The goal of the Cultural Tourism Working Group (CTWG) is to explore intellectual property issues that emerge from heritage tourism around the world. Since the last update, the group has gathered for two team meetings, participated in two conferences and begun planning our Cultural Tourism Resource Reader in earnest.
CTWG co-chairs Dave Schaepe and Lena Mortensen, along with WG member Alexis Bunten and Stó:lo Nation Cultural Tourism and Events Coordinator Francine Douglas, organized two IPinCH sessions at the Stó:lo Nation’s Stó:lo People of the River Conference in Chilliwack, British Columbia, from May 31-June 2, 2013. The conference was well attended by local Stó:lo community members, academics and a number of IPinCH team members.
The conference began with a Cultural Tourism Workshop hosted by the CTWG that brought together community leaders, representatives of local tourism organizations, local government representatives and experts in culturally appropriate tourism development. Alexis Bunten, CTWG member and IPinCH project ethnographer, led the workshop, which featured a facilitated discussion about how to create Indigenous heritage initiatives while protecting intellectual property. Guest speaker Mark McKernan from “Alaska Native Voices” presented on his experience as a consultant to help Indigenous communities develop cultural tourism projects.
Following this, the CTWG organized a tourism-themed panel, with group members Lena Mortensen, Kristen Dobbin, Alexis Bunten, David Schaepe, David Stephenson and Rachel Giraudo giving presentations on their work in IPinCH. Videos of the workshop and conference presentations are now available on the IPinCH website.
On the final day, the Stó:lo Research and Resource Management Centre hosted a morning workshop for the team to meet and discuss future plans, and, especially, outline the next steps for developing the CTWG reader project.
Following from these plans, members of the CTWG gathered again in Albuquerque for the Society for Applied Anthropology meetings, March 17-22, 2014. They organized and participated in a session on “Intellectual Property Issues and Cultural Tourism: Developing Resources for Communities.” The session was chaired by Rachel Giraudo and included papers by Rachel and team members Lena Mortensen, Alexis Bunten (read by Robin Gray), David Stephenson, David Schaepe and Francine Douglas. The panel was a great opportunity to share preliminary topics, approaches, resources, and stories that will form the substance of the CTWG reader. Later at the conference, the team met again to move forward with the CTWG reader and other activities.
The Cultural Tourism Resource Reader is now the CTWG’s priority heading into the last year of IPinCH. The project is based around a story-telling model and will feature “stories” about experiences with tourism and tourism development from IPinCH team members about IPinCH community-based initiatives, case studies and other related projects. We envision these “tourism stories,” narrated in a casual or conversational tone, as a powerful way to organize and share ideas on good practices, stimulate discussion about how to communicate community protocols, and to help think through how to share culture with outsiders in a way that protects community intellectual property. Some of the CTWG team members have written up their own encounters, and we hope that other IPinCH team members will do the same. In order to collect more stories for this project, the WG sent out a survey in August 2014 to all IPinCH team members asking them about their interactions with cultural tourism.
This book project is still in development, but we look forward to producing an engaging reader that can serve as a resource for use by Indigenous and other communities wishing to develop tourism initiatives and for those seeking more information on the important intellectual property concerns involved in cultural tourism.
Photo: Members of the CTWG at the Stól:o People of the River conference, where the group organized a panel on Community-Based Cultural Tourism (photo: S. Carr-Locke).
