Who Owns an Ancestral Photo, Song, or Language?

Jane Anderson a professor in NYU’s Program in Museum Studies and Department of Anthropology, an intellectual property lawyer, and co-director of the intellectual property rights initiative Local Contexts, she has been working for decades with Native, First Nations, Indigenous, and Aboriginal communities all over the world—including the Passamaquoddy—to help them reconnect with cultural artifacts that have been lost, stolen, or misappropriated by a variety of entities, including museums and corporations.  A collaborative project with Kim Christen at Washington State University and with various Native American communities in the US—received its second grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in December 2018, and emerged out of Anderson’s frustration that while Indigenous intellectual property rights are frequently discussed by academics, Indigenous people still have no practical resources available to reclaim their culture.