Norman – Indigenous peoples, scholars, practitioners and policy-makers increasingly are faced with dilemmas about rights, responsibilities and access to intellectual products associated with cultural heritage, including research data and use of artifact and site images.

A new team of experts will tackle these difficult issues during the next seven years, and Joe Watkins, director of Native American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, will provide guidance and advice for activities, components and outcomes as a member of the project’s steering committee.

“This program focuses on the lasting heritage of the archaeological record and its relationship to living peoples,” said Watkins.  “It integrates the perspectives of archaeologists and Indigenous people in a way never done before to discuss the impacts of academic research on living cultures.  I am honored to have been asked to sit on the steering committee for such an important endeavor.”  

George Nicholas, professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University, will lead an international and interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, lawyers, anthropologists, museum specialists, ethicists and others to explore issues surrounding legal and ethical entitlements to information derived from cultural heritage, with particular emphasis on the archaeological record and other aspects of the past. The team recently received an award of $2.5 million from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to support the projects’ initiatives.

Working in collaboration with Indigenous and other communities, the project aims to identify a range of intangible cultural heritage and intellectual property concerns faced by Indigenous peoples, researchers and other stakeholders in order to gain theoretical insights on the nature of knowledge, intangible cultural heritage, and culture-based conceptions of rights and responsibilities and to generate ideas for fair and effective research practices. Nicholas and his team intend the results to assist descendant communities, archaeologists, academic institutions, scholars, policy makers and other stakeholders in negotiating more equitable and successful research and heritage policies in the future.

Once the range of intellectual property and ethical property is identified, the team will generate ideas for norms of good practice and theoretical insights on the nature of knowledge, intellectual property and culture-based rights.  Areas of particular concern are research on and access to cultural material and cultural heritage sites, cultural tourism, censorship, commercial use of rock art and other images, open vs. restricted access to information, applications in new products, bioarchaeology and the uses of ancient genetic data, legal protections and research permissions and protocols.

For more information on the project, visit their Web site at www.sfu.ca/IPinCulturalHeritage/.