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Editors --- "Protecting Knowledge: Traditional Resource Rights in the New Millennium - Digest" [2001] AUIndigLawRpr 24; (2001) 6(2) Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 101

Indigenous Statements - Canada

Protecting Knowledge:
Traditional Resource Rights in the New Millennium

The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) hosted a three-day legal conference that explored traditional resource rights, more commonly known as cultural and intellectual property rights issues, affecting all Indigenous Peoples. The target audience consisted primarily of First Nation community members and workers from the province of British Columbia (BC). As well, representatives from indigenous peoples from around the world and the traditional resource rights and academic communities were in attendance. The purpose was to bring BC First Nations community workers together with internationally renowned resource people in this field.

The conference focused on exploring and clarifying the following three questions within an international context:

1. What is indigenous cultural and intellectual property?

2. What rights do BC First Nations want recognised?

3. Can BC First Nations communities develop their own system(s) for protecting traditional resource rights?

This is a relatively new area of the law in Canada that is not widely understood yet it affects Indigenous peoples where they live on a daily basis. The conference was timely because of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization initiatives to introduce draft amendments on Indigenous peoples’ knowledge during the TRIPS review in 2000. As one of the primary organisers noted, ‘the whole issue of Indigenous knowledge is on the fast-track in the world trade arena (including North America Free Trade Agreement — NAFTA — and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation – APEC), and time is running out for a coordinated and effective Indigenous response’.

Spirit of the Conference

Although we have been subjected to colonial forces for several centuries, we retain and affirm all of our inherent collective rights as sovereign nations. These rights include the right to protect our own survival, in particular, by protecting our cultures, languages, and knowledge systems from expropriation, encroachment, or theft.

1. Indigenous Peoples’ own languages, knowledge systems and laws are indispensable to their identity, and are a foundation for self-determination.

2. Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems are inextricably and inalienably connected with their ancestry and ancestral territories.

3. Indigenous Peoples’ heritage is not a commodity, nor the property of the nation-state. The material and intellectual heritage of each Indigenous People is a sacred gift and a responsibility that must be honoured and held for the benefit of future generations.

4. Indigenous rights, individual and collective, are defined by Indigenous laws. The starting–point for any consideration of rights to learn, use or transmit Indigenous knowledge must therefore be the laws of the Indigenous peoples concerned.

5. The use of Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge or resources is unlawful and illegitimate unless it is done in conformity with the laws of the Peoples concerned.

Actions

1. We will take steps within our own communities to ensure that our people, and in particular our children, learn our own laws concerning the acquisition and use of knowledge and resources, and the credentials of knowledge-keepers, so that they can fully enjoy the right to self-determination.

2. We condemn all trade in unlawfully-obtained resources or knowledge, and we will act jointly at the local, regional, national, and international levels to deprive corporations and governments of any profit from such trade through effective international legal, political and economic actions.

3. We will cooperate to establish an effective international network to monitor the activities of corporations in the ancestral territories of Indigenous Peoples worldwide, and to support Indigenous Peoples everywhere in the full exercise of their rights.

4. We will take steps to prevent any assertion of intellectual property rights to the genetic integrity or genetic potential of biotic systems in our ancestral territories.

5. We will press for the ratification and full implementation of all international conventions in the fields of human rights, Indigenous Peoples, and their ecosystems, which we deem applicable.

6. We will work together for the speedy adoption of the Draft Principles and Guidelines on the Heritage of Indigenous Peoples by the United Nations.

7. We will promote the adoption of the Principles and Guidelines by our own Nations and Peoples as an international compact among ourselves, and as a basis for dealing with non-indigenous interests, and we will work together to establish a global registry of Indigenous Nations and Peoples who have agreed to implement the Principles and Guidelines within their own territories.

8. We support all international standard-setting initiatives by Indigenous Peoples that advance these actions.

Hosted by the Union Of British Columbia Indian Chiefs

with support from

Law Foundation Of British Columbia, Legal Services Society Of British Columbia — Native Programs,

UBC Museum Of Anthropology & Canadian International Development Agency

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Wednesday, February 23rd to Saturday, February 26th, 2000

<www.ubcic.bc.ca/>