The first thing I should clarify is that we take our knowledge from our indigenous members—indigenous academic staff—who have explained the problems to us. We are trying to convey that along, but they will be the main spokespeople on this and will bring forward the concerns more directly. I would not want to appear to be pre-empting that or speaking on behalf of another community.
We have learned that western notions of intellectual property set out in the Copyright Act or the Patent Act, with very precise definitions of individual or corporate ownership and very precise timelines for the creation of knowledge and how long that knowledge lasts, do not fit at all well with the different kinds of indigenous knowledge systems that exist within aboriginal communities. The mix between those two things—our Copyright Act and traditional approaches to indigenous knowledge—is very difficult.
One particular example that came to our attention was that of a historian in New Brunswick who, in the seventies, recorded stories of elders. When the community wanted to access those stories, recordings, and transcripts, they were not able to, because copyright ownership in those stories was claimed by the person who had made the recordings. It's now section 18 of the act, I think, that gives those rights to the recordist. In this case, the community was not able to access the stories. The elders who had told the stories had died. Most of their children had died. It is just now that they have finally broken through and been able to publish these stories.
That was a specific example of one small part of the act, which in that instance caused real damage to that community, real sorrow and heartbreak. I believe that same situation has happened in other places.
There are other situations where, because the copyright requires a specific creator—someone to claim ownership—and a specific timeline, it doesn't fit well with notions of community ownership or with notions of ownership since time immemorial, going back and going forward.
We would not purport to say exactly what has to be done. We know there are experts and elders within indigenous communities who can speak to this. We just want to put our support behind them in making the changes necessary to protect indigenous knowledge.