Indigenous data protection system to branch out into Māori communitites

Monday, 11 October 2021

Associate Professor Māui Hudson is confident a labelling system will protect indigenous interests in knowledge circulating in an online world.

An indigenous knowledge protection system is soon to knock on the doors of iwi and hapū.

The global project between Waikato University’s Associate Professor Māui Hudson (Te Whakatōhea, Ngā Ruahine, Te Mahurehure) and New York researchers landed a $750,000 grant for the Enrich project, which will be used to support indigenous communities to protect their rights on their knowledge and data.

Hudson, co-director of Enrich and director of Te Kotahi Research Institute at the University of Waikato, said indigenous intellectual knowledge was an area that had been mined by researchers without much thought given to the rights of the groups behind the knowledge.

To combat this, over the past 10 years-plus, the project had been developing a labelling system that connects to research, ensuring anyone using the information could see an indigenous population has an interest.

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The more than 20 traditional knowledge labels allow the person who sees the information to track it back to its original iwi or hapū, with indicators of its ethical use and possible collaborative opportunities, Hudson said.

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“It’s a significant issue and it’s been an issue for a long time. Our artistic expression, our cultural traditions connected to iwi or Māori people, they’re able to be copied and turned into a product.

“The thing that’s making it more pressing is the digital environment and that everything can be shared so quickly, so far.

“What we’re trying to do is disclose that there is some indigenous interest in this.”

Tikanga Māori and Māori intellectual property expert Karaitiana Taiuru is concerned the labelling won’t cater to the needs of Māori.

The grant from Andrew W Mellon Foundation will train local facilitators to help iwi and hapū engage with the system and apply their labels to information, Hudson said.

He said it’s not just traditional data, but as information is discovered or used by organisations that involved Māori that also needed to be shared with iwi.

The project has been working with indigenous peoples across Canada, the United States and Australia to apply digital labels to datasets, confirming their origins and ensuring shared benefit from the use which was often harnessed for commercial gain, Hudson said.

However, there were still many kinks to work out, such as how the labels will follow information through publications.

But in its current state any labels noticed on a dataset or publication relied on the goodwill of the researcher, Māori intellectual property expert Karaitiana Taiuru said.

With no legislation or policy connected to the system, the labels merely announce the interest, unlike the long-running Wai 262 claim launched in 1991.

The Wai 262 claims brought to the Waitangi Tribunal alleged the Crown failed to protect Māori interests in a wide range of cultural knowledge and practices, as well as in their relationships with indigenous flora and fauna.

It sparked a whole-of-government approach to consider the issues raised by claimants and the Waitangi Tribunal in the Wai 262 inquiry.

Wai 262 was the way to protect indigenous interest, Taiuru said, not the labelling system.

He argued the labelling system was not asked for by iwi, and while it would be invaluable to other indigenous peoples overseas, Māori could rely on Te Tiriti o Waitangi to support their calls for protection through Wai 262.

“The claimants and their children are still trying to figure out how to work through it all. There’s hundreds of people on that with multiple organisations, so I struggle to see how a small academic group could.”

Taiuru said all hapū and iwi had their own ways of protecting their knowledge.

“The knowledge is definitely safe, but in order to get further protection for our knowledge we need to get Wai 262 sorted out.

“Academia has had a habit of putting indigenous perspective into a Western framework and that’s what’s happening with the labels.

However, if the Wai 262 consultations found the Hudson’s labelling system was the way forward, Taiuru said he would support it as it was coming from Māori themselves.