Top-down methods fail – further empower oppressors

While international and national regimes have extended some protections to the cultural property of indigenous peoples, in many respects the results have not corresponded to their needs. Although there has been some participation by indigenous peoples in the development of these laws, the result has, nevertheless, largely been the creation of top-down, international norms that have yet to take shape and that are rarely sufficiently multi-faceted to encompass the differences among indigenous groups. 94 As such, the laws promulgated often are either too broad or too narrow to adequately capture the distinctions and nuances among indigenous groups and their particular cultural properties. 95 Another problem with the top-down model is that it imports Western intellectual property regimes into indigenous communities. 96 Academics, activists, and indigenous peoples alike view such importation with great skepticism. One scholar warns that great care must be taken not to [*87] impose dominant legal systems wholesale upon traditional knowledge communities: "traditional knowledge deserves and requires greater recognition and protection through legal means, without unduly compromising its essence." 97 Some scholars claim that extending Westernized intellectual property rights to indigenous communities constitutes neo-colonialism, 98 in that it simply borrows the language and methods of the oppressors and, in doing so, further empowers the oppressors. 99 Others maintain that addressing the problem of appropriation, distortion, and destruction of cultural property with a new form of property rights is just a "Western form of problem solving." 100 Whether these particular criticisms are on point, it is clear that the core motivations behind the creation and design of Western intellectual property rights, as well as the paradigm to which the protected knowledge must correspond, simply do not fit indigenous communities. 101 It is therefore logical to challenge the efficacy of imposing on indigenous groups today the same intellectual property structure that has failed them in the past.