Indigenous Intellectual Property: An Interrupted Intergenerational Conversation

Historically, Indigenous artistic, cultural, and societal expression has been identified and examined within Canadian or international legal regimes. This book identifies Indigenous intellectual property concerns as an Indigenous legal issue to be taken seriously within specific Indigenous legal orders. Indigenous Intellectual Property opens up complex discussions about existing Indigenous intellectual property law, and avoids the tendency to pigeonhole Indigenous intellectual property into a Western legal model.

Drawing on diverse case studies, this book considers the existing laws in the Gitxsan, Secwepemc, and Hupacasath (Nuu-chah-nulth) legal orders, as well as from the Solomon Islands and Hawai’i. The case studies are grounded in their respective legal and oral histories, and contextualized within a broader discussion of Indigenous law, addressing issues of colonial myths, shrinking conceptions of Indigenous law, common resistances to Indigenous property and law, and important connections between Indigenous law and governance and citizenship.

The book carefully considers how the governance and civic value of intellectual property points to the unsuitability of the current state and international intellectual property legal regimes to many Indigenous intellectual property concerns. Ultimately, Indigenous Intellectual Property reveals the various ways in which to identify and understand law within Indigenous societies – through narrative and story analysis, observations of practices and ceremonies, and political and legal ordering.

Val Napoleon is a professor, the director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit, and the Law Foundation Chair of Indigenous Justice and Governance in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.


Rebecca Johnson is a professor of law and the associate director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.


Richard Overstall is a lawyer with a particular interest acting for indigenous groups constituted under their own laws.


Debra McKenzie is a research coordinator in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.