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.