 freedom initiative. My name is Sofia Montarroso and I am the senior officer of programs and operations at artistic freedom initiative. Led by immigration and human rights attorneys, artistic freedom initiative or AFI facilitates pro bono immigration representation and resettlement assistance for international artists who are persecuted or censored. Our work champions not only at risk artists, but all forms of art and culture. We recognize that art and the wealth of knowledge and skills that inform its creation form a significant part of the intangible cultural heritage of all communities. We affirm the right to freely create and access art, including that which upholds cultural identity and heritage. By advocating for the protection and preservation of at risk art forms, we champion artistic freedom for all communities. Today, I'd like to start by acknowledging that though artistic freedom initiative operates internationally, our offices are on the unceded land of the Lenape people, Lenape Hoking. The Lenape people were forcibly displaced through a long history of settler colonialism and federal and state land dispossession, which continues to this day. We acknowledge this historical and ongoing dispossession and we honor the current Lenape tribes and leaders who are still here still connecting to the land and who are still and have always been here stewarding the land. On behalf of us at AFI, I thank the team of Safe Havens Freedom Talks for co-organizing this first important event on Indigenous peoples art forms and the law. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues met for its 20th session on the theme Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, the role of Indigenous peoples in implementing Sustainable Development Goal 16 in April 2021. Of the three recommendations made on this theme, one called for increased study of the relationship of law with formal and traditional to the justice to justice for Indigenous peoples. Over the last few years, there have also been significant developments in jurisprudence that expands or amends existing legal frameworks such as intellectual property rights to protect Indigenous art forms and Indigenous art makers. In this panel, we will explore the particular protections offered to Indigenous art forms by existing legal frameworks both at the domestic and international levels. The panel will be composed of legal experts, advocates, and artists who will examine various threats to Indigenous art forms and analyze the legal mechanisms that have been used to protect them. It will serve as the first installment in a series that will go on to explore particular case studies where diverse Indigenous groups have established legal protections for their art forms. Hello everybody, my name is Philip Blanchett and my Yupik name is Gilik Ngok and we are Bamiwa and Bamiwa is a Yupik word and it means on-core or do it again. And my name is Asanak or Asi for short. And my name is Qajunga Takle, Qajung for short. We're in Anchorage, Alaska right now and the three of us are originally from the Yukon-Kusquim River Delta area. And these songs that we do represent our culture and it represents us and our identity and our love for these songs. And this first song is a song that Asi wrote, Bubble Gum. Can you tell us a little bit about Bubble Gum? So I was teaching my dance class and I caught one of my students chewing gum which is a nono and I kind of made fun of them and I told them and I told them I am going to immortalize you and this kid is originally is from Shishmir, which is a Wep North. So this is called Damolo Chewing Gum Yagira Love While I'm Dancing. We got a music video. You can check this out on YouTube, Bubble Gum Alaska, Bamiwa. Check it out. This showcases Inuit culture through music and dance performance. The show is a platform to share indigenous knowledge as from traditional malidolization and instrumentation. Often described as Inuit song music, Bamiwa has discovered their own genre and we are so grateful to have had them with us today. We're pleased to introduce our panelists starting with Andes Sambi, a traditional Sami yoyk artist and professor of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto specializing in indigenous rights law. We also have with us Professor Christian Carpenter who's the Council Tree Professor of Law and Director of the American Indian Law Program at the University of Colorado Law School. Professor Carpenter served as a member of the United Nations expert mechanism on the rights of indigenous peoples from 2017 to 2021 and as its chair from 2019 to 2020. Over the course of this event we will speak with Ande about a specific case study where intellectual property has prevented access to indigenous cultural heritage and then asked Professor Carpenter about the extent to which intellectual property can serve to protect indigenous cultural heritage on an international scale. So Ande, I was hoping that you would be able to speak to us a little bit about the over 7,000 recordings of Sami yoyk that are being kept by the from the public at the Tromsø Museum. This is a little sample of one of these 7,000 yoyks that are in Tromsø museum. Tromsø museum has the largest collection of Yoics on this planet and the Yoics were collected when the recording industry sort of the recording equipment started to to work in such a way that it was possible to record. Yoics have been carrying a lot of connotations. Today the main connotations to Yoics are that we are very proud of the Yoics and they are very genuine, special for us, very precious, but it hasn't been always in that way. So because the Yoics have been so important in our pre-Christian shamanistic religious practices so therefore the church has been very hostile against Yoics and so has the state and so has all the powerful institutions in the society of not only Norway but also Sweden and Finland and Russia been. But Yoics carries this this beautiful strong flame of resilience that we all carry in our heart but Yoics is sort of an embodiment of that. So Tromsø museum has taken the position that they are not sharing the samples for Yoics and that is an important issue because there is no formal training of Yoics these days. So it means that the generation who are literate with the techniques of Yoics, the semiotics of Yoics, the philosophies of Yoics, the logics of Yoics, they are stepping out of time. So it would have been very important to let these people meet the Yoics that are in that museum. But the museum claims two arguments for not letting the Yoics get free from from their basement. The argument one is that the issue of copyright is so complicated in an indigenous people's context. So it's safest to lock them down. And the other is that it happens that some sensitive information is contained in a Yoic. For example, if somebody is making some comment, personal comments or person, because we have Yoics that refer to persons, we have Yoics that refer to animals and to landscapes and rivers and so on. But Tromsø museum has taken the position that they don't take the chance to open up with any of those Yoics. So my background as a legal professional as well as a Yoic professional, I have been performing. And I have also been a producer of Yoics and even once started a little record company with Yoics. So the legal arguments on the side that the Yoics should be made accessible. It's the Sami people's cultural heritage. And very much crucial important information for the culture is contained in the Yoics. Very much of our memories. So it's the right to our past that this is a question of. And the right to our past is backed up by the Norwegian constitution, the Norwegian national legislation, a bunch of international conventions that we will use too much time to list up here. But the convention on civil and political rights article 27 and the ILO convention and the UN Drip, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and a lot of other legal material is not complicated to deduce that that would be the right thing to do. But here we meet a phenomenon when it comes to cultural heritage. And that is that the transaction cost becomes very high. That if you need to go to court every time you want to cash out a cultural heritage, then it will be a very exhausting life to be in the Sami culture. So it becomes a matter of legal sociology, because the experience is that the litmus test of how substantial a package of rights is, is that if an individual decides to not comply with the legal standards, if the institutions then will step up and straight up the record, or if they will let that person continue to lock down the oaks. And unfortunately, that is what we have experienced from the University of Tromsø because it shows us this dilemma that in order to have a right, you have to get the right. But you shouldn't be in the situation that you have to go to court every day, then you would be a part of the court room as a living sculpture there all the time litigating. So that is the situation. And it is interesting because we are in a kind of welfare state, a state where the courts are rumored to function and so on on the on the indigenous peoples side. Thank you, Anne. I was wondering just to go back to one thing that you said. You said that the Tromsø Museum thinks it's too complicated with the copyright to release the recordings. What is it about the copyright that they are saying is too complicated? Well, we have several ways to think about the issue of copyright. Traditionally, if I made a yoke to you, which would be a personal song portrait of you, then the issue would be, did I carry the copyright or did you carry the copyright? So the Western system says that I carry the copyright, but the traditional Sami way of thinking says that you carry the copyright and then they become scared of, for example, this little dilemma there and the solution they then choose is to lock down and not let the genie out of the bottles, so to speak, seen from their perspective. Thank you. And I wanted to ask, I know you said that in order to litigate this case, you might need to become a living statue in the courts. But I'm wondering if any similar case like this has been litigated before. Is there a precedent for using the law to gain access to recordings like these? Well, our use of the courts have been very much more basic questions like land rights, the right to exist. So we have, I used to think that it's a matter of three rights, the right to a past, the right to the presence and the right to a future. And we have been fighting so much for the right to a presence. So we don't, and we are not so many people, so we simply do not have the human or economic resources to make all these fights that are required under the current regime. So the cases that have been litigated now has been on reindeer gracing land and such issues that, in a practical sense, are more important. And as I mentioned that the yokes carry different types of connotations. So, for example, Christianized samis are not very fond of yoke because they also think that it's a pagan tradition. So yoke doesn't have that many supporters within our culture as well. And that teaches us or reminds us that we can get some kind of cultural viruses that if, for example, our elders become Christianized, then they can use the status of being an elder, which they get from the sami tradition. And then they use it against the yokes, for example. So, so it is also complicated in that respect. Thank you very much. And then I now want to turn to Professor Carpenter. And Professor Carpenter, first, I want to acknowledge that in the US, the legal frameworks that govern property have colonial origins and federal and state laws continue to cause harm to indigenous peoples. In your article owning red, a theory of Indian cultural appropriation, you trace some of this history in the United States, noting the role of the legal frameworks in the dispossession of Native American land. Your article clarifying cultural property acknowledges that there are instances where the misappropriation and commodification of indigenous culture has been protected by copyright, trademark, and patent law. So given these complexities, to what extent is the intellectual property framework a valuable tool to protect the art forms and traditional knowledge of indigenous communities, both domestically and internationally. Thanks, Sophia. It's a pleasure to join you and also to be here with Antisombie, whose work is much respected in the international community. You've identified some of the key tensions, I think, in the intellectual property law system as it affects indigenous peoples. And on the one hand, the origins of that system and property law generally in the United States and other Western countries has been to incentivize innovation through economic rewards and largely to recognize the so-called creators of works, whether expressions like yokes or art or medicines, and to grant the people who apply for intellectual property protections a limited monopoly over them so that they can gain economic benefits for some amount of time before it reverts to the public domain and then others have a chance to further innovate. And indigenous peoples, I think, sometimes are motivated by similar concerns. They might be painters or jewelers or singers who are, you know, eager to participate in the market. But other times, their creations are motivated by spiritual values or to teach children or to keep the world in balance. And our intellectual property law systems typically don't offer protections for those kinds of values. Indigenous peoples' own laws, customs and traditions typically do offer the kind of protections that they're seeking. And one of the current challenges is to find space in our law as it's developing domestically and internationally so that those indigenous legal values and legal systems can come into play. I guess I'll say just briefly, in those cases where indigenous peoples are able to avail themselves of the protections of intellectual property law, it may be because, again, they have been participating in the market. One case that I like to mention is Navajo Nation versus Urban Outfitters. It was a case here in the United States where Urban Outfitters, the teeny bopper retail company, decided to market underwear and flasks using the Navajo name and patterns that were vaguely indigenous looking. So the Navajo panty and the Navajo flask were being widely marketed much to the events of the Navajo people, probably for obvious reasons. But this was one of those cases where the Navajos had actually registered Navajo and Navajo Nation as a trademark because they were already selling t-shirts and other things in the market. So they were able to use trademark and concepts of infringement and tarnishment to negotiate a settlement. But in other instances where expressions are more of the cultural nature that I've been talking about, it's much harder to find a way in through domestic or international intellectual property law for indigenous peoples. Thank you, Professor Carpenter. I'm glad you brought up that case. It's one that AFI has explored in our Art and Cultural Heritage Law course with Georgetown Law, actually. And I know it's not the the only case like that, where major fashion labels have appropriated indigenous imagery. So given this this domestic context, I want to turn now to the international and ask, given your work with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, as well as Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, how is that the process at the Waipo and the Waipo's IGC? How does that process add to the legal protections? Or what can that process add to the legal protections that are available to indigenous communities? And how could it better protect the rights and interests of indigenous peoples? Well, the World Intellectual Property Organization through its Intergovernmental Committee embarked on a process to draft three instruments about 20 years ago. And the idea was to to offer better protections for indigenous peoples and local communities. But again, to also do so with consideration for the users of indigenous peoples, intellectual and cultural property, which include industry and governments. And so from the outset, we should probably acknowledge that this process isn't exclusively devoted to the rights of indigenous peoples. It's an international, state centric process that nonetheless, I think, is striving to recognize indigenous peoples' rights in those realms. What I would like to see the Waipo IGC process do is to recognize and incorporate some of the international human instruments, sorry, human rights instruments that anti-zombie referenced the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with the provisions on minority rights and maybe even more specifically the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which in its article 31 provides that indigenous peoples have the rights to their cultural heritage, their traditional cultural expressions and their traditional knowledge in those categories of intellectual and cultural property, which may include collective creations and intergenerational transfer of knowledge, spiritual, religious values. Those are recognized as types of properties and interests that indigenous peoples claim and are important for their self-determination. And the Waipo process, hopefully, will recognize those as well through these legal instruments that are better adapted, I hope, to indigenous peoples' claims and interests than are the conventional laws of copyright, patent and trademark. But as with many processes, this one, too, is about power and about the ability of indigenous peoples to seek allies and to state their interests strongly and diplomatically in a way that will ultimately achieve better recognition. Thank you, Professor Carpenter. So, Anne, I came across the transcript of your 2001 statement at the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva. One of the elements that stood out to me is when you ask, do human rights only refer to individual rights or are they also collective rights in this concept? And I wanted to bring this question to the panel. Yeah, that's a very interesting question because there we also meet the dilemma of how we think about rights and on what levels indigenous peoples should negotiate, which of the games is to be played. So, if we then pretend that we are in this traditional axis between the individual and the state and have this division that some rights belong to the individuals, others belong to the states, and there is nothing between. But if we then start to negotiate about the rules of the game where we ask, yeah, is it only this axis that is valid? Are there any other actors in the game? And the collective is one part. But one could scare the people by saying that, well, it could be people from the past, for example, in our traditional ontology of the Sami people. It is that we also interact with our spirits, people who have passed away and people who haven't been born yet. So we sort of count them into the equation. And it is this question of what should be included in the equation when we are trying to solve a problem? So what I just wanted to address there is that one couldn't see this axis as a given that we would have to be able to also to negotiate the game of legal argumentation, of legal reasoning. And Indigenous peoples are not the only ones who have also brought up this issue of negotiating the rules of the game. For example, one of the results of the post-colonialism was that the new players, when they came in, they wanted to argue the rules of the game, as did when we got a lot of women into the legal world. Then, for example, normality was a normal person, automatically a man, that one then looked at formal rights and rights that were implied by the rules. So, but my position on this, because one could be pragmatic and say that, OK, let's fight the fights that are possible. But I think that we live in on a very long stretch. So we have to start start negotiating also these issues, even if we never will see those results of those things be cashed out. Thank you, Anna. And I'll turn this in question now to you, because I grew up into. Thank you. I believe that human rights are collected as much as they are individual. And I believe that for a few reasons. First, among Indigenous people, so many aspects of life are collective in nature. And I think that our laws can be flexible and they should be shaped and reformed to reflect the kind of society that we want to inhabit. And so there are instruments that have recognized that the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. So the right at the beginning that Indigenous peoples have individual and collective human rights. And it is time for domestic and international laws to get on board with that. I also practice and teach law in a country, the United States, where corporations and churches have freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Those are collective entities comprised of shareholders or members. There is absolutely no reason why Indigenous peoples can't have at least those same rights. But for Indigenous peoples, I think if it's more complicated, of course, because rights usually in their cosmologies come with relationships. And one of the things I really like about the declaration is it talks about relationships with the natural world, obligations to future generations. And I, too, am familiar with many Indigenous cultures where the spirit world is alive and very much part of the society. And human beings have obligations to take care of the spiritual world, whether that's through ceremonial grounds or repatriation or, you know, other legal and non-legal means. And I just think it's both descriptively accurate and normatively desirable to recognize that human rights are both individual and collective in nature. Thank you so much. At this point, I wanted to ask you if you have questions for each other. I wanted to have some reflections on on this dilemma that we have, that that sort of the legal system, it strives to a kind of universal unity and in some respects, it's a very good thing, for example, that universal human rights can be the absolute floor of that you can't go lower than this or that norm. At the same time, we exist in very different works. Where we sort of, because if you if you lean to universality, then you lean towards text. But if you lean towards difference in the different words, then you lean towards context. And and and somehow it is it is both cognitively a dilemma, but it's also strategically a little dilemma in that. So I know it's it's a hard one, but but I throw the ball. Thank you. That is one of the absolutely most confounding questions I think about human rights and about Indigenous peoples. When we think about culture and the very many different ways that human beings organize themselves really to the environment, their environments vis-à-vis the desire, as Andy says, to have universal norms so that all human beings are guaranteed some level of dignity and basic respect. And I definitely don't have the absolute answers, but the way I think about it is sometimes taking off my law professor hat and putting on my lawyer hat. You know, how did these things actually play out in practice? And among the people that I work with, which are largely Indigenous peoples throughout the world, I think their realities reflect a sense of legal pluralism in that universal rights, let's say the right to religion, could be respected among all people. But what that means for, I'll just pick two examples, Korean people in Russia and Cherokee people in the United States may be very different. And I think we can recognize, as a matter of context, as you said, Andy, that the experience, what people need to enjoy the freedom of religion, which I think is an individual and collective human right, may differ in one place versus another. And that our societies and our laws are hopefully sufficiently capacious to manage that, even with a universal baseline. And going back to the intellectual property conversation, I think some of those ideas could pertain there. I mean, when it comes to what Indigenous people are seeking, at least from my experience of working with them, when it comes to intellectual property, sometimes they're seeking privacy. They want to keep their intellectual and cultural property confidential within the community. They don't want it to be injected into the market. They don't want it to be alienable. I think that should be reflected in the law. Sometimes they do want to inject it in the market. They would like acknowledgement and attribution. They would like to participate in benefit sharing. Those are some of the things that WIPO could accomplish. I think that we could offer that, too, in a menu of legal solutions while acknowledging the fundamental right of individuals and collectives to their intellectual, their cultural and spiritual properties. So I don't know if I'm answering on the conceptual level as much as on the practice level. But those are some of my some of my thoughts. Thank you so much. Thank you both. Professor Carpenter, I don't know if you had a question for Annette. I don't know if I'm going to state this as articulately as I'd like to. But one of the things that I find the most powerful about the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is its several articles recognizing the laws, customs and traditions of Indigenous Peoples. And I was wondering if in your understanding of the yoke and the tradition of yoke, does that is that a legal tradition? Does it give us sort of rules to live by? Or is it more of a cultural tradition? Or is it something that is kind of uniquely saw me and transcends those categories? Yeah, that's a that's a very, very interesting question because the yokes have have many, many aspects. And one way to look at yoke is that it's a kind of a way to meditate. And and as a human, you would share with your fellow human beings if you then know of a very good way to meditate. And but it's all we say about the yoke that we got it from the people underground with them. It's in our our cosmology. So basically, it's the song of the earth. So the earth has given us these songs. And that we have to sort of keep the songs alive so that we also keep the human resilience sort of alive. So when you are are yoyking, then you are are not only operating on behalf of your culture or or behalf of your or your aesthetic preferences or or existential needs, for example, myself. I use yoyk when I have a complicated problem. Also, when I was practicing as a lawyer, then I used to and we have great distances in Northern Norway to drive from A to B. So then I used to to yoyk through the case to analyze the case by by yoyking it. And and then it was a very, very practical thing, thing for me. But it has also been the blanket of shame that that I belong to the generation who turned that around and brought it in the limelight and and so on. So so it is I was very happy to see all the references that that in the UN declaration that one could apply to yoyks. But but I think about yoyks that. That one has to think in steps. Step one would be to preserve that and to to to make it healthy enough. It's like a person who has almost drowned and you rescue that person and you make sure that that the health is coming up. And then I think that that it is something very valuable in yoyk that we can share with the with the humanity on a little longer horizon. And I think that that's not unique to yoyk. I think that there are very many practices of different nature in the indigenous world that is in parallel situations where that we belong to the time when we have to protect and nurture. It's like a beautiful little flame that we have to make sure that it doesn't blow out. But when it starts to get healthy, then I think we can provide to to humanity very many beautiful and strong, interesting things from the from the indigenous cultures as well. So and that makes indigenous rights not only indigenous rights, but but very important for the whole humanity. So that whole humanity has important fears in the indigenous rights. Thank you. That was so beautifully said and shared. I'll be thinking about it for a long time. And if I may, you just reminded me, too, that we're about to embark on the international decade of indigenous languages. And the UN has declared the next 10 years a time for all of the world's people and states to be focusing on the revitalization use and transmission of these languages, whether in song or in writing or daily speech. And I agree with you that this is something that all of the world should be concerned about. Thank you both so much. It's been such an honor to have you both here for this panel event. And we're just so grateful that you've shared your time and your thoughts and your words so generously with us and your York so generously this evening. And yes, with this, I think we conclude our panel event.