One might downplay the 2017 granting of “personhood status” to the Māori nation’s Whanganui River as a legal sleight of hand rather than true acknowledgment of nature’s ontological standing. After all, when Christopher D. Stone first argued that environmental entities might have “legal personality,” he still entitled his 1974 book Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. Objects! Objects are not what Eurowesterners equate with living beings, much less real persons. How then is “personhood” the right approach for a multispecies constitutional effort hoping to move beyond rights-based configurations and into multispecies imaginaries that amplify entanglement? Could personhood language really help beyond-human entities become participants in planetary care and keeping? Would such governance through the analytic of personhood actually be symbiotic? These valid concerns miss the profound spiritual claims inherent in post-colonial and indigenous narrations of River Whanganui’s personhood, which must be enfolded into any future multispecies governance that invokes environmental personhood.
Writing amidst the Standing Rock Pipeline protests, Mojave poet Natalie Diaz sheds light on the growing menagerie of rivers with personhood status. She invokes her people’s Creator-given namesake, Aha Makav. Translated to English, it means “the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land.” Diaz’s blending of biological personhood with spiritual personhood symbiotically tangles ours and the river’s fates. “If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing? If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?”
Diaz’s words portray an Indigenous eco-spirituality that guides the meaning of “person,” human or otherwise. A Creator brings life and names. In Indigenous wisdom, personhood and kinship connect, featuring interdependency that stems not just from entwined fate but also shared origin. Different creatures, from wombats, to slime molds, to philosophers, all emanate from the Creator. All creatures, having the same source, are kindred. For the Māori people of River Whanganui, such kinship conveys personhood, suggesting that even human personhood is contingent upon this filial entwinement.
Eurowestern thought has defined personhood differently. The ancestry of “person” goes back to the Greek term prosopon, signifying the mask or role worn by human actors in a play. Roman scholar Cicero writing in the first century BCE used the correlating Latin word persona to describe state officials. Roman law followed suit. Half a millennium later, the Roman Senator Boethius defined persona as “an individual substance of a rational nature,” pertaining only to humans and angels. From this point forward, “human” and “person” were fairly interchangeable, with “person” taking on all the force of gendered, racial, species-related, binaries, and exclusions of colonial history.
It would be hard to extract these colonial notions of personhood from Christian anthropocentrism, superiority and anti-animality, wherein what makes a human/person so is whatever they have that animals do not. By and large, a morally upright, colonial person was a white, straight, male, whose nature was rooted not in creaturehood but in his reflection of the Divine. To the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, the human and the animal were distinguished by his desire to know the Divine. Political philosopher John Locke later ascribed personhood to that which "can conceive itself as itself." French philosopher René Descartes further winnowed personhood to a mind/body dualism. Other binaries that emerged as a result of these philosophies (human/animal, man/woman, spirit/matter, culture/nature) have spun out from such hubristic human claims to exceptionality and near divinity. They have funded centuries of abuse of all things deemed sub-human, including those humans Eurowestern logic intentionally excluded.
It’s fair to ask whether these exclusions are baked so deeply into the history of personhood that merely expanding the tent to include rivers or mycelial networks could ever be sufficiently disruptive. For if personhood is redefined with those who’ve failed to qualify, would not the concept cease to mean anything at all? The concept of personhood is part of the colonial and industrial matrix that has brought Earth to the brink.
Ironically one of Christianity’s earliest uses of personhood was not in describing the human but rather in attempting to understand what was beyond knowing—a God claiming to be one god but in three persons, or in Greek, three hypostases. Here, person simply meant one existence or instance of a nature, some kind of being. Aquinas would later explain that “person” didn’t mean human or divine or animal but simply “a vague individual thing” that shared a nature with everything else. This way, the Christian god could have one nature but in three persons or beings. Those who are anxious about personhood’s precious significance being lost as it is shared with others might do well to recall that personhood was hardly humanity’s to begin with. In this divine trinitarian use, a person is not defined over and against an animal. Personhood is not defined at all, and precisely so that it might be shared.
Bucking Descartes and Boethieus, modern theologian John Zizioulas insists, personhood “cannot be conceived in itself as a static entity, but only as it relates to.… Personhood implies the ‘openness of being.” The extent of our bodies is unknowable. Diaz agrees, “The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement.” Environmental personhood begs the humility and respect to discover humans are in the presence of ones who are made and unmade with us, bearing the dignities and vulnerabilities of kinship. Environmental personhood doesn’t namely extend rights, it extends being and solidarity as it embraces a truth indigenous communities have long lived. That, in Rarámuri Enrique Salmón’s words, “Life in any environment is viable only when humans view their surroundings as kin; that their mutual roles are essential for their survival.” The world, as packed with persons, bids humans come, be with, and attend to the vibrance in which we live, move, and have our being.
