Thank you.
My name is Camille Callison and I am honoured to be here today presenting to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. Thank you for the opportunity to join you today, and thank you to the committee members for the important work that you do on behalf of all Canadians, including indigenous Canadians, first nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples of Canada.
I also want to acknowledge the elders, my fellow panellists, and all the good people gathered here today.
I am honoured to be here today in this historic gathering place where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet, currently known as The Forks, and to be a guest living here in Treaty 1 territory within the heart of the Red River Métis homeland known as Winnipeg.
My name is Camille Callison and I am from the Crow clan, the Tsesk iye, of the Tahltan Nation located in northern B.C., Yukon and Alaska. I'm presenting here today as an individual, so I wanted to introduce myself.
As my late grand uncle Robert Quock taught me, we belong to the land, so it's important for me no matter where I am to acknowledge where I come from. We are the people of the Stikine River, Canada's Grand Canyon, and the home of the sacred headwaters where the Stikine, Skeena and Nass headwaters flow from, creating northwest B.C.'s biggest salmon-producing rivers.
On October 18, 1910, also known to us as Tahltan Day, my great grandfather Grand Chief Nanok Quock, another chief, and 80 Tahltan witnesses delivered the Tahltan declaration signed and delivered to the representatives of the Canadian governments and the British crown, which states that we have never ceded or surrendered our land at the cost of our own blood from time immemorial. This is still true today, and we continue to rely on the wealth of our land for subsistence and what lies below it for economic opportunities and employment.
I hope to honour my heritage today by facilitating a better understanding of why the Copyright Act needs to respect, affirm, and recognize indigenous peoples' ownership of their traditional and living indigenous knowledge, thereby facilitating respectful relationships between indigenous people and Canada.
For the purposes of this presentation, “indigenous” refers to the first nations, Métis, and Inuit people of Canada.
Currently I am the indigenous services librarian and liaison librarian for anthropology, native studies and social work, and a Ph.D student in anthropology, at the University of Manitoba. I also am the vice-chair and indigenous representative on the board of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, CFLA-FCAB, and in that capacity I chair the indigenous matters committee and I'm a member of the copyright committee.
I also sit on numerous other boards, including the indigenous matters section of the International Federation of Library Associations, the indigenous advisory circle of the National Film Board, and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, the Canada Memory of the World Register, and the Sectoral Commission, Culture, Communication and Information of UNESCO.
I'd like to begin today by talking about why it's important that indigenous knowledge be affirmed, respected, and protected under the Copyright Act. Indigenous knowledge is dynamic and has been sustained and transformed throughout time. Indigenous people continue to produce new knowledge in new media, including the music, theatre, dance, photographs, film, poetry, literary expressions, language applications, blogs, social media, and digital collections, etc.
Library and archives and other cultural memory institutions often hold indigenous knowledge and traditional cultural expressions in their collection as a result of research or appropriation or participation with indigenous communities and authors. In some cases, under the Canadian intellectual property regime, indigenous people from whom that knowledge originated and who are the traditional intellectual property holders have inappropriately lost their ownership rights. Who holds the legal copyright to the knowledge or cultural expressions under Canadian copyright is often contrary to indigenous notions of copyright ownership.
Parallel to western culture, indigenous people regard unauthorized use of their cultural expressions as theft. The indigenous world view includes the understanding that indigenous knowledge should only be transferred with the owner's permission from the originating people, and should be within that method of transmission.
As Canada works toward reconciliation, a fair and balanced intellectual property system works for everyone, including indigenous peoples.
In their knowledge systems, indigenous people have developed this wealth of indigenous knowledge that they rightly wish to protect under their constitutional rights as Canadians. They also wish to create their own knowledge protocols and have those protected under the Copyright Act. Therefore, Canada needs to acknowledge indigenous people to maintain, control, protect, and develop traditional knowledge and traditional knowledge expressions within our current intellectual property right regime in order to access, use, and protect indigenous knowledge by developing appropriate protocols with indigenous people. Essentially, reconciliation is about establishing respectful relationships with indigenous people.
I'm noticing the time, so I'm going to skip ahead in my speech and talk about the protection of indigenous knowledge and the truth and reconciliation committee that was formed in 2016 to address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action. I'll talk about our recommendation 8, which asked the Canadian government to affirm and protect indigenous knowledge under the existing Copyright Act.
I want to recommend that indigenous knowledge be respected in the public domain, and that we do that in keeping with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, particularly article 31. I join with CFLA-FCAB and its indigenous knowledge and copyright statement that was released last week in asking that the copyright reform “respect, affirm, and recognize indigenous people's ownership of their traditional and living respective indigenous knowledge.” This would allow for Canada's diverse indigenous people to develop indigenous knowledge and cultural expression protocol agreements that reflect their diverse cultural heritage and traditions. One nation's protocol concerning the sharing of knowledge and cultural expression will be different from another's, so there needs to be room left for indigenous nations to work with their elders and knowledge keepers to develop these protocols.
Meduh—thank you, in English— for the opportunity to speak with you today. I ask that you join me and other Canadians on the path towards reconciliation. I ask that you walk, not in front of me or behind me, but that you walk beside indigenous people to create a new Canada where all people are treated equally and are respected fairly under the law. I welcome the opportunity to answer questions you may have.