Explained | Why this New Zealand mountain is now recognised as a person by law

New Zealand on Thursday passed a law that granted one its mountains the staus of a legal person, bestowing upon it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.

According to a report by the Associated Press, Mount Taranaki, now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Maori name, was granted personhood, joining a river and a stretch of sacred land, which had previously received this staus.

Standing at 2,518 meters (8,261 feet), the mountain is located on New Zealand's North Island and is a dormant volcano covered in snow.

Passed unanimously by the New Zealand parliament, the change of status is in recognition of the mountain's theft from the Maori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonized, fulfilling the government's agreement with the Indigenous people to redress the harms perpetrated against their land during the rule of the colonisers.

According to the law, Taranaki Maunga is now granted all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person, with a name — Te Kahui Tupua — which means "living and indivisible whole."

Four members from local Maori iwi, or tribes, and four members appointed by the country's Conservation Minister will form an entity that will act as the mountain's face and voice. The mountain's legal rights are meant to uphold its health and wellbeing.

“The mountain has long been an honoured ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place," Paul Goldsmith, the lawmaker responsible for the settlements between the government and Maori tribes, told Parliament in a speech on Thursday, according to AP.

Mountain was named Egmont previously by explorer Captain James Cook, during the colonizers period in the country. Taken away from the Maori for rebelling against the British crown, “...traditional Maori practices associated with the mountain were banned while tourism was promoted,” Goldsmith said.

Folowing Maori protest movements in the 1970s and '80s, the Indigenous people's culture was slowly recognised, and the government began redressing the injustice done to the tribes. This redressal process included the recent Treaty of Waitangi.

“Today, Taranaki, our maunga, our maunga tupuna, is released from the shackles, the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate," said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, a co-leader of the political party Te Pati Maori and a descendant of the Taranaki tribes, using a phrase that means ancestral mountain, according to AP.

“We grew up knowing there was nothing anyone could do to make us any less connected,” she added.