Bootlegacy: Liz Nevis on intellectual and cultural property

This is me in 1994 with treasure hunter Mel Fisher, who salvaged the wreck of the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senora de Atocha. Mrs. Fisher customarily took pictures like these whenever a visitor to their Treasure Museum (now the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum) in Key West* bought a gold 8-reale coin […]

Stories handed down orally are a form of cultural property that international organizations like WIPO and even the WTO are working on protecting. I’ll go into that some more in later posts. Today, it’s the slab of concrete on which I’ll set up a small soapbox (which I promise not to do very […]

Appropriation of minority religious or other cultural images by outsiders - often, though not always, as a status symbol or fashion statement - is a sharpening point of controversy in some parts of the world. People from the originating cultures are upset for any or all of a number of reasons:

Some images are traditionally […]

Well, OK, I’ve already broken my rule about spending more than 4 hours on a post. I set out to write about something told to me orally by a usually reliable source, but despite Googling my fingers to the bone I can’t seem to verify it anywhere - at least not online, for free, […]

Road verges. Windbreaks. The vicinities of abandoned fields, market grounds, and storage sheds. When most people think of biodiversity conservation, these are not the places that come to mind. Much more familiar are wild-land conservation areas - rainforests, wetlands, tundra, even tidepools and undersea canyons - places virtually untouched by human […]

Everywhere they go in Indian country, the Wanabi are despised and ridiculed.  They seem to get everything wrong.  They never take advantage of a good opportunity to shut up.  They ask stupid questions and then hear what they want to hear, no matter what the answer is.  They have no dress sense.  They call the regalia […]