The dockets are rather slow, probably because of the holidays.   I apologize in advance to all who were looking for new updates on case law.  This offers a good opportunity, on the other hand, to catch up on some of the academic work I haven’t had the chance to address in the past few weeks. Danielle Conway-Jones, a professor of law at University of Hawaii at Manoa, has posted a thought piece at SSRN that was originally published in 2006, so file this in the “new to me” category. In “Safeguarding Hawaiian Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Heritage: Supporting the Right to Self-Determination and Preventing the Commodification of Culture,” Professor Conway-Jones argues that providing “Western” incentive structures to advance Hawaiian tradtional knowledge is ineffectual, and may even be fundamentally inconsistent with Hawaiian traditional knowledge itself.

48 How. L.J. 737, 741-42 (2005):

As an initial matter, when academics speak of traditional knowledge or folklore of Indigenous Peoples, they speak of genetic resources, indigenous creations, indigenous practices, and possibly oral accounts of spiritual stories.  Interestingly enough, whenever Western academics come together to discuss this topic, they usually find themselves speaking to each other without the benefit of attendance and participation of traditional healers, cultural practitioners, and elders.  Even more interesting is the heavy emphasis by many academics on the significance of trade and trade related aspects of traditional knowledge and folklore.  Typically, the conversation engaged in by these groups of Western individuals or organizations focus on one of several goals: defining folklore or traditional knowledge from a Western perspective: providing model protections for traditional knowledge from a Western perspective, presumably under existing intellectual property regimes; protecting traditional knowledge or folklore collections owned by Western art museums and other dealers in antiquities; balancing the economic and research needs of multinational corporations and their governments with the asserted rights of Indigenous Peoples in their traditional knowledge; and protecting traditional knowledge in the face of widespread and continued efforts at globalization.

These efforts may seem necessary to the eduction of those in control of the Western intellectual property regime when considering how Western policies of intellectual property ownership impact Indigenous Peoples, but in observing the protocol and practices of Native Hawaiians, these efforts are irrelevant to Native Hawaiian responsibility to protect and perpetuate traditional knowledge and cultural heritage.  In fact, the more time and effort spent on analyzing methods to converge Western intellectual property regimes with Indigenous Peoples’ traditional knowledge just brings more attention to the issue that any attempt at convergence creates a breeding ground for the comodification of culture and, thus, magnifies the reality that Western intellectual property laws promote economic and cultural oppression.  From an observer’s perspective, to do justice to the issues and concerns facing Native Hawaiians and the world’s Indigenous Peoples in the information age, it is imperative that the rhetoric and discourse for protecting and safeguarding traditional knowledge be cast in terms of the Native Hawaiian and Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews, not from the Western perspective, which idolizes trade, individualism, and radical free markets.