“Te Awa Tupua is a legal person": The Framing of Nature in the Whanganui River Deed of Settlement

The present article aims to address the framing of nature as a means to encourage positive attitudes towards the environment. Accordingly, it draws on ecolinguistics and Positive Discourse Analysis to examine Ruruku Whakatupua – the Whanganui River Deed of Settlement (2014), which represented the first step towards the recognition of legal personhood to Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River). The legal framing of the river promotes a favourable understanding of the environment, as it assigns nature an agentive role and allows the allocation of responsibility for harmful actions against it. Through a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach, the study suggests that relational clauses typical of legal discourse may stress identity and entanglement between humans and nonhumans, which is further supported by the metaphor TE AWA TUPUA IS A PERSON activated by the framing. Ultimately, the conventional CONTAINER scheme conceptualising nature as an external object is displaced to uphold a vision of interconnection and respect.