Indigenous people have been persecuted for centuries by the colonizers and in the status quo IP does little to take into account their knowledge based systems
Drahos and Frankel 12, Professor Peter Drahos is an Australian academic and researcher specializing in the areas of intellectual property and global business regulation amongst others. Susy Rebecca Frankel FRSNZ is a New Zealand law academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the Victoria University of Wellington. (“Indigenous Peoples’ Innovation and Intellectual Property: The Issues”, ANU Press, 2012, Accessed on JSTOR via University of Michigan Library System, DOA: 6/29/24)//LFS – LMH
When European states colonised countries, the land ownership systems of the original inhabitants of those countries generally underwent a radical transformation21 or, as in the case of Australia, were extinguished altogether.22 Unable to find land rights justice within settler societies, some indigenous groups from countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand took their cause to seats of power in Europe. For example, delegations of Māori travelled to England in 1882, 1884, 1914 and 1924 in an attempt to meet with monarchs.23 Among the petitions organised by the Aboriginal leader William Cooper was a petition of 1937 addressed to King George V. It contained 1,814 signatures of Aboriginal people, and asked for Aboriginal representation in the Australian Parliament.24 In 1923 Deskaheh, a chief of the Cayuga, travelled to the League of Nations as a spokesman for the Six Nations of the Iroquois League.25 In essence he wanted the League of Nations to help the Iroquois League gain the sovereign independence and territory that had been agreed to by King George III but was now opposed by the Canadian Government. Anthony Fernando, whose mother was Aboriginal, left Australia for Europe in the early 1900s. Deported from Italy to Britain in 1923 for distributing pamphlets declaring the extermination of indigenous people by the British in Australia, he spent his days in England in sole protest, at one stage regularly appearing outside Australia House in London in a coat covered with toy white skeletons.26 The skeletons, he said, depicted the fate of his people. These and other attempts like them generally ended in failure. The Australian authorities never forwarded Cooper’s petition. Deskaheh left Geneva without success, and died alone in New York in 1926. Fernando died in a mental hospital in Essex in 1946. Indigenous people nevertheless persisted with the strategy of globalising their fight for justice. The evolution of the UN system, which began with the United Nations Charter of 1945, created new opportunities for them. The language of human rights treaties seemed full of evocative promise: ‘All peoples have the right of self-determination’ (Article 1.1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The indigenous networks of political mobilisation and negotiation that evolved around indigenous peoples’ issues concentrated on developing a broad rights-based agenda at the highest levels of international law-making.27 However, IP remained a technically obscure subject and there was little understanding of its connections with indigenous knowledge systems. This, as the next section makes clear, began to change slowly in the 1980s.