Copyrighting culture: Tulalips assert rights to stories

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, April 14, 2007

TULALIP – As a boy, Bernie Gobin was certain that a monster in the forest would snatch him up if he didn’t come home before dark.

His grandmother, Nancy Jones, warned him time and again of the danger.

“Ts’emekwes,” she said fiercely, conjuring an endless history of Indian legend in one ancient Lushootseed word.

Sasquatch.

It was the 1930s.

Time and again, Gobin barreled into his grandmother’s home, either mud-streaked from an afternoon beneath the shade of giant cedars or salt-caked from chasing fish in the shallows of Tulalip Bay.

The boy’s playtime was over.

It was the time to listen to the stories.

He sat down every night with his brothers, sisters and cousins, and their grandmother told them stories. Each one had a moral.

Ts’emekwes reminded Gobin, now 76, of his ancestry, and brought him inside to hear more.

Gobin can’t remember everything she told him.

He wishes he could. It is the stories she shared that would help keep Tulalip tribal culture alive.

When she died, decades ago, she took with her a wealth of ancient wisdom.

Every day now, more disappears. As elders pass away, children are distracted from the lessons that would have guided them in tribal culture.

The pieces that remain are weathered memories.

A team from the Tulalip Tribes’ Cultural and Natural Resources Department is working to plumb this knowledge before little is left.

Jones told her stories at a time when the Bureau of Indian Affairs made it federal policy to extinguish anything Indian, tribal elder Wayne Williams said.

“The languages were prohibited, the songs were prohibited, the dances were prohibited,” he said. “Anything Indian, the old religions, the old ways – stamped out.”

Now, tribal leaders are drafting laws they hope will protect knowledge unique to the Tulalip Tribes in ways current copyright laws don’t.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

If they don’t act quickly to preserve what the elders remember of traditional life, Tulalip culture will die, some tribal leaders say.

Tribal culture – sacred things such as stories and songs – is diluted when used inappropriately.

Federal and international trademark and copyright laws don’t account for the knowledge of tribal culture.

“We want to create tribal law to protect tribal heritage,” Tulalip Tribes Policy Analyst Preston Hardison said.

First, they must determine what they need to protect.

Through interviews with tribal elders, they are gathering memories of the life that once was: the location of a trail that led to a berry thicket; the Lushootseed name of a bend in the Snohomish River; the meadow where elk rested.

They’re also documenting the story of change: When did the salmon runs first falter? Which medicine disappeared when the last of a native plant was hacked away? When did rays of sunshine first penetrate a forest floor known for its constant shade?

“We want to paint three pictures of the world,” Hardison said. “The world as their ancestors reported it, the present state of the environment and where they would like to go in the future.”

Hardison is part of a team led by tribal member Terry Williams that is working to create laws to protect what the elders are sharing – the tribe’s intellectual property and traditional knowledge.

It includes songs, dances, herbal remedies, even tribal versions of historical accounts.

The law will also protect physical property on and off the Tulalip reservation, including plants the tribes used for medicine and food; towering cedar trees, where they would find strips of the bark for clothes and baskets; tree trunks from which they would carve canoes.

Experts say it will be the first law of its kind – written specifically for tribal culture.

The protected information will be used as a compass for the tribes’ environmental polices.

It will also be used as a legal tool in the tribes’ claim that the state has violated its treaty with the federal government by damaging the environment.

Tribal leaders say the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, in which 21 tribes ceded about a fifth of what is now Washington state, guarantees healthy salmon runs, flourishing cedar forests, vibrant elk herds – all the things that define tribal culture.

When the tribes met the state in court in February, state attorney Fronda Woods said there’s no evidence that its actions caused the environment to change.

The tribes’ traditional knowledge could be that evidence, Williams said.

Elders’ stories could become evidence that proves how much tribal life has changed since the treaty was signed.

Tribal members believe that the region’s natural resources must thrive as they once did for tribal culture to survive.

“We could be out of ability to practice our culture within the next 25 years,” Williams said. “Unless we actively go out and manage these resources, they’re just not going to be there.”

The Cultural Stories program began in 1999. It was the tribes’ first foray into the formal collection of traditional knowledge.

Fifteen elders were asked to talk about their families and share their oral histories.

With each word, memories and places took shape. Each revealed something about the tribes’ history and resources.

“We asked, ‘How have things changed over your lifetime? What was it like 50 years ago when you gathered?’ ” said Julia Gold, a tribal employee who coordinated the project.

Stan Jones, 80, a longtime tribal leader, was among those interviewed.

“When the tide came in, the table was set,” he said. “The shellfish, the salmon were there. Game was in abundance.”

When Gobin was a boy, he followed his grandmother as she waded through streams and hiked in the forest. She was teaching him, he said, even though he didn’t realize it at the time.

“I wasn’t paying much attention to what she was doing,” he said. “I wish I had.”

He remembers, yet not enough. He grieves over what’s been lost.

“We used to gather Indian tea, for colds, to make us healthier,” he said. “It was over by where we lived.”

“It’s been developed now, and the Indian tea is gone.”

Each bit of information the elders share will be entered into a database Hardison is designing. Stories will be linked to information about cultural practices and concepts.

The database will be layered.

Some information will be available to the general public. Other areas will be open to all tribal members; others, only to specific families.

“We can make the decision about how much to reveal and who to reveal it to,” Hardison said.

Still, the database will be a “pale reflection of reality,” Hardison said.

“It’s just a tool,” he said. “We’re really after keeping the knowledge living on the ground. There are many spiritual things you cannot store. They must be orally transmitted.”

The very act of writing down sacred stories and history is offensive to some elders.

“Once you write things down, you’ve lost your authority, your control. It’s out of your hands,” Hardison said.

Shrubs are stripped of their berries and trampled. Ancient designs are mass-produced onto postcards for tourists. Forests are chopped away.

Tribal members want a law that will protect their stories even if they’re never recorded.

Some of what they’re sharing is being recorded, but much of it will be passed down in the tribes’ oral tradition.

“There’s this misconception that tribes have no concept of property, but they have complex property systems,” he said.

Stories can be sacred property of the one who tells them. Some information is owned collectively by a tribe; other knowledge belongs to a single family.

Yet for tribal members, “owning” something means that they have been charged by the creator with guarding it. They can’t sell or trade sacred knowledge; they must protect it.

“The creator requires them to guard things,” Hardison said. “For every property right, there is a property obligation.”

American Indian tribes and other indigenous groups have historically had very little control over mainstream patents and copyrights, said Rudolph Ryser, director of the Center for World Indigenous Studies in Olympia.

That’s changing.

“There’s an increased recognition that they themselves need to create an international agreement that allows for the protection of indigenous knowledge,” Ryser said.

But Williams has led the Tulalip Tribes far beyond other indigenous groups.

The World Intellectual Property Rights Organization, a technical arm of the United Nations, wants to use the Tulalip law as a model for other indigenous groups worldwide.

Williams recently submitted a draft of the law to the U.S. departments of state and interior to ensure that the legislation the tribe adopts has the best chance of getting federal support.

“At this point, these are aspirational laws,” Hardison said. “There must be reciprocal agreements; there should be some quid pro quo.”

Bureau of Indian Affairs officials said they weren’t aware that the tribes planned to seek federal enforcement.

There aren’t any international laws that protect traditional knowledge, said Molly Torsen, vice president of the International Intellectual Property Institute in Washington, D.C.

Many countries’ copyright laws don’t consider traditional knowledge.

For example, American copyright laws require that a work be attributed to a specific author. Often, traditional knowledge is passed down over generations and no one person can claim it.

Still, some countries have begun to recognize the intellectual property of their indigenous communities.

In Venezuela, a 1999 re-write of the national constitution guaranteed the “inalienable rights” of indigenous groups, including the right to protect and practice their culture, and regain ownership of their land.

Last year, Bolivian voters elected Evo Morales as the country’s first indigenous president.

While indigenous groups are fighting for recognition and cultural rights, they’re also defending themselves from what Ryser believes are predatory researchers.

It’s not just stories, ancient medicines and spiritual practices that are at risk, Ryser said. The genetic code of indigenous groups has also become a hot commodity.

In 2000, an Australian company secured the rights to the gene pool of the people of Tonga, claiming that the DNA of that isolated group could offer secrets to curing certain types of cancer.

The project stalled when advocates complained.

Similar situations have occurred in Iceland and Estonia. Biotech companies call them “laboratory communities.”

Last year, Alaskan tribes challenged a National Geographic project to collect DNA samples from indigenous groups worldwide. The project was to trace human migration, but tribes said it could undermine their culture. They believe they’ve lived in Alaska since time began.

Nearly a century ago, Tulalip tribal leader William Shelton knew that his culture was fading fast.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs had outlawed the tribes’ longhouse ceremonies, potlatches and most other cultural practices.

The world around them was changing fast, and tribal members were losing that which set them apart.

Shelton feared his culture would be entirely forgotten if he didn’t take action.

In 1914, he asked the bureau for permission to carve a totem pole.

Bureau leaders said he could, if in return he shared the stories symbolized in the pole for publication.

Shelton agreed.

In a preface to the stories, he wrote, “I went around gathering the old Indians and talking to them in the genuine Indian language to make them understand why I wanted their totems carved on the pole to show our history.”

Each totem – the sacred spirit that comes to an Indian to offer direction – would be on display, for all to see.

Students at the Indian school helped Shelton carve the pole, said Wayne Williams, Shelton’s grandson.

Later, when the totem’s center began to rot, the pole was cut in half. The top half, with an eagle presiding at the tip, is on display outside Tulalip Elementary School.

“William (Shelton) was a great leader,” Gobin said. “He could see in the future. He preserved something that otherwise would have been lost.”

A century ago, Shelton used a tree trunk and carving tools to preserve his culture.

The Tulalip Tribes are doing the same thing today. Instead of using knives and a cedar tree, they’re using computers and legal codes.

Shelton’s words ring true for Terry Williams and the others working to keep Tulalip culture alive.

In a preface to the totem stories, Shelton wrote:

“You can see the totem pole that I carved out with the courage of the older Indians that are living, to show our young children … who never saw anything like that before.”

Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.