Cooperatives of the world
The New Zealand river that achieved human rights thanks to Māori cooperativism
There is an ancestral maxim that the iwi tribes of the Whanganui River basin in New Zealand have repeated for generations: “Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au” (I am the river and the river is me). To Western thinking, this sentence might sound like a beautiful poetic metaphor. However, for the local indigenous community, it describes a legal, spiritual, and daily reality: the health of the people and that of the water form the same inseparable organism.
