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Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 15:45:02 -0800
From: Protecting Knowledge <logoston@smartt.com>
Organization: UBCIC Research
Subject: Protecting Knowledge: Articles of Interest 020800

Hadih All!

There are only 15 days left before the Protecting Knowledge: Traditional
Resource Rights in the New Millennium conference begins.

Due to the overwhelming response we have stopped taking registrations as
we have reached capacity.  Though we have blocked off space for First
Nation community members.  Those members can contact us at (604)
684-0231 for further information.

Please keep in mind that we intend to make available on our website the
transcripts and papers that result from this conference.

As for this email, the following articles of interest deal with

   * Michael Davis' papers, "Biological Diversity and Indigenous
     Knowledge" and "Indigenous Peoples and Intellectual Property
     Rights"
   * Igloolik elders win northern science award written by Sean
     McKibbon (Nunatsiaq News, January 21, 2000)
   * Plants Protected By Patents by Victoria Slind-Flor (The
     National Law Journal, January 31, 2000)
<<clipped>>
   * A review of Winona LaDuke's newest book, All Our Relations:
     Somebody Else's Wealth by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Hope this helps.

Don

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Michael Davis is a Research and Policy Specialist in Australia and wrote
the paper, Biological Diversity and Indigenous Knowledge (Research Paper
17, 1997-98), for the Australian Parliamentary Research Service.

     This paper surveys a range of international developments as a
     context for discussing some possible measures for the
     protection of Indigenous knowledge. Successful measures could
     include a combination of creative legislative and policy
     responses to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the
     use of a range of other laws, policies and instruments. The
     integration of Indigenous knowledge and practices with other
     conventional approaches to land and environment is also a
     useful way of achieving recognition and protection for
     Indigenous knowledge systems.

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/1997-98/98rp17.htm

Also check out Davis’ article, Indigenous Peoples and Intellectual
Property Rights (Research Paper 20, 1996-97).  Point your browser to:

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rp/1996-97/97rp20.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Igloolik elders win northern science award

SEAN McKIBBON
Nunatsiaq News
January 21, 2000
http://www.nunatsiaq.com/nunavut/nvt20121_10.html

IGLOOLIK - Elders in Igloolik were recognized with a national science
award last week for their efforts in preserving traditional Inuit
knowledge.

Since 1986, elders in the community have worked with researchers such as
John MacDonald, the co-ordinator of the Igloolik Research Centre and
George Qulaut, the centre's former operations manager to record their
knowledge for posterity on paper and audio tape.

Stories, expertise on hunting, survival on the land, sewing, tanning,
technical terms for harpoons and other traditional tools and many other
topics have been recorded in 500 interviews.

The work has only scratched the surface, MacDonald said.

"It's a race against time," said Nunavut MP Nancy Karetak-Lindell, as
she listened to MacDonald describe for the Northern Sciences Award
committee the painstaking work of interviewing the elders and then
transcribing and translating their words.

"Hardly a day goes by that an translator does not wish they could go
back and ask an elder who has passed away what a particular word meant,"
MacDonald said. Many of the Inuktitut terms used by the elders are very
specialized and no longer used by younger Inuit, MacDonald said.

On Friday, Lindell presented Igloolik's Inullariit Elders Society with
the federal government's Northern Sciences Award. She said the award is
important, because it recognizes traditional Inuit knowledge as being on
the same footing as Western scientific knowledge.

The award was established in 1983 by the Department of Indian and
Northern Affairs to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the
International Polar Year - the first world-wide scientific effort to
study the Earth's polar regions.

Between the years 1882 and 1883, 11 countries established 12 stations in
the Arctic and two in the Antarctic to simultaneously observe weather
and other phenomena. The award consists of a centenary medal
commemorating the polar year, and $4,500 in cash.

Until 1998, the award was always awarded to individual researchers who
were often from the South and usually affiliated with Southern
universities.

But this year, the award was given to people who have been helping
southern researchers ever since Europeans arrived in the Arctic.

"We were very happy about it," said Arsene Ivalu, the president of the
Inullariit Society. He accepted the award on behalf of the society at
the award ceremony.

The elders of the community were pleasantly surprised by the award, he
said, but had never expected to get an award. For them the motivating
factor behind their work was to preserve their oral history and
knowledge.

"The culture is not being shown enough," Ivalu said. As a result the
elders of the community want to pass on as much as they can, he said. So
began the project of recording as much traditional knowledge as
possible.

"I believe this is the largest indexed collection of interviews," said
MacDonald, explaining that researchers can use a computerized keyword
search in English to look for particular topics of traditional
knowledge.

But it's difficult to keep pace with volume of interviews he said. Time
and money limit the project he said. One elder, the late Noah
Piugaattuk, would interview himself, and contributed 70 to 80 hours of
audio tape.

"If the translation is left too late, sometimes we may find an elder
passes away," said MacDonald. Of the 30 elders who were in Igloolik when
the project started, about half have died, MacDonald said.

But the elders have recruited more middle-aged people to help with the
project and contribute what knowledge they learned from their parents in
an effort to counter their decline in numbers, MacDonald said.

"In the winter time we take students out caribou hunting with us," said
Ivalu. In an effort to reclaim the traditional method of transferring
knowledge from one generation to the next, the Inullariit society takes
youngsters out on the land to learn traditional hunting and survival
techniques, Ivalu said.

"They're usually quite happy about this. Not just boys, sometimes there
are girls who go out too," he said. Almost year-round the elders try to
teach young people in Igloolik everything from how to hunt seal, to how
to navigate the land and how to make clothing.

Even new knowledge about how far gasoline-powered vehicles can go on the
land and still make a return trip has been incorporated into the
teaching.

"Traditional knowledge can grow, and it will change over time as the
environment changes and people learn new things," said NTI President
Paul Quassa, who was on hand for the award ceremony. He said the science
award is an important stepping-stone for the federal and territorial
governments in their attitude toward traditional knowledge.

"It's in the land claim, traditional knowledge is to be considered to be
equal to scientific knowledge," Quassa said.

Nunavut Premier Paul Okalik said the award represents a lot pride for
the people of Igloolik. He said the book Arctic Sky, written by John
MacDonald with the help of the Inullariit society using research
gathered in the oral history project is a "very good start" in helping
to preserve traditional knowledge.

He said traditional practices are very important to Nunavummiut and
evoke powerful emotions.

"I can remember being out on the land with my parents and them telling
me about the names of different places and what they meant. They would
explain the name of the place and it's background and purpose and
history," he said.

"The thing is it's not dying at all because we are going to make it
continue," said Ivalu. He said that he hoped the award would motivate
other communities to preserve their traditional knowledge also. He said
the different regions had inherited different things from their
ancestors.

"Maybe if other people are watching us receive the award they will do
the same thing," said Ivalu.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Plants Protected By Patents
Federal Circuit's ruling clarifies confusion in the law

By Victoria Slind-Flor
The National Law Journal
January 31, 2000
http://www.lawnewsnetwork.com/stories/A14570-2000Jan28.html

A recent patent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal
Circuit involving corn seed may have far-reaching implications for
feeding the hungry of the Third World, as well as for agribusiness
worldwide.

The appeals court, in a ruling handed down on Jan. 19, determined that
seeds, as well as the plants grown from them, are patentable under 35
U.S.C. 101. Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. v. J.E.M. Ag Supply Inc.,
No. 99-1035. Although the patent office had been granting plant and seed
patents, it was not until this ruling that patentability was firmly
established.

The case won attention from diverse interests. Stanford Law School
Professor John H. Barton, for example, initially sought permission to
file an amicus brief on behalf of New York's Rockefeller Foundation. The
foundation was "concerned that a wide range of germ plasm [remain]
available for developing countries," said Barton, who is a member of the
National Genetic Resources Advisory Council and the National Academy
Panel on Genetic Diversity.

MIRACLE RICE
Affording plants and seeds patent protection "could make it impossible
to use material for breeding purposes," he said. He noted, for example,
that some of the "miracle rices," developed in Asia as a weapon against
hunger, have parent strains that "came from zillions of different
countries." Getting licenses to continue production would be
prohibitively expensive if the parent seeds were patented.

But the defendants did not want the foundation to file a brief. "They
persuaded us that this would have given Pioneer a new chance to file a
counter-brief, so we were persuaded not to," said Barton.

Pioneer, an agribusiness subsidiary of chemical giant E.I. du Pont de
Nemours & Co., was represented by Edmund J. Sease, of Des Moines, Iowa's
Zarley, McKee, Thomte, Voorheese & Sease P.L.C. Sease said that the
patent dispute stemmed from the unauthorized resale of Pioneer corn
seed. The resellers, represented by Bruce E. Johnson, of Des Moines'
Lewis, Webster, Johnson, Van Winkle & DeVolder L.L.P., challenged the
right of the patent office to issue plant patents in light of the Plant
Variety Protection Act of 1970, which set up a separate mechanism to
protect plant varieties.

The American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) submitted an
amicus brief on behalf of Pioneer. AIPLA argued that patent protection
should not be denied because an invention is embodied in a plant.
Rather, AIPLA -- which was represented by Warren D. Woessner, of
Minneapolis' Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth P.A. -- argued that
in recent years, "patent protection for plants has assisted progress in
many areas of agricultural science."

The appeals court, in an opinion written by Federal Circuit Judge
Pauline Newman, turned to a 20-year-old U.S. Supreme Court case
involving bioengineered bacteria, Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 477 U.S. 303
(1980), in which the court said that "Congress plainly contemplated that
patent laws would be given wide scope."

Sease said that while he anticipates a petition for an en banc rehearing
will be filed by the seed resellers, he expects the petition to be
denied because all three judges on the panel -- Judge Newman, Chief
Judge H. Robert Mayer and Judge Alan D. Lourie -- are considered experts
on patents.nts.

The full decision is at this location:
http://www.law.emory.edu/fedcircuit/jan2000/99-1035.wpd.html

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<<clipped>>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The following is a review of Winona LaDuke's newest book, All Our
Relations.

Somebody Else's Wealth
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Where does the vast wealth of the United States come from? It is hard to
read the financial and popular press today without encountering stories
that suggest the answer is the creativity of entrepreneurs in Silicon
Valley.

To this prevailing, romanticized perspective, Winona LaDuke  offers a
jolt of reality: Many of the great U.S. fortunes are based on somebody
else's wealth -- the natural resources of Native Americans.

In her eloquent new book, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land
and Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press), LaDuke documents
the historic -- and ongoing -- process of Native American dispossession.

LaDuke, a member of the Anishinaabeg nation, lives on the White Earth
Reservation, in northern Minnesota. She describes how a series of
treaties and U.S. laws transferred land from the Anishinaabeg to
incoming settlers and converted commonly held Anishinaabeg land into
individual parcels, with much of it soon alienated from Anishinaabeg
(and a huge chunk taken by the state of Minnesota, illegally, for
taxes).

The big winners in the process were Frederick Weyerhaueser and the
company he created. "Some are made rich and some are made poor," LaDuke
writes.  "In 1895, White Earth 'neighbor' Frederick Weyerhaueser owned
more acres of timber than anyone else in the world." Today, descendant
companies of Weyerhaueser continue to clearcut what remains of the
Minnesota pine forests.

In upstate New York and Canada, the Mohawk nation retains land in
scattered reservations -- a tiny fraction of their former possessions.
The Akwesasne Mohawk Reserve borders the St. Lawrence River. Families
that once relied on fishing and farming have been forced, she writes, to
abandon their livelihoods because the river is so polluted with PCBs
dumped by General Motors and air pollution depositions have poisoned the
land.

"Many of the families used to eat 20-25 fish meals a month," LaDuke
quotes an Akwesasne environmental expert as saying. "It's now said that
the traditional Mohawk diet is spaghetti."

All Our Relations features another half dozen case studies of corporate
and governmental assaults on Native American land and livelihoods.

Dispossession of Native American lands has led to what LaDuke calls
"structural poverty." Structural poverty, she told us, "ensues when you
do not have control over the land or any of your assets."

"It is not a question of material wealth, but having conditions of human
dignity within the reservation," she says, citing a litany of
devastating statistics on Native American poverty rates, crime rates and
access to health care. "You can throw whatever social program you want
at this, but until we are allowed to determine our own destiny, these
are the problems we are going to face."

Dispossession has inflicted on Native Americans an intertwined spiritual
poverty as well, she says. "You have some [Native Americans] whose whole
way of life are based on buffalo, but we have no buffalo. This loss
causes a kind of grieving in our community."

But LaDuke's All Our Relations is as much a hopeful as depressing book.
She chronicles Native American resistance to incursions from
multinational corporations, government agencies which frequently act to
further corporate interests and a white-dominated society which too
often maintains a settler mentality.

She profiles women like Gail Small, "the kind of woman you'd want to
watch your back at a meeting with dubious characters." An attorney,
Small runs a group called Native Action, which has led the strikingly
successful fight against coal company strip mining on the Northern
Cheyenne and other Montana
reservations. Native Action has also pushed for affirmative development
proposals, forcing the First Interstate Bank System to provide loans to
Northern Cheyennes through use of the Community Reinvestment Act and
helping establish a Northern Cheyenne high school.

LaDuke herself is an inspiring figure, working with her White Earth Land
Recovery Project not only to pressure states and the federal government
to return Native American lands (which because they are government held,
would not require the displacement of any individual property holders),
but also trying to enact a sustainable forest management plan for White
Earth, supporting the development of wind power on the reservation and
establishing a project, Native Harvest, to "restore traditional foods
and capture a fair market price for traditionally and organically grown
foods" such as wild hominy corn, organic raspberries, wild rice, buffalo
sausage and maple syrup.

All Our Relations is a wonderful read, and an important book -- both for
telling a story of plunder and exploitation too often forgotten, and
because, as LaDuke notes, "this whole discussion is really not about the
Seminoles and the panther" or other particular problems facing
particular groups of Native Americans -- "it is really about America."

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press, 1999, http://www.corporatepredators.org)
 

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