the history of colonial interactions with the whenua (land), wai (water), and awa (river) reveal a history of violence wherein land, water, plants, animals, and minerals are accessed, but not learnt from nor also treated as part of the whole (Bacon 2019; Tuck and Yang 2012; Watts 2013, p. 26; Whyte 2018). The settler-colonial state-supported projects to drain wetlands and the creation of resource-intensive industries (most notably pastoral agriculture) produced devastating impacts that amounted to environmental violence. J.M. Bacon suggests that “colonial ecological violence” was (is) a process of disrupting Indigenous social relationships (Bacon 2019, p. 59). We investigate one component of how settler-colonialism carried out environmental injustices through acts that interrupted and destroyed Indigenous peoples connections with their waterscapes. The dimension focuses on how specific legislation, policies, institutional arrangements and actions (that all formed part of the process of settler-colonialism) worked strategically to undermine Māori resilience.

In this book, we highlight examples of how Māori experiences of settler-colonialism resulted in a plurality of environmental injustices, which were tied to the Anthropocene (Curley 2019; Winter 2019). Rather than an extraordinary one-off environmental disaster—an oil spill, nuclear disaster—we demonstrate that environmental injustices are often creeping and cumulative; a form of slow violence against bodies (be they human or ecological, physical or metaphysical) (Bacon 2019; Davies 2019; Marino 2017). Accordingly, as we later demonstrate in Chaps. 5 and 6, actions to address these environmental injustices are likewise multiple, ongoing, and heterogeneous activities that require (in many instances) a fundamental reconfiguring on the ontological and epistemological privileging of Western knowledge, values, and practices (challenging the supremacy of settler-colonialism and whiteness in socio-natures). We argue that Māori environmental (in)justices (which are not restricted to just whenua/land nor wai/water) cannot be disconnected from the historical (and ongoing) injustices of settler-colonialism. Only as countless other examples from Indigenous peoples around the globe similarly demonstrate, the past continues to shape the present and future (Ahmad 2019; Proulx and Crane 2020; Whyte 2016b, 2017).

Indigenous Environmental Justice

Throughout the book, we seek to explore and extend discussions of environmental justice (and what constitutes environmental injustice) beyond its framings within Western liberal worldviews, philosophies, and legal systems to include indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Geographers and other scholars concerned with Indigenous struggles about sovereignty over natural resources and decision-making about environmental risks highlight that “justice for one group may mean injustice for another occupying a different political-geographical position” (Ishiyama 2002, p. 5). Earlier examinations of environmental justice, such as the work of Schlosberg and Ishiyama, seek to clarify processes of defining local struggles for autonomy that are grounded in different Indigenous communities’ self-determination in political and economic decision-making in interrelated and paradoxical ways (Ishiyama 2002; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Whyte 2016b). The majority of these studies, however, concentrated on the North American context and did not consider the role of ontological and epistemological differences between Indigenous and Western cultures in accounts of justice/injustice (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2018; Rodríguez and Inturias 2018). We argue that there is an additional layer of complexity to thinking about Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ) due to the constant tensions between Indigenous and Western (settler/European/White) worldviews and the ways in which humans and more-than-human relate to one another. Throughout this book, we seek to explore and extend discussions of environmental justice (and what constitutes environmental injustice) beyond its framings within Western liberal worldviews, philosophies, and legal systems to include indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Geographers and other scholars concerned with indigenous struggles about sovereignty over natural resources and decision-making about environmental risks highlight that “justice for one group may mean injustice for another occupying a different political-geographical position” (Ishiyama 2002, p. 5). Earlier examinations of environmental justice, such as the work of Schlosberg and Ishiyama, seek to clarify processes of defining local struggles for autonomy that are grounded in different Indigenous communities’ self-determination in political and economic decision-making in interrelated and paradoxical ways (Ishiyama 2002; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Whyte 2016b). The majority of these studies, however, concentrated on the North American context and did not consider the role of ontological and epistemological differences between Indigenous and Western cultures in accounts of justice/injustice (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2018; Rodríguez and Inturias 2018). We argue that there is an additional layer of complexity to thinking about IEJ due to the constant tensions between Indigenous and Western (settler/European/White) worldviews and the ways in which humans and more-than-human relate to one another.

The second goal of this book is to bridge the divisions between environmental justice, Indigenous history and geography, and decolonial scholarship (Agyeman et al. 2016; Álvarez and Coolsaet 2018; Daigle 2016; Nirmal 2016; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Whyte 2016b). Environmental justice scholars recommend moving beyond the simplistic mapping of environmental harms (distributive justice) to ask questions about the political, economic, and social dimensions of why and how unjust landscapes manifest and persist across spatial and temporal scales (Barnhill-Dilling et al. 2020; Boone and Buckley 2017; Keeling and Sandlos 2009; Mohai and Saha 2015; Pulido 2017b; Schlosberg 2003). With their focus on the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous peoples, the works of scholars from across the critical social sciences and humanities (drawing of the lenses of settler-colonialism and decolonial theory) provide essential contributions to the study of environmental justice (Adamson 2017; McGregor 2018a; Ulloa 2017; Whyte 2016a, 2017; Winter 2018, 2019). In particular, examining the histories of settler-colonialism and Indigenous agency assists us in seeing more clearly the cumulative impacts of uneven power dynamics and the consequences in terms of how environmental injustices occur in particular locations.

Environmental justice was developed first by scholars interested in the distribution of environmental harms and goods (distributive-based justice) in the context of minority communities in the United States of America (Bullard 2018; Mitchell et al. 1999; Pellow 2004; Pulido and Peña 1998). The language used by environmental justice borrowed from the civil rights movement. Later environmental justice scholarship extends theories to procedural- and recognition-based accounts of environmental justice. In particular, Schlosberg and Carruthers point out that environmental justice (a sub-discipline, a theory, and a social movement) also includes Indigenous peoples’ struggles for self-determination, resource sovereignty, and recognition of their cultural identities (Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010). However, increasing numbers of Indigenous scholars critique the mainstream environmental justice literature for rearticulating colonial discourses. Māori philosopher Christine Winter argues that the underlying assumptions of environmental justice remain underpinned by Western liberal justice theories that perpetuate the settler-colonial project, which is designed (amongst other things) “to suppress and destroy Indigenous peoples.” She challenges the universality of justice theorising and seeks to demonstrate the need to seek input from Indigenous ontologies to “fashion more robust imaginings” of intergenerational Indigenous environmental justice to respond to the crises facing the globe (Winter 2018, p. 13). Along similar lines, Whyte writes that “for Indigenous peoples, environmental justice is rooted in one society’s interference with and erasure of another society’s way of experiencing the world as infused with responsibilities” and their collective continuance (Whyte 2016b, p. 159). Whyte continues, “environmental injustice is rooted in how social institutions are structured and operationalised in ways that favour powerful and privileged populations” (Whyte 2016b, p. 159). Along similar lines, Chicano geographer Laura Pulido observes that, often, policies are a vital avenue by which environmental injustices are facilitated by the state (Pulido 1996, 2017a, b).

In the context of indigenous environmental justice, a plethora of scholars identifies the relationships between colonialism and injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples (Coombes 2013; McGregor 2018a; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Watson 2014; Winter 2018). While it is critical to observe the diversity of colonialism, the existence of “colonial situations” persists in supposedly post-colonial countries, and how colonialism continues to be acted on and evolve (particularly in settler-colonial contexts such as Aotearoa, Canada, the US and Australia) (Ahmad 2019; Álvarez and Coolsaet 2018; Balaton-Chrimes and Stead 2017; Bargh 2018; Bell 2018; Maldonado-Torres 2016; McGregor 2018b). In the North American context, Kyle Whyte highlights the close connections between current ecological crises and the socio-cultural, political, and economic interventions (violence, dispossession, genocide) made by colonial societies against Indigenous nations. With the ongoing challenges of settler-colonialism in settler-states, the worsening impacts of environmental degradation and climate change on communities around the globe, and the failure of settler-states to adequately fulfil their responsibilities to address the root causes of environmental injustices facing Indigenous communities, Indigenous voices within environmental justice theorising and activism are being more critical (as demonstrated most recently in the Dakota Pipeline Protest) (Davies 2019; Proulx and Crane 2020; Whyte 2017). Sioux Nation people’s protests (supported by other Indigenous peoples as well as non-Indigenous allies) against the construction of the Dakota oil pipeline across their lands and waters (located in the US Midwest) highlight how one event or action of the settler-colonial state against an Indigenous people is not a singular environmental injustice but part of the ongoing process (Gilio-Whitaker 2019; LeQuesne 2019; Proulx and Crane 2020; Whyte 2017). The Sioux Nation protest was not merely a response to building a pipeline across their land, but also a protest about the litany of social and environmental injustices that did and are still occurring as part of settler colonisation. Likewise, as we will highlight in the rest of this book, the histories and present-day lived realities of Māori environmental injustices are interwoven with multiple stories and experiences of losses and damages generated by settler-colonialism. However, we demonstrate how since the commencement of colonisation, Māori (individually and as part of wider collectives iwi/hapū/whanau, and pan-tribal alliances) have consistently protested, resisted, and challenged settler-colonial intrusions into their rohe, and also sought ways to adapt to colonial disruptions, mitigate damage to their livelihoods and environments, and take advantage of new circumstances. Thus, this book is about the loss and destruction of Indigenous landscapes and waterscapes, environmental degradation and racism, but also of Māori agency, resistance, and new more hopeful (ontologically and legally pluralistic) freshwater geographies.

One of the key aims of this book is to fill some of the theoretical gaps that exist within environmental justice and water justice scholarship and explore decolonial spaces for indigenous ontology and epistemology in the context of freshwater governance and management. Environmental justice and water justice, climate justice and social justice are closely connected and overlapping concepts (LeQuesne 2019; Mascarenhas 2007; Mohai 2018; Stensrud 2016). However, most scholars do not consider the intersections between different (in)justices nor how indigenous worldviews, centred on holism, kincentrism and relationality, can challenge and expand how scholars, activists, policy-makers and freshwater management practitioners discuss and attempt to take action to address polluted waterways. In the disciplinary fields of freshwater governance and management, most researchers elect to employ the term water justice (Jackson 2018; McGregor 2015; Robison et al. 2018). However, in this chapter (and the rest of the book) we deliberately chose to frame our discussion as environmental justice not water justice because water (from Māori worldview) is not separate from the environment (taiao). In keeping with our decolonising agenda, we promote mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledges) ways of seeing wai as part of a holistic system in which whenua, awa, repo (wetlands), moana (sea), and tangata whenua (people of the land) are all connected through relationships.

In this book, we also seek to draw on the diverse and frequently disparate works of literature on Indigenous geographies, environmental justice, Indigenous histories, and political ecology to provide a more nuanced and multidimensional account of the histories, politics, and geographies of the freshwater governance and management in Aotearoa. Instead of just describing and situating the distribution of environmental risks, we examine the historical, social, political, and economic processes that gave rise to environmental injustices for the Māori iwi Ngāti Maniapoto, whose rohe included the upper and middle reaches of the Waipā River and its environs. Our research demonstrates that rather than singular environmental injustice, the environmental degradation of the Waipā River was and is evidence of the multiple layers of environmental injustices experienced by not only Māori and now—to some extent—all peoples who live in Waipā catchment. The root cause of these injustices rests with settler colonisation but also in the unchecked capitalistic drive for endless growth (through the accumulation of resources and agricultural expansion) and Western ontologies’ unhealthy division of people from nature (what Ghosh calls the “Great Derangement”) (Ghosh 2018; Nightingale et al. 2019). These environmental injustices, which lasso the ecological and social (what some scholars dub “socio-natures”) together in tightly bound coils, include the historical loss of land and other resources by iwi and by extension the economic basis of their livelihoods; the environmental degradation of their rohe; actions (or inactions) by governments to deny them the capacities to participate in decision-making processes meaningfully; and the settler-colonial state (be it local government or central government) actions to exclude, suppress and fail to acknowledge Māori cultural identities, values, and knowledge.

Verse

Verse Whakatauki (Proverb) Hutia te rito o te harakeke Kei whea te tauranga o te mako e ko? He aha te mea nui o tenei ao? Maku e ki atu He tangata, He tangata, He tangata. If you remove the heart of the flax Where will the bellbird then rest? If you should ask me What is the main thing in this world? I will say to you It is people; it is people, it is people.

At the heart of this book, then, is the Waipā River and indigenous Māori iwi and hapū who connect to the river and consider it to be an ancestor and members of their whānau (extended family). The iwi and hapū of the Waipā River all affiliate to the Tainui waka (canoe) and include Waikato/Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Hikairo and Ngāti Mahanga (Muru-Lanning 2016; Waitangi Tribunal 2018). The upper and middle reaches of the Waipā River (from the mountains north of Te Kuiti to Puniu River near Te Awamutu) is the domain of Ngāti Maniapoto, whose iwi was one of several that developed from the original Pacific migrants from the Tainui waka. Many of Ngāti Maniapoto’s hapū intermingled with the hapū of Waikato-Tainui (also descended from the Tainui waka) in the middle reaches of the Waipā River (where the forest Te Nehenehenui met the southern floodplains of the Waipā and Waikato Rivers), and at the north-west coastline (at the harbours of Whāingaroa and Kāwhia). Hapū associated with Ngāti Maniapoto and Waikato-Tainui also intermingled with those of Ngāti Raukawa (whose rohe lies to the north-east). All three iwi shared common whakapapa (genealogical or ancestral) links to the Tainui waka. Iwi groups who were not descended from Tainui waka also held varying degrees of overlapping influence with Ngāti Maniapoto and Waikato-Tainui within parts of their traditional lands and waters. To the south-east of Te Rohe Pōtae lie the territories occupied by Ngāti Tūwharetoa. Southwards, around the present-day township of Taumarunui, were people who affiliated to hapū of the upper Whanganui River. In the south-west, in the Mōkau River catchment, were hapū associated with northern Taranaki. All these different groups of people, however, shared close links in the various territories, with groups possessing customary interests and rights of usage that overlapped. Accordingly, given our geographical focus, we adopted a case study approach for our research.

Case studies are nothing new to scholars of human geography, environmental justice, or river management; case studies use space to analyse particular and complex phenomena located within a real-world context (Yin 2013). However, we chose adopted a case study approach to examine the intricate and interconnected social, cultural, economic, political and environmental implications of radical environmental changes that occurred within river systems of Aotearoa as a consequence of colonisation. We concentrate, in many instances, primarily on the Waipā River and the rohe (traditional lands and waters) of the Māori iwi Ngāti Maniapoto. However, we do draw linkages with other parts of Aotearoa and another iwi. We consciously chose to employ a case study approach because it provided us with the capacity to undertake an in-depth analysis of the complex historical, geographical, political, legislative, and socio-cultural processes that shaped Māori relationships and experiences of more than two centuries of changes within their rohe.

In keeping with the transdisciplinary focus of the research, we employ research methods from human geography, Indigenous and historical studies. Empirical data collection included archival-based research as well as oral histories, semi-structured interviews and participatory observation. The first half of the book is based on empirical data derived from historical archival-based research that augmented with memoirs and oral histories collected by ourselves and other researchers (held in public collections throughout Aotearoa) with people who lived in the Waipā catchment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The use of historical sources, in particular archival collections, is widespread amongst historians, historical geographers and environmental justice scholars (Bolin et al. 2005; Boone and Buckley 2017; Boone and Modarres 1999; Keeling and Sandlos 2009; Pellow 2004; Pulido 1996). As Boone and Buckley (2017, p. 222) observe, historical research approaches, which includes archival-based research as well as oral histories, provide an “important and useful mechanism for understanding the origins, causes, and legacies of present-day environmental injustices, both for the process and the outcome”. The remaining second half of the book employs widely used human geography research methods, including primary data (semi-structured interviews) and secondary data (analysis of legislation, policy, and planning documents), to examine the efforts of iwi, the New Zealand Government (the Crown), and local governments (district and regional councils) to address the freshwater degradation in the Waipā River and other rivers within Aotearoa (See Appendix 1, which includes tables detailing the list of interviewees).

We examine the fluid, liminal and challenging to define places that comprise the historical and contemporary waterscapes of the Waipā—watery landscapes or muddy waterscapes—by eschewing the strict methodological moralising of individual disciplines and instead embrace transdisciplinary approaches. Accordingly, throughout this book, we draw on historical geography, environmental history, Indigenous geography, and global environmental change scholarship to weave together a history of Pākehā (used, in this book, as a reference to New Zealand Europeans) and Māori imaginaries and interactions with wetlands of the Waipā River catchment within Aotearoa.Footnote 1 We collected and analysed a wide range of data including archival records (newspapers, government documents, maps and photographs), interviews (unstructured life histories and semi-structured interviews), and Māori oral traditions including waiata (songs), whakataukī (proverbs) and pepeha (recitations linking people to place), and pakiwaitara (legend or story). In particular, we concentrated on materials focussing on the floodplains of the Waipā River and its tributaries, which formerly included extensive wetlands and now includes the towns of Otorohanga, Te Kuiti, Te Awamutu, Kihikihi, Pirongia, and Ngaruawahia. It is the area where we spent a great deal of time as children and adults, and where two of us (Fisher and Crease) trace their whakapapa to. Through these diverse materials, we can see glimpses of the radical changes in the ways that rivers, wetlands, and lands were understood before and after the settler colonisation arrived (invaded) the area.

Each of the authors of this book has a claim to Māori whakapapa along with other cultural identities and ancestry that have shaped their (our) experiences both personally and professionally. Each has experienced (and continue to experience) the effects of colonisation whether it be in the form of overt racism or exclusion based on racialised assumptions about what knowledge and ways of knowing count, or through the historical loss of land suffered by ancestors in the form of raupatu (confiscation) and dispossession through myriad government policies and settler actions. They are also descended from settlers who arrived in Aotearoa from as early as the 1830s and as recently as the 1980s.

Fisher is of Ngāti Maniapoto (Ngāti Paretekawa) and Waikato-Tainui (Ngāti Mahuta) descent (through her mother) and affiliates to the Waipā River through Mangatoatoa marae on the banks of the Puniu River. Mangatoatoa is the marae to which she feels most closely connected, as this is the marae she has visited the most throughout her life. Mangatoatoa is also the marae at which she first learned about the Treaty settlement process for the Waipā River. As she learned more and became more engaged in discussions about the Waipā, she visited another marae along the river to which she also affiliates (Te Keeti, through her mother’s childhood visits and holidays; Te Kotahitanga through her great-great-grandfather, Tanirau Patea; Tarewaanga through her great-great-great-great grandmother, Taupoki). Her hybrid identity as coloniser/colonised arises through her Pākehā father (English, Scottish, Swedish, French), who was also raised in the King Country (Te Rohe Potae), and her Māori mother (English, Irish) and especially her Irish ancestor, Thomas Power. She travelled to Te Rohe Potae in the 1840s to oversee the development of flour mills and the introduction of colonial agricultural practices.

Born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and a New Zealand father of Māori and Pākehā ancestry, Roa Petra Rodriguez Crease is a hybrid who does not neatly fit into one culture or another. She visibly (through skin colour and bodily features) occupies the middle ground and lives (co-exists) in different worlds. Yet at the same time feels excluded from each world since she is not one or the other, neither looking like a ‘typical Filipino’ (or Māori or Pākehā) and not being able to speak the languages of her mother (Tagalog and Ilocano) or her father’s Māori tūpuna (ancestors ). Her experience is by no means unique but rather one that many people of mixed heritage speak and write about, which highlights how colonisation is a process premised on the subjugation of non-Western identities and the privileging of (whitewashing) European identities (Alcoff 2018; Bell 2009; Bird 1999; Brablec 2020; Connor 2019; King et al. 2018; Wanhalla 2015). Her family histories attest to the diverse manifestations of colonisation, with the Philippines (like Aotearoa) a product of Euro-Western colonisation (first Spanish and then the US), and where historical injustices associated with colonisation continues to mediate how Filipinos live (including with the consequence of environmental degradation associated with capitalist exploitation) (Crease et al. 2019; McKenna 2017; Moran 2015). Like the majority of Māori (84 per cent) Crease grew up in the urban centre (Auckland City) in an environment far removed from the landscapes and waterscapes of the Waipā. Accordingly, her knowledge of her Māori ancestors derived from occasional mentions and visits to whānau living (and who are buried) near the township of Te Awamutu. It was only through researching this book that she learnt not only of her whakapapa to Ngāti Maniapoto and Te Awa o Waipā but also the histories, mātauranga and tikanga (laws) of her tūpuna. The research included in this book, therefore, is the start of a journey for Crease that involves her seeking to decolonise herself and consider how her multiple identities inform how she relates to and seeks to engage with different environments (both in Aotearoa and in the Philippines) to achieve environmental justice.

Like her fellow co-authors, Parsons’ ancestry is a kaleidoscope of different threads from across the globe. Her mother’s ancestors came to Aotearoa from Scotland, the Channel Islands, and Denmark in the 1850s and 1860s. Her father’s ancestors (Lebanese and Jewish) arrived later, at the end of the nineteenth century, fleeing the violence of colonialism and prejudice, and married into Māori whānau living in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland (but originally from Northland iwi Ngāpuhi) whose experiences of colonisation, dispossession, and the marginalisation echoed those of the incomers. Problematically placed into single category by others (sometimes labelled as Pākehā, Lebanese, Māori, White, non-White, disabled, or able-bodied), Parsons (like Crease) recognises that she is not a singular identity but instead occupies an ambiguous in-between-ness. However, the enduring desire to classify individuals into narrow categories is part of the enduring legacies of Western ontologies and epistemologies that attempts to divide the world (and its peoples) into binaries (self/other, nature/culture, civilised/primitive, West/the Rest, white/black, land/water). Indigenous knowledges, in contrast, are holistic and relational ways of thinking that emphasis the connectivity between individuals and collectives, humans and more-than-humans, and health and wellbeing. Thus, while the book initially started as a project to decolonise freshwater management and governance through incorporating Indigenous knowledge, it became far more this as Parsons and the other authors commenced their watery (physical and discursive) journeys along the Waipā River. It became clear that for Parsons, to consider how to decolonise rivers required scholars (herself included) to challenge their assumptions and preconceived notions of rivers, water, and health.

Recalling her childhood spent walking and running through waterlogged fields and swimming in murky waters of its rivers and lakes of the Waikato and Bay Plenty regions, she realised that she was often told by elders (doctors, teachers, professors) that her regular engagement with these muddy blue spaces was not only undesirable but also potentially disease-inducing. Pākehā doctors and nurses informed Parsons (and her family members) that frequent bouts of sickness (bacteria pneumonia, asthma, autoimmune disease) could be traced to the unhealthy environment; not only was her childhood home located too close to a river, it was built on former wetlands, and surrounded by the Waikato air laden with moisture (rain and fog). Even her first-year geography lecturer warned her that bog-dwellers such as herself ended up with autoimmune diseases as a consequence of dampness-inducing negative immunological responses within the bodies. These personal anecdotes can be read on the one hand as evidence of how poorly informed experts who resorted to pseudoscience for explanations rather than acknowledging scientific uncertainty, but on the other hand, highlight how the many water-infused -scapes (aero- water-scapes and land-scapes) of the contemporary Waikato were (and are still) viewed by Pākehā as problematic spaces. Indeed, it seems that the earlier settler-colonial environmental anxieties (outlined in Chap. 3) about the region’s wetlands generating ill-health amongst residents did not merely evaporate following the advent of new knowledge (germ theory) and technologies. Instead, ideas merged, fluxed, and flowed into later generations, which directly and indirectly influence the ways in which individuals and communities perceive and interact with particular blue (or formerly blue) spaces. Accordingly, in this book, wetlands are deliberately woven into discussions of rivers, with attention drawn to the need to reassert the holism of freshwater systems, of kinship, and hauora (health).

The Organisation of the Book

The book is organised into three sections (Parts 1–3) that all emphasise the temporal and spatial connectivity between places, peoples, biota, and other more-than-human actors that comprise the freshwater systems. In particular, the relationships between past, present and future accounts of social and environmental changes are circled and interwoven throughout the book, drawing on Māori understandings of time as a temporal loop and of human-environment relationships as one based on whakapapa. Part One recounts the historical waterscapes of the Waipā River that charts stories of change and loss, adaptation and resilience, and the creation of multiple environmental injustices for Māori iwi and hapū. Part Two charts the emergence of contemporary freshwater co-governance and co-management arrangements in Aotearoa and considers how legal and ontological pluralism can address freshwater degradation and indigenous environmental justice. Lastly, Part Three examines efforts to restore the Waipā River and what freshwater management and restoration mean in the context of changing climate conditions.

In the following chapters, we consider how the shifting social, cultural, political and economic landscapes and waterscapes of the Waipā River were directly linked to the history of local environmental changes in the catchment, and how different generations of people, and different groups of people interacted with and sought to manage the river and its connected ecosystems (Bonnell 2014; Lavau 2011). The consequences of these changes (intended and unintended) and the lessons (in the form of memories and narratives) people took away from their interactions with the river offer essential insights into changing human relationships with environments, and the particular pressures and contingencies at work in Aotearoa. We demonstrate how specific histories of human interactions with freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems in the Waipā River, focusing mainly on the impacts of wetland-drainage, land-use changes, and past management approaches, continue to shape how people perceive and relate to the river in the present-day.