Long Road

Check out Angela Riley’s insightful piece in the NYT today on the Twilight industry and Quileute interests:

At the same time, like indigenous peoples around the globe, the Quileute want to be meaningful participants in the treatment of their own cultural property. This means, first and foremost, having their sovereignty and their culture respected by outsiders. The Quileute’s Web site tells visitors about the tribal laws that govern Quileute territory. One of these laws specifies that burial grounds and religious ceremonies are “sacred and not to be entered.” Had MSN acknowledged the tribe as a sovereign government, it might not have broken that rule. The Quileute believe that respect for Indian tribal sovereignty could likewise bridge cultural gaps between other Indian communities and outsiders.

The ultimate choice, regarding not only the Quileute but all indigenous peoples, is not simply whether outsiders are free to appropriate tribal cultural property. For the sake of fairness as much as law, indigenous peoples must play a significant role in decisions regarding their cultural property.

Riley’s piece acknowledges the weakness of US IP laws to deal with these types of situations at the same time as “others”–read: Hollywood–IP interests are “protected.” I do not advocate “stronger” IP laws, but do agree with Riley that the right to be at the table, to be active participants in the reproduction of Quileute culture is not too much to ask.  Nor is it too much to ask that some of the profits reach the Quileute. Much has been said about the evils of Hollywood’s manipulation of IP laws to benefit them, but these diatribes rarely address the misuse of other peoples’ cultural or intellectual property.  Taking Native Americans’ sovereignty seriously means undoing the erasure of Native voices from the public domain and further, reexamining the nature of the “public domain” in relation to cultural materials that, while, legally may be “public” are only so because of the historic erasure of Indigenous peoples from the public domain. For more I suggest Riley’s “Straight Stealing: Toward an Indigenous System of Cultural Property Protection” which I reviewed on this blog two years ago.

This looks like a great project at Michigan:

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Preservation and Access Education and Training Program has awarded the School of Information a two-year grant to develop and implement a virtual laboratory featuring digital access and preservation tools.

I hope the chronicle their work and the tools they develop. I’d be interested to see how they link in with collecting institutions and other software tools and content management systems.

From the Times Online their listing of the “ten best museum websites”:

Check them out, some are obvious choices, others not so much.

Check out this story on NPR about the Rosetta Stone company’s endangered languages program:

In Harrisonburg, Va., a small training room is alive with the sounds of a once-dead language.

Kimberly Walden, Sandra Boutte and Rachel Vilcan are members of the Chitimacha tribe. They have flown from Louisiana to the corporate headquarters of Rosetta Stone, a company that primarily focuses on selling language software to tourists and business travelers. The company is helping them develop computer software they hope will help interest younger members in learning their native tongue.

The last line peeked my interest:

Don’t expect to see Chitimacha software at your local kiosk. The tribe will own this product and hopes to distribute it free of charge to members of the tribe.

I’m not sure what the details of the deal are, but this statement makes it sound like Rosetta Stone is relinquishing its proprietary rights to this particular language software. Kuddos to them. While some might like to narrate this as a step that would limit language expansion or even information freedom, it seems to me more like an acknowledgment by the Rosetta Stone that language “ownership” means and looks different for Indigenous communities. I don’t buy the gateway drug arguments that may see this as a slippery slope to other forms of knowledge limitation. Instead, this is a step toward making clear the differential politics of language transmission and dissemination as well as knowledge access.

Check out the site for this upcoming conference and see the CFPs at MIT’s (new, newish….) The HyperStudio – Laboratory for Digital Humanities.

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research?

The Hopi Music Repatriation Project has a blog tracking the progress of the collaboration between several Hopi advisory boards and the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Here’s a bit from the latest entry:

The goal of this first meeting with CRATT was primarily to outline the project, present a few of the recordings as examples of the more than 6 hours of Hopi music archived in Columbia’s Center for Ethnomusicology, and to find out how the collection might be of use to Hopi villages and clans. The opinion given by these traditional leaders was overwhelmingly in favor of returning the recordings and the copyrights to the Hopi people. Just how the recordings might be used and the specifics of who should hold the rights were the subject of significant dialog, and additional conversations on these topics will be the the theme for additional meetings with HCPO and CRATT over the course of this year.

It will be very useful to see how this process evolves. Kudos to the members of this project for documenting not just the outcome, but the process itself. This type of documentation will help others understand the issues involved in digital repatriation in terms of ownership, access and potential uses of the materials.

I haven’t been able to find too much on this yet, but here’s the news so far…

MEXICO CITY – US COFFEE giant Starbucks has agreed to pay intellectual property rights owed to Mexico for a line of coffee mugs showing pre-Hispanic images, a company statement said on Thursday. Starbucks has withdrawn the mugs, which contained images of the Aztec calendar and a pyramid from pre-Aztec ruins near Mexico City, from shop shelves. Starbucks Mexico said on Thursday that the supplier of the mugs had sought approval for the images from government archaeological agency since 2008, but had failed to receive it.

‘Starbucks Mexico assumes responsibility … and is prepared to pay the amount corresponding to the use of these images,’ a statement said, apologising for ‘any misunderstanding.’ The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) was still studying the issue, a spokesman said on Thursday. ‘We haven’t asked for any compensation yet from the company, nor has a figure been established, but it’s certain that they’ll have to pay rights,’ said Francisco de Anda. — AFP

It sounds like it is the INAH who lodged the claim, but I’m not certain about that or whom they are or were representing. I also haven’t seen an of the offending mugs. This type of case could provide a platform for making the claims of Indigenous IPR more visible, if people can get past the public domain argument about Indigenous imagery. I’ll hunt for more information.

From: [...] Heather Horst [...]
Dear All,

We are currently accepting paper proposals for a workshop focused upon “Digital Anthropology” at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Annual Conference. The conference will take place in Maynooth, Ireland between August 24 and 27th, 2010. Further details about the Conference are located here: http://www.easaonline.org/conferences/easa2010/index.htm Details about the session and submission are listed on the conference workshop website: http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2010/panels.php5?PanelID=599

Workshop: Digital Anthropology
Convenors
Daniel Miller (University College, London)
Heather Horst (University of California, Irvine)

Short Abstract
How can anthropology contribute to an understanding of the impact of new Digital Technologies? In particular relating the way they become part of everyday life to their role in the development of new infrastructures within both commerce and the state.

Long Abstract
A key component of many peoples sense of crisis today is the impact of new Digital technologies that seems to constitute a loss of control over the world. For example, one theory of the recent financial crises is that too many financial instruments were set to automatically sell when shares reached a certain level so the crisis was an integral effect of digitisation itself. People’s imagination of the digital seems to bifurcate as something that on the one hand lies at the keyboard at the tip of their fingers but at the same time appears as an abstraction from traditional analogue modes of representation. This bifurcation is often what makes the digital appear to be either the cause or the solution of impending crises. Often this imagination is fed from science fiction and images of humans losing control of the planet to the new technologies themselves.

This is perhaps the moment when anthropology has to choose how to respond to digital technologies. Whether to demonise them as a form of alienation, to romanticise them as open-source utopias or get to grips with the way they speedily become part of everyday life. To resist this bifurcation we need to link the study of ordinary people’s consumption of social networking sites and Google Earth with an appreciation of deeper infrastructural developments such as the digitalisation of financial systems, geographical positioning systems and the impact upon both state and commerce. This is the task to which this workshop will be dedicated.

Heather A. Horst
Digital Media and Learning Research Hub
UC Humanities Research Institute
University of California, Irvine
4000 Humanities Gateway Building
Irvine, CA 92697 USA

Some good news on the TK/TCE front from the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat:

The Pacific Model Law for the protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Culture is paving the way for work in this area around the world.

The Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, Tuiloma Neroni Slade, said as Pacific Islander, he is very pleased with this development, as it brings broad recognition to what the region is doing on protection of Traditional Knowledge.

This is a great model. The PDF provides a lot of detail and background, it’s a great resource for folks thinking about alternative models on IP-related business.

This looks like a great gig for someone…pass it on:

The World Intellectual Property Organization seeks expressions of interest for the WIPO Indigenous Intellectual Property Law Fellowship. The Fellow will work in the Traditional Knowledge Division of WIPO and should be able to commence the fellowship in Geneva on 1 April 2010. The Fellow is expected to meet the following requirements: a recognized and active member of an indigenous community; an established track record in advising on and researching legal issues relating to indigenous peoples and IP law and practice; legal qualifications, or equivalent in practical expertise and community work, preferably with specific components relating to IP law; ability to work effectively in English, and to work fluently in and prepare documents in at least one of the six UN languages; a record of publications and/or participation in community consultations and outreach would be an advantage; and demonstrated capacity to contribute directly to the approved program outputs established in the WIPO Program and Budget. Expressions of interest should be sent to the WIPO Secretariat before 12 February 2010. Download the request for expressions of interest, including full details [pdf] …