Cultural property, aboriginal people, ethnobiology, legal status, laws.

This fascinating study describes efforts to define and protect traditional knowledge and the associated issues of access to genetic resources, from the negotiation of the Convention on Biological Diversity to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Nagoya Protocol. Drawing on the expertise of local specialists from around the globe, the chapters judiciously mix theory and empirical evidence to provide a deep and convincing understanding of traditional knowledge, innovation, access to genetic resources, and benefit sharing. Because traditional knowledge was understood in early negotiations to be subject to a property rights framework, these often became bogged down due to differing views on the rights involved. New models, developed around the notion of distributive justice and self-determination, are now gaining favor. This book suggests – through a discussion of theory and contemporary case studies from Brazil, India, Kenya and Canada – that a focus on distributive justice best advances the interests of indigenous peoples while also fostering scientific innovation in both developed and developing countries. Comprehensive as well as nuanced, Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge will be of great interest to scholars and students of law, political science, anthropology and geography. National and international policymakers and those interested in the environment, indigenous peoples' rights and innovation will find the book an enlightening resource.

This volume of the Indigenous Justice series explores the global effects of marginalizing Indigenous law. The essays in this book argue that European-based law has been used to force Indigenous peoples to assimilate, has politically disenfranchised Indigenous communities, and has destroyed traditional Indigenous social institutions. European-based law not only has been used as a tool to infringe upon Indigenous human rights, it also has been used throughout global history to justify environmental injustices, treaty breaking, and massacres. The research in this volume focuses on the resurgence of traditional law, tribal–state relations in the United States, laws that have impacted Native American women, laws that have failed to protect Indigenous sacred sites, the effect of international conventions on domestic laws, and the role of community justice organizations in operationalizing international law. While all of these issues are rooted in colonization, Indigenous peoples are using their own solutions to demonstrate the resilience, persistence, and innovation of their communities. With chapters focusing on the use and misuse of law as it pertains to Indigenous peoples in North America, Latin America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, this book offers a wide scope of global injustice. Despite proof of oppressive legal practices concerning Indigenous peoples worldwide, this book also provides hope for amelioration of colonial consequences.

This collection deals with an ancient institution in Eastern Polynesia called the rahui, a form of restricting access to resources and/or territories. While tapu had been extensively discussed in the scientific literature on Oceanian anthropology, the rahui is quite absent from secondary modern literature. This situation is all the more problematic because individual actors, societies, and states in the Pacific are readapting such concepts to their current needs, such as environment regulation or cultural legitimacy. This book assembles a comprehensive collection of current works on the rahui from a legal pluralism perspective. This study as a whole underlines the new assertion of identity that has flowed from the cultural dimension of the rahui. Today, rahui have become a means for indigenous communities to be fully recognised on a political level. Some indigenous communities choose to restore the rahui in order to preserve political control of their territory or, in some cases, to get it back. For the state, better control of the rahui represents a way of asserting its legitimacy and its sovereignty, in the face of this reassertion by indigenous communities.

Provides an overview of Native American philosophies, practices, and case studies and demonstrates how Traditional Ecological Knowledge provides insights into the sustainability movement.

Discusses the suitability of mainstream forms of intellectual propety rights to indigenous knowledge and efforts to reconcile the Western concept of intellectual property with indigenous knowledge.