24-4 Intellectual Property Rights: Culture as Commodity

Language as Part of Cultural Heritage

For the M...ori, their language is a part of their taonga "treasures," which is how they refer to their cultural heritage. For Native North Americans, languages are part of the Sovereignty Bundle. These conceptualizations are not only statements of principles, but also have significant legal consequences. For the M...ori, the inclusion of language among the taonga has meant being able to place a...

The UN Millennium World Peace Summit Of Religious And Spiritual Leaders

Xavante shaman Waparia, the first Brazilian Amazonian Indian to stand before a UN podium, performs a ritual of healing so that Summit participants will comprehend the sacred and global role played by indigenous forest dwellers. As a caretaker of what remains of the Amazon forests, Waparia offers a warning. Respect the shaman. Respect indigenous leadership. Demarcate the lands of the Indians and...

Caribou and Community

During my visit to Sheshatshiu and the periphery of the bush-country in July, I stayed with members of the Penashue family. I spent my time listening to the stories of ongoing struggles in Sheshatshiu and the return to the old ways in the country. The bush is the place in which Moshum (Grandfather) beats his drum, tales of the dancing northern lights are recounted, and caribou are processed....

The Traditional Medicine Research Center (TMRC): A Potential Tool for Protecting Traditional and Tribal Medicinal Knowledge in L

It's all been said before. If you are reading this article, then most probably you are familiar with the issue of saving the world's tropical forests. The reasons are manifold: rainforests may contain a future, yet-to-be discovered cure for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, or any of a host of presently incurable diseases; when a stand of rainforest succumbs to the chainsaw or the backhoe, some species...

The Sierra Tarahumara and its Inhabitants

The Sierra Tarahumara, a major component of Mexico's northern Sierra Madre Occidental, is a spectacular region of high sierras and deep canyons. It extends for nearly 1000 kilometers from just south of the United States border through the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango, and Sinaloa. Ranging in altitude from around 200 meters to over 3000 meters, the region is characterized...

The Kuna General Congress and the Statute on Tourism

The Kuna people live on Panama's northeastern Caribbean coast, and their beautiful lands (which they call Kuna Yala, known to others as San Bias) draw many visitors. Their reservation, or comarca, consists of a strip of the mainland and about 400 islands. With sandy beaches, clear water, coral reefs, and sunny skies, Kuna Yala seems like paradise to tourists. According to the Panamanian...

The Commodification Of Art: Ndebele Women in the Stream of Change

History The Ndzundza Ndebele are an Nguni people who originated in the areas of present day Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and the Northern provinces, formerly the Eastern and Northern Transvaal. King Musi, a great diplomat, led his people to settle among the Tswana and Pedi, where they intermarried and engaged in cultural exchange. It is believed that early Ndebele house structure and house-painting...

Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights: Tools That Work

The international policy debate on the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples has advanced from the question of whether indigenous knowledge should be protected to a consideration of how to protect it. Much of the debate arises from issues addressed by different communities, such as: - Human Rights: The resurgence of self-determination by indigenous groups, particularly their quest...

Protecting American Indian Intellectual Property in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the Cow Creek Tribe and Indian Motorcy

Struggles by indigenous peoples to preserve native property interests from within western legal systems, and in particular to assert native intellectual property rights, have been arduous. In recent years, however, these interconnected struggles have achieved significant inroads. The following discussion reviews recent developments in international human rights law and associated intellectual...

My Home Town is A URL in Cyberspace: The Internet, Italian Ethnic Identies & The European Union

My Home Town is a URL in Cyberspace: THE INTERNET, ITALIAN ETHNIC IDENTITIES & THE EUROPEAN UNION While indigenous people everywhere fight fight to defend their identity, their lands and their languages, an interesting parallel phenomenon is taking place in Europe. One of the paradoxical results of the cultural globalization caused by the world market and the Internet, with its instant forms...

Maori View of Their Natural World

Maori origins are traced back to the beginnings of creation -- Te Kore (total darkness). There was no life, only potential. Papatuanuku (the Earth Mother) and Ranginui (the Sky Father) were clasped together, stifling all growth. Their children, desperate for light, devised a plan whereby one of them, Tane Mahuta (Got of the Forests) would separate his parents. Binding to his mother below, he...

Local Empowerment And International Cooperation

During the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. on June 20, 1999, a group of UNESCO delegates, outside observers and Smithsonian staff held meetings to investigate the state of traditional culture and consider the protection of the world's intangible cultural heritage. The conference was part of an evaluation requested by UNESCO on the content and efficacy of the 1989 UNESCO...

Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco

Textiles laden with traditional patterns and symbolic layouts carry rare information among indigenous people of Peru, where writing has never been the prime means of communication among Inca people. As the industrial world impacts even the most remote Andean villages, Nilda Callañaupa, Coordinator of the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC) special project, is working against time to...

Trepans: Translating Indigenous Performative Traditions Into Contemporary Inter-Cultural Performance

Darwin, Australia, September 1999. The town reveals itself for the military staging post it was always destined to be; soldiers from around the world and UN personnel are everywhere. East Timor, only an hour's flight away, is in flames. Indonesian performers from Makassar, South Sulawesi, are worried on account of false reports by the Indonesian media of street violence against Indonesians in...

Toward the Integrated Protection of Language and Knowledge as a Part of Indigenous Peoples' Cultural Heritage

Terralingua: Partnerships for Linguistic and Biological Diversity In June 2000, a unique gathering took place in Chihuahua City, the capital of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, through which runs the famed Sierra Tarahumara, part of Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental. Indigenous Rarámuri (Tarahumara) and ...dami (Tepehuan) residents of the Sierra, as well as local Mestizos, met with a...

Tourism Opens New Doors, Creates New Challenges, for Traditional Healers in Peru

Mateo Arevalo, 43, was born into a family of traditional healers, or curanderos, in the Shipibo community of San Francisco de Yarinacocha in Peru. When he decided to follow in his father's footsteps and learn curandismo, he was taught to prepare a ceremonial drink from a woody vine scientists call Banisteriopsis caapi and curanderos call "ayahuasca," a Quechua word meaning "vine of the soul." He...

The Waitangi Tribunal and the Maori Claim to their Cultural and Intellectual Heritage Rights Property

Over the past two decades or so, the Western intellectual property rights (IPR) legal system has increasingly found itself on a collision course with the cultural and intellectual heritage rights system of indigenous and traditional peoples the world over. The two systems have inherent philosophical conflicts. The IPR system is concerned with private economic rights whilst those of indigenous...

Lessons from Bioprospecting in India and Nigeria

The Goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), introduced in Rio de Janeiro during the 1992 Earth Summit, are (1) the conservation of biological diversity, (2) the sustainable use of its components, and (3) the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of its commercial use. Ratification of the CBD by 177 nations has led most commercial users of bioresources to comply...

Is Delgamuukw the same as Gayanerakowa? Understanding Reconciliation's Preconditions: A review of: Delgamuukw

In December 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada issued the landmark Delgamuukw Decision on Native land entitlements -- a progressive (some would say activist) decision that in many ways parallels the Australian High Court's Mabo Decision regarding Australian Aboriginal property rights. The ground-breaking ruling for the Git...an and Wet'suwet'en(1) of British Columbia was that aboriginal title was...

Intellectual Property Responsibilities

In the Fulani village of Bainjong in Cameroon, a calf afflicted by an infectious disease is treated with a preparation that begins with the harvesting of certain mistletoe leaves; ethnoveterinarian Ardo Umaruis completes this task early in the morning before speaking to anyone. He pounds the leaves into a dry powder and washes a verse from the Koran, written in Arabic ink on a Koranic board, into...

Intellectual Property Protection For Alaska Native Arts

In many Fourth World contexts, commercial art production, stimulated by global tourism, is one way people have adapted to the economic pressures of a cash economy and the disruption of subsistence lifestyles. Art production's economic importance to indigenous people in the United States has increased over the past decade along with unemployment rates, generating over a billion dollars in gross...

Indigenous Knowledge Rights: Recognizing Alternative WorldviewsIndigenous Knowledge Rights: Recognizing Alternative Worldviews

Whether it's the Maasai of East Africa, the M...ori of New Zealand or the Quechua of the Andes, indigenous and local communities simply do not see the world in the same way that your average scientist, corporate executive, or urban resident does. Many of the differences between the worldviews of indigenous and local communities and those of the rest of the world can be traced back to the writings...

Forest Foragers: The Life of Efe Pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo; part two

Over the next few weeks, the Efe women are in Lese fields harvesting rice, and the men spend most of each day helping Taki and other village men cut the trees in what will be the coming year's fields. Food is plentiful these days, and the camp is filled from dawn to dusk with the sound of young girls pounding the husks from rice with wooden pestles and mortars borrowed from the village. It rains...

Digitizing Indigenous Sounds: Cultural activists & local music in the age of Memorex

Consumerism, the ineluctable allure of the foreign, and mass telecommunications have made the ostensibly traditional cultural products of indigenous peoples available to a much wider global audience. Paradoxically, this affords indigenous peoples (and ethnic minorities) with both opportunities and great risks. New technologies like the Internet and the digitization of information provide...

Dancing with the Devil: Health, Human Rights, and the Export of U.S. Models of Managed Care to Developing Countries

The current movement to export prevailing American practices of managed health care to developing countries is a development in need of critical reevaluation. In a shrinking, more complex world where health care must be sensitive to cultural beliefs and practices to be wholly effective, this movement at best represents a misguided attempt to control the burden of disease on developing countries....

Connections: Working Toward Partnerships with Indigenous Peoples

Today's individualistic lifestyles are often established around work schedules as people try to obtain a better education, better jobs, and better and more expensive goods. Because education is widely believed to be a fundamental need (for the individual and for the welfare of societies), questions about the source, impact, effectiveness, and the price of knowledge must be addressed in many...

Challenging the Status Quo in Ethnobotany: A New Paradigm for Publication May Protect Cultural Knowledge and Traditional Resourc

In recent years, the discipline of ethnobotany has become increasingly associated with the search for new medicines and other products from plants. Ethnobotanical-based selection of plants has gained in popularity as a means to identify which plants (of the estimated 250,000-500,000 existing species) contain relevant compounds for exploitation. This approach to biological prospecting uses the...

Sheshatshiu: Building a Better Future

During my time at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst I learned of the issues facing the Innu of Sheshatshiu in a course entitled "Contemporary Issues of North American Indians." The classroom discussion about the pain caused by hydroelectric dams and low-level flying affected me greatly. As an intern at Cultural Survival, I was presented with the opportunity to visit the community of...