Newest Case Study: Secwepemc Territorial Authority Honoring Ownership of Tangible / Intangible Culture

Published: 
Jul 30, 2010

The IPinCH Steering Committee is pleased to announce our latest case study, developed by Brian Noble (Dalhousie University and IPinCH Co-investigator) and Arthur Manuel (Secwepemcul’w, INET Spokesperson).  

This community-based study will outline approaches to “cultural heritage” encounters within Secwepemc territory, examining what it would look like were we to fully accept and act upon the premise that Secwepemc Peoples’ have economic, political, and legal authority within their territory. 

Obligations surrounding Free Prior Informed Consent will be key to this conversation. The research will involve Secwepemc people from Neskonlith, Adams Lake, and Splats’in bands and a group of established social, legal, and political scholars. By way of respectful community-based circle discussions taking place in Secwepemc territory, supported by documentary research, we will begin by considering the pragmatic case of a Secwepemc Ancestral Burial site at Pritchard, B.C. which caused CP Rail to halt local construction work. Specifics of the case will help us think and talk about how researchers and others might (a) most respectfully relate with Secwepemc people concerning tangible-intangible culture, (b) develop fruitful scholarly and/or cultural-economic collaborations, while (c) fully honoring Secwepemec Peoples assertions of Territorial Authority. The study contributes to IPinCH objectives by: (1) generating community-based reports toward the IPinCH Knowledge Base, in the area of decolonizing practices of political authority pertaining to Indigenous Peoples’ IP and CH, (2) offering analytic complements to other IPinCH studies by integrating Territorial-political authority with inter-cultural practices and relations to land; (3) generating robust stories and dialogues that can give guidance to future projects seeking territorially-appropriate collaborative research relationships around intangible and tangible culture and questions of ownership, (4) advancing strong ethics of informed consent based in inter-political relations on the land, and (5) aiding First Nations and scholars by outlining a set of case-derived practical and mutually supportive ways to discuss and implement Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination and authority.