Who Owns Native Culture?

By Michael F Brown, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, 316 pages, hardcover, US$29.95. Reviewed by Michele Grossman in the December 2004 issue.

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In this lucid, well-researched, unsettling excursion into the realm of Indigenous cultures, intellectual property, and the nexus of Indigenous and non-Indigenous proprietary interests and rights, anthropologist Michael Brown pursues a self-avowed 'centrist' line of inquiry as he attempts to balance the historical and cultural interests of specific Indigenous communities and cultural groups with 'the requirements of liberal democracy', particularly those of settler societies. (p 9) The book's major strength lies in its effort not to answer the question posed by Brown's title, but to re-orient the way in which we think about the implications and consequences of Indigenous cultures, proprietary rights, and the challenges of living cross-culturally in both local and global contexts.

Who Owns Native Culture? takes for granted the historical tensions, and their continuing resonance in the present, that have characterised colonial relations between Indigenous communities and settler states marked by large-scale uses and abuses of Indigenous artifacts, rituals, knowledges, and resources by both individuals and institutions, including researchers, administrators, museums, universities, governments, extractive industries and tourism. The critical energy of Brown's analysis is thus usefully focused not so much on rehearsing this history as on exploring comparative contemporary responses to it, primarily by Indigenous communities in the United States and Australia, though Canada, Latin America, New Zealand and Africa also feature at times.

Throughout, Brown's concern is with how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures conceptualise the way in which 'culture' is defined and deployed as a means of exercising power, control, and limit over the proprietary rights that may be exercised by groups -- and individuals -- over both tangible and intangible Indigenous cultural production. Using carefully (if highly selectively) researched case studies ranging from the Australian Hindmarsh Island Bridge controversy to the complex and knotty conundrums posed by contemporary ethnobotany, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and pharmaceutical patents, Brown shows the extent to which sweeping generalisations that assume all Indigenous communities operate in the same way and with the same aspirations and end-games in mind in relation to managing and protecting their cultural resources and heritage is a dangerous and unproductive extension of colonial ideas about 'native' cultures and societies (though consoling for those at either extreme of the political spectrum). The detailed case studies he draws on in relation to North American and Indigenous Australian efforts to negotiate the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing demands of both limiting and exploiting access to Indigenous knowledges and products in the public domain bear striking witness to the sophisticated, complex and heterogeneous relationships that specific Indigenous communities have with government agencies, the realms of intellectual property and copyright law, and both Indigenous and non-Indigenous publics in particular locales and contexts.

For all its clear-sightedness about the need to avoid romanticising either the resistance or the capitulation of Indigenous cultures to the onslaught of global efforts to extend and consolidate the privatisation of knowledge for the sake of profit, however, Who Owns Native Culture? remains frustrating in its ultimately conservative approach to the question of how Indigenous communities might balance cultural imperatives for protection, limit and control with the desire -- both within and beyond Indigenous groupings -- for unfettered access to aspects of both tangible and intangible cultural products in the arena of what Brown terms the 'global commons'. The 'global commons' is one name for that cultural space (at once pragmatic and ideal) in which the world's cultures might participate in the free exchange and circulation of ideas, knowledges, discoveries, remedies and understandings that can lead to productive hybridities and ameliorative prospects for the needs and demands of a globally conceived social and cultural order.

By contrast, Brown takes sustained aim at what he sees as the desire for 'institutions of surveillance, border protection, and cultural purification' that he argues characterises the 'Total Heritage Protection' paradigm (p 252) -- an absolutist position taken by some individuals and communities that advocate uncompromising Indigenous community control over all Indigenous products, whether material, intellectual, artistic, or historical. Brown's arguments are at their strongest when he lays out the ways in which advocates of Total Heritage Protection at times pursue policies that seek not only to limit unauthorised non-Indigenous access to and use of Indigenous knowledges and cultural products, but also to quash and erode intra-Indigenous diversity and dissent within particular locales and groupings. The borderlines and power struggles between whose version of a particularised 'Indigenous' should, or might, prevail in any given scenario is a sobering corrective to those who assume that harmony and consensus unremittingly characterise such debates within as well as beyond Indigenous communities.

Brown establishes early on an explicit commitment to the idea that no 'pure' or 'perfect' cultures exist; accordingly, he maintains that attempts to police cultural boundaries in an effort to promote radically separatist visions of cultural knowledge and control are at best instances of bad faith and at worst versions of the disingenuous manufacture of 'culture' that serve coded political and economic agendas. However, in counterposing what he sees as the excessive desire for limit of the Total Heritage Protection advocates with the correspondingly expansive desire for a 'global commons' in which Indigenous cultural knowledges can be shared through the negotiation of mutual respect by all parties, Brown falls prey to precisely the kind of simplistic oppositions that he elsewhere rightly critiques throughout Who Owns Native Culture?

This is so in part because, while he charts many of the successes achieved through various legislative and local reforms that allow Indigenous peoples greater control over cultural and heritage management, Brown is less able, or willing, to document the ways in which the same frameworks continue to offer at times intractable obstacles, or fail to provide meaningful solutions, to Indigenous people's struggle to prevent or minimise the constraints occasioned by the long reach of global capital and neo-colonialist utilitarianism (disguised as economic 'pragmatism') to the choices that Indigenous peoples might wish to make with regard to the disposition and management of their own conceptual paradigms of cultural wealth. One example of this occurs in an otherwise fascinating and worthwhile discussion (chapter 5) of the complexities of land, religion, sports tourism and the vexed 'multiple use' status of Wyoming's Bear Lodge/Devils Tower -- a volcanic monolith of great religious and cultural significance to at least half a dozen Indigenous Native American tribes. Native American interests in this site require not only access to it, but an atmosphere in which to conduct religious ceremonies unpunctuated by the enthusiastic whooping of climbers and casual tourists who regularly test their skills of ascent on the nearly vertical sides of this volcanic outcrop. Local Indigenous efforts to limit access by climbers and other non-Indigenous visitors during peak periods of cyclical worship have been fiercely contested by a dizzying array of non-Indigenous special-interest groups. While limited compromises have been reached regarding rights and conditions of usage, the success of these lies, in Brown's view, largely in the fact that they are voluntary rather than coercively imposed by legislative fiat. Conspicuous by its absence is a comparative discussion of Uluru/Ayers Rock in Australia's Centre -- arguably the most famous of all the nation's iconic tourist destinations -- and the fact that, despite a clear legislative framework in which both ownership and management of Uluru have been handed back to its Indigenous Anangu owners for nearly two decades, the parallel issue of those who continue to ascend Uluru against Anangu wishes remains a potent source of conflict between the economy of cultural tourism and the cultural economy of Indigenous efforts to reclaim authority over land-based sacred sites.

Who Owns Native Culture? is carefully argued, thought-provoking, and good to think against as well as with. Its comparative breadth and detailed case studies make for compelling reading; while these will fail to sway sceptical readers (including me) toward the liberalist glosses of power and politics that Brown brings to his analyses of how Indigenous cultures are positioned in relation to dominant global formations, the text's virtues lie in part in its author's willingness to stand up and be morally as well as intellectually accountable for the centrist path consistently charted throughout this work.

Citation

• Michele Grossman. 'Review: Who Owns Native Culture? by Michael F Brown' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), December 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 23 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• The creations of native peoples permeate everyday life in settler nations, from the design elements on our clothing to the plot lines of books we read to our children. Unfortunately, native communities rarely benefit materially from this use of their heritage, a situation that drives growing resistance to what some denounce as 'cultural theft'.
  
  Who Owns Native Culture? documents the efforts of indigenous peoples to redefine heritage as a protected resource. Michael Brown takes readers into settings where native peoples defend what they consider to be their cultural property: a courtroom in Darwin, Australia, where an Aboriginal artist and a clan leader bring suit against a textile firm that infringes sacred art; archives and museums in the United States, where Indian tribes seek control over early photographs and sound recordings collected in their communities; and the Mexican state of Chiapas, site of a bioprospecting venture whose legitimacy is questioned by native-rights activists.
  
  By focusing on the complexity of actual cases, Brown casts light on indigenous grievances in diverse fields - religion, art, sacred places, and botanical knowledge. He finds both genuine injustice and, among advocates for native peoples, a troubling tendency to mimic the privatising logic of major corporations.
  
  Brown proposes alternative strategies for defending the heritage of vulnerable native communities without blocking the open communication essential to the life of pluralist democracies. Who Owns Native Culture? is a lively, accessible introduction to questions of cultural ownership, group privacy, intellectual property, and the recovery of indigenous identities.