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Recent Developments, Indigenous Cultural/Intellectual Property
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| The International Journal of Cultural Property is now regularly carrying articles on indigenous IPR and is actively seeking innovative submissions on this and related topics. For additional information, browse the website of the International Cultural Property Society. |
| Additional publications by Michael F. Brown, Williams College, on indigenous rights and heritage protection, most available for full-text download. |
 RSS feed for Who Owns Native Culture? website. |
| Some blogs to track if you're interested in indigenous IPR, heritage protection, and questions of open access: SavageMinds, the Museum Anthropology blog, Material World, Culture Matters, and Kimberly Christen's Long Road. You might also want to check the web page of a project at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada, called "Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage." Likewise the website of the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. |
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News, Stories, Documents |
The UCLA-based legal scholar Angela R. Riley has published a compelling op-ed piece in the NY Times about the impact of the Twilight vampire novels and films on the Quileute Nation of Washington State. The Quileute name is being used on tee-shirts and other Twilight-related products without producing significant financial benefits for the Quileute people themselves. 8 February 2010.
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| Another one to check out: Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Univ. of Chicago Press), 2010. An interview with Johns was posted at Inside Higher Ed on February 3, 2010. |
| Important new book: Eduardo M. Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal , Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership (Yale University Press), late 2009. |
| A nice piece appeared in the L.A. Times about how the documentary work of the eccentric anthropologist John Peabody Harrington (1884-1961) has proved to be an invaluable resource for Chumash people as they try to conserve and reconstruct their traditional culture. Includes video clip. 31 January 2010. |
| Sacred-Sites International has added a blog to its website. Also worth a look is the terrific website of the Sacred Land Film Project. 29 January 2010. |
| From the Wall Street Journal, an opinion piece by Eric Felten on the dust-up over the Russian skaters' homage to Aboriginal culture. Felten, although hardly a defender of the poor taste shown by Domnina and Shabalin, makes a qualified case for cosmopolitanism and against the notion that "a style, an idiom, or a cultural aesthetic is the province of a race or ethnicity." 29 January 2010. |
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Russian skaters Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin are accused of "cultural theft" and offending Aboriginal culture after presentation of Aboriginal-themed skating routine at St. Petersburg several weeks ago. The Herald Sun, Australia, 21 January 2010. [Added 22 January: Salon.com is carrying an article on the same controversy.] |
| Kim Christen's blog Long Road calls attention to two interesting stories. The first is a program called the Hopi Music Repatriation Project. The second is about the decision by Starbucks to stop sale of a line of coffee mugs imprinted with designs from Mexican prehistory that had apparently been reproduced without securing permission of the Mexican government, which holds the relevant copyrights. Related to the latter story, see also the Telegraph (Belfast, N. Ireland). |
| From Indian Country Today: Rick Kearns, "Bolivia launches traditional medicines programs," 14 January 2010. |
| From IP Watch: David Cronin, "UN report: Indigenous rights ignored In global IP policy," 14 January 2010. |
| Interesting paper on biopiracy, although you may need a login: Daniel F. Robinson, "Locating biopiracy: Geographically and culturally situated knowledges," Environment and Planning A, Vol. 42, 2010. |
| The latest on the proposed Cape Cod wind turbine project and its alleged spiritual harm, from the New York Times, 5 January 2010. |
| Here's a podcast of a 2008 interview of indigenous anthropologist Marge Bruchac (U Conn-Avery Point) about the special challenges of NAGPRA repatriation cases in New England. The interviewer is J. Kehaulani Kauanui (Wesleyan U.). Posted here 4 January 2010. |
| Several articles on indigenous IP have been published in the Texas Wesleyan Law Review, Vol. 15, 2009. Tracking them is a challenge because the journal's website isn't up-to-date. Some pre-prints: John T. Cross, "Justifying property rights in Native American traditional knowledge"; Daniel Austin Green, "Indigenous intellect: Problems of calling knowledge property and assigning it rights"; Danielle M. Conway, "Indigenizing intellectual property law: Customary law, legal pluralism, and the protection of indigenous peoples' rights, identity, and resources." 4 January 2010. |
| From NGO Pulse: "Indigenous cultural entrepreneurship in South Africa," December 2009. If you want a comprehensive, nuanced analysis of how (indigenous) culture has become a commodity in S. Africa and everywhere else, beg, borrow, or steal a copy of John L. and Jean Comaroff's Ethnicity, Inc. (University of Chicago Press, 2009). |
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| "Maori artists set on reclaiming Toi Iho Trademark," Tangatawhenua.com, 14 December 2009. |
| Not to be missed: Michael Goldsmith (University of Waikato), "Who owns native nature? Discourses of rights to land, culture, and knowledge in New Zealand." Int. Journ. of Cultural Property 16 (2009): 325-339. This is just one article in a special issue of the IJCP entitled "Pacific discourses about cultural heritage and its protection," edited by Toon van Meijl. |
| Kaitlin Mara, "WIPO traditional knowledge negotiators dodging roadblocks," IPWatch.org, 10 December 2009. |
| Just out and important: Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. |
| From the New York Times: "In twist, tribe fights for college nickname," 8 December 2009. Story about efforts of some Sioux to protect the "Fighting Sioux" nickname of the University of North Dakota. Update on this story, 12/19/2009. |
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Ben Macintyre, "Where the Rosetta belongs can't be set in stone," 10 December 2009, The Times (London). The case for non-repatriation of the Rosetta Stone. |
| Kenya's leading paper publishes an op-ed piece questioning the wisdom of trying to protect "traditional culture" through specific constitutional provisions: Rasna Warah, "Culture can't be captured in any constitution," Daily Nation, 29 November 2009. |
| The UN continues to struggle over the legal status of traditional knowledge: "UN Biodiversity negotiators to work from single text on access, benefits," IP Watch, 24 November 2009. |
| More on the Sedona sweat-lodge deaths: "Council resolution condemns exploiters of sweat lodges," Indian Country Today, 23 November 2009. |
| Don't miss the terrific New Yorker piece, "The Taste Makers," by Raffi Khatchadourian. The author describes the work of professional "flavorists" who search the world for distinctive flavors that can be added to new beverages and foods, sometimes generating tens of millions of dollars in revenues. The author isn't interested in the bioprospecting/biopiracy implications of this industrial activity, but I'm sure that someone will be. 23 November 2009. |
| For the Arizona Republic, John Faherty reports on the challenges of studying and occasionally protecting ancient cultural remains on a remote Arizona bombing range, 22 November 2009. |
| "Indonesia pushes for treaty against theft of genetic resources and culture." Jakarta Post, 19 November 2009. |
| John Tierney, "A case in antiquities for 'finders keepers'," New York Times, 16 November 2009. |
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| "Bears, bombs and popcorn: Some considerations when mining other cultures for source materials," by Judith Berman. This short essay didn't get on my radar screen when it was published about three years ago. Definitely worth a look today. 16 November 2009. |
| The blog Don't Pay to Pray describes a lawsuit launched by the Lakota Nation against James Arthur Ray for his use of the sweat lodge ceremony in his New Age workshops--including the recent Sedona disaster in which several participants lost their lives. The post includes PDFs of various statements and relevant documents. 14 November 2009. |
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Wampanoags resist wind turbine project: "The Wampanoag or "The People of the First Light" ... are asking the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to help them classify Nantucket Sound as traditional cultural property, a designation that could permanently becalm Cape Wind's project. Part of their bid to convert the Sound into sacred ground stems from the Wampanoag belief that the turbine generators' monopoles would be pounded 80 to 100 feet into the bottom in a Native American burial ground dating back to when the Wampanoag lived on what was then land." Update, 8 November: This emerging cultural property dispute has inspired a tsunami of articles and op-ed pieces in New England. Among them a skeptical editorial from the Boston Globe, as well as articles in Indian Country Today, the Associated Press, and letters to the New York Times. |
| Lawrence Lessig calls for a "copyright revolution." Inside Higher Education, 6 November 2009. |
| From the Wall Street Journal: "Cheap jewelry imports vex artisans in Southwest." Article about the flood of fake American Indian jewelry imported from abroad and its impact on Southwestern Indian artisans. November 2, 2009. |
Many more archived stories about recent developments in Indigenous IP, 2003-2006, 2007- |
