Māori Intellectual Property Rights and the Formation of Ethnic Boundaries

This article questions and contextualizes the emergence of a discourse of intellectual property rights in Māori society. It is argued that Māori claims regarding intellectual property function primarily to demarcate ethnic boundaries between Māori and non-Māori. Māori consider the reinforcement of ethnic boundaries necessary since they experience their society and distinctive way of life as endangered both by the foreign consumption or misappropriation of aspects of their authentic cultural forms and by the intrusion of foreign cultural elements. Following Simon Harrison (1999) it is argued that the first threat is often represented as an undesired form of cultural appropriation, piracy or theft, while the second threat is viewed as a form of cultural pollution. This argument is elaborated with a case-study of each so-called danger, namely a claim regarding native flora and fauna submitted to the Waitangi Tribunal, which is considered as an example of resistance against cultural appropriation, and the increasing hostility of Māori to foreign interest and research in Māori culture and society, which is analysed as an example of opposition to putative pollution. Over the past decade, the cultural renaissance of the New Zealand Māori has expanded into the legal regime of intellectual property rights. Māori people have not simply become more conscious and more proud of their cultural heritage, but their cultural traditions and the knowledge associated with them are increasingly cast as property of which the indigenous people of Aotearoa are the intellectual owners. Worldwide the discourse of intellectual property rights rapidly proliferated among indigenous peoples in the course of the 1990s. As early as 1991 this resulted a New Zealand Māori claim to the Waitangi Tribunal regarding indigenous forests and seven species of flora and fauna that are unique to New Zealand, namely the kūmara (sweet potato), pōhutukawa (New Zealand Christmas *University of Nijmegen. Email: [email protected] International Journal of Cultural Property (2009) 16:341–355. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 2009 International Cultural Property Society doi:10.1017/S0940739109990245