Control over cultural practices and intellectual property is a necessity in a world where Western understandings dominate and coopt indigenous culture under the guise of globalization

The unchecked expansion of European nations since the sixteenth century has signalled over 400 years of significant change for the world's Indigenous' peoples. This process of colonisation did not end with the arrival of European people but persisted as European goods, European technology and European beliefs perpetuated the process of invasion. Globalisation threatens to accelerate this process of colonisation. Networks that were once restricted to individual communities, nations or continents are becoming globalised through the latest innovations in communication technologies. With the advent of these technologies and the extreme mobility of modern peoples, the geographic boundaries that formerly shaped a people's understandings of themselves and the world are collapsing. In the rhetoric of transnational corporations and markets, globalisation entails the removal of limitations, allowing the exchange of ideas across boundaries by people from all walks of life. In reality, mass tourism is shrinking the world, bringing once-distant peoples quite literally face to face. Telecommunications technologies such as the Internet are pro-viding worldwide access to identical information and entertainment, while consumers from opposite corners of the globe can purchase the same products from the same multinational corporations. Just as the introduction of cheaper, faster air travel since the 1950s has permitted younger, less wealthy travellers to reach once distant lands (Bankes 1995: 7), so too are modern communication technologies allowing many more peoples access to one another across the gulf between cultures. The Internet is the single fastest-growing medium of communication in the world. It took 75 years for 50 million people to be connected to the telephone—it took only ten years for the same number of people to be connected using the Internet (Nathan 1997). As cultural boundaries dissolve and fundamentally Western under-standings and attitudes become dominant, more and more people are conversing in the universal language of popular culture.

While the mass changes that attend these developments are commonly censured in terms of very real social problems such as the increasing commodification of culture, the entrenchment of inequality, growing feelings of insecurity and a loss of identity, Indigenous peoples are seldom considered in discussions of the `globalisation juggernaut'. While there are approximately 350 million Indigenous persons across the world, they comprise only 6 per cent of the world's population. The process of globalisation began in the West and has mainly fostered the expansion of Western ideas, values, lifestyles and technology. Globalisation creates unprecedented opportunities for people to see, hear, visit and experience, with an ease previously unimaginable. For Indigenous peoples, globalisation threatens to extend the process of colonisation begun 400 years ago, giving rise to the possibility of a new invasion. For many non-Indigenous peoples, globalisation is merely a means of opening up new markets and finding new ways of `selling' Indigenous culture. For some it provides access to a smorgasbord of cultural practices that are seen as public property to be `borrowed' at will. Certainly, globalisation makes Indigenous cultures available to a wider audience, often without that audience ever having to leave home. It deliberately invites the outsiders in. The result is that Indigenous peoples are having to fight harder on a variety of fronts to ensure their cultural survival and to find new means for asserting their rights and autonomy in the face of the new threats posed by globalisation.

The key issue here is control—control over land, control over knowledge, control over the past, present and future. The object of the struggle is not only Indigenous cultural and intellectual property but the continued future of Indigenous societies themselves. This conflict establishes an arena for radical change in the social and political environments of Indigenous peoples. At the forefront is an emerging process of decolonisation, which involves not only the deconstruction of colonial processes and the many assumptions on which colonialism is based but also, as a result, the transformation of social and political orders. The value of this to Indigenous peoples lies with the empowerment that comes from identifying common goals, many of which arise from the lived experiences of colonialism, and from being active agents in the process of decolonisation; as Daryle Rigney (1996: vi) has said: 'My research is a commitment to exposing the systematic de-powering, silencing and exclusion of Nunga [Indigenous] behaviours, consciousness, culture, ideology and social formations. It is time for the Invader Dreaming to end.'