Indigenous

Legal and political strategies for “protecting” traditional environmental knowledge in Penticton, Okanagan Nation (British Columbia)

Sean Robertson

Martha Steigman

Adapted from an article that originally appeared in Alternatives Journal: Canadian Environmental
Ideas and Action, 29:4 (2003). <http://www.alternativesjournal.ca>

In Esgenoopetitj - also known as Burnt Church - a Mi’kmaq village on New Brunswick’s
Miramichi Bay, the Marshall decision was greeted with high hopes and much celebration. With
few options for work in the area, the chance to catch enough lobsters to feed the family and sell
a few on the side was big news. But for Burnt Church First Nation the ruling meant much more
than a modest economic opportunity. It meant that finally Canada recognized their right to live
according to Mi’kmaq culture and traditions, including their right to fish.

Vandana Shiva, Peace Review, 12:4 (2000), 501-508

Western intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes have emerged as major
instruments of North–South inequality. Not only do they block technology
transfer, they facilitate piracy of the indigenous knowledge and biodiversity of
Third World countries. They could, if not revised and reviewed, make northern
countries into the monopoly owners of knowledge, including knowledge that has
evolved cumulatively and collectively in indigenous cultures, selling it at high cost
to already impoverished and indebted countries of the South, pushing them
further into poverty and debt. Since the majority of the people in the South
depend on biodiversity for their livelihoods and survival, the hijack of their
resources and knowledge through IPRs is the hijack of their lives and livelihoods.

Prepared by Dawn R. Morrison

for The Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain, May 2006

With due respect for the dedication and commitment shown by the various Indigenous groups in B.C. (i.e. Haida, Taku River Tlingit, Gitskan and Wet’su’weten) who were successful in recent court cases, there is still a need for new policies at all levels of local, provincial and national government to solidify the courts' recognition of Aboriginal title and rights. Despite the recognition gained in the recent court rulings, policies designed to extinguish Aboriginal title and rights continue to maintain the status quo where Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, values, wisdom are disregarded or appropriated by government, corporations and other economic institutions. Decision making structures and processes established in the various land and resource management agencies perpetuate the “business as usual” approach characterized by the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from decision making processes in land and resource management. Indigenous peoples must be given greater control in decision making processes, and governing structures must be redesigned to accommodate the complex web of location and culture- specific traditional land and resource management strategies and practices that are unique to each of the many diverse nations of indigenous peoples in B.C. and Canada.

This interview with Also Gonzales was given to Carlos Santos in May 2004, when Aldo was participating in the seminar on “Food Sovereignty and Biodiversity,” in Montevideo, to mark Biodiversidad’s tenth anniversary. Biodiversidad (www.grain.org/biodiversidad) is GRAIN’s sister magazine. It is published in Spanish and has a Latin American focus. It is published in the January 2005 issue of SEEDLING (www.grain.org).

Aldo Gonzalez is a Zapotec indigenous and community leader from Guelatao in the Sierra Juarez mountain range of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. Aldo is director of UNOSJO, a grassroots campesino organisation in the Sierra Juarez. UNOSJO provides technical assistance and consultation to small farmers with the goal of promoting sustainable rural economies that are based on respect for indigenous culture. It plays a vital role in educating local communities and collaborating with national and international organisations about the threat of GM maize.

Prepared by Dawn Morrison

“. . . the health and integrity of Secwepemc communities is inextricably linked to continued and improved access to the traditional resources that are needed to supply the Secwepemc with the means to practice healthy traditional lifestyles in the modern world. The driving economic force of capitalism in Secwepemcul’ecw has resulted in limited access and has infringed upon the collective nature of Secwepmec traditional resource rights. The process of privatization has also been a major contributing factor to the economic marginalization of the Secwepemc, as well as the over-exploitation of the land and collective sources of Secwepemc foods, medicines and technologies.”

PROTECTING TRADITIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE AND
NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE AMERICAS: INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY, A HUMAN RIGHT, OR CLAIMS TO AN ALTERNATIVE FORM
OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?
Rosemary J. Coombe
The protection of traditional environmental knowledge is a complex area of emerging
law that has attracted a great deal of academic attention and controversy over the past
five years. I will limit my remarks to the Americas and focus primarily on the empirical
reasons that have been established for asserting such rights, the limits of the intellectual
property model often proposed to accommodate them, the nature of the social

Protecting Cultural Industries To Promote Cultural Diversity: Dilemmas For International Policy-making Posed By The Recognition Of Traditional Knowledge."

Forthcoming in Keith Maskus and Jerome Reichman eds., International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology Under a Globaized Intellectual Property Regime (Cambridge University Press) 2005.

The protection of traditional environmental knowledge is a complex area of emerging law that has attracted a great deal of academic attention and controversy over the past five years. I will limit my remarks to the Americas and focus primarily on the empirical reasons that have been established for asserting such rights, the limits of the intellectual property model often proposed to accommodate them, the nature of the social movements in which they are asserted, and the larger difficulty of placing these rights within a human rights framework. Ultimately I will suggest that we understand claims to traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) in the Americas within a context informed by the social movements in which they are most forcefully expressed, where they draw upon human rights vocabularies and rhetorical forms but express much wider social and political aspirations that have emerged in response to conditions of neoliberal globalization.