Perm do the AFF and adopt restorative licensing. It decolonizes the relationships between Tribes and institutions by ceding authority and heeding to indigenous demands for intellectual property protection.

Indigenous communities are increasingly active in protecting and promoting their culture, and many are turning to IP and cultural rights laws as a means of accomplishing this. At the same time, universities, museums, corporations, and other Institutions want to appropriately safeguard and circulate Indigenous cultural expressions in their possession while also repairing the historical harms occasioned by their sometimes illicit and unethical collection, preservation, management, and dissemination activities involving Indigenous culture. Restorative justice provides a framework whereby Indigenous communities and Institutions can begin to repair these harms. They can do this by bringing Indigenous communities, Institutions, and their communities to the table on equal footing and allowing Indigenous communities to articulate the specific harms they have experienced and their expectations for redress, which should enable Institutions to formulate an enforceable plan for repair and redress that meets those expectations. As I have argued, such a plan will necessarily entail a binding commitment by the Institution to abide by Indigenous laws, protocols, and standards of care as a condition of future possession, management, and distribution of Indigenous culture in their collections, or a promise to completely repatriate that culture back to the community of origin. Importantly, these agreements may not be sufficient by themselves to bring about repair. If the parties agree that the Institution can continue possessing, using, and managing Indigenous culture, that agreement should also include a mechanism— restorative licensing—whereby patrons and follow-on users who access Indigenous culture through the Institution are likewise bound to these same conditions.

While restorative licensing may draw upon privately ordered licensing structures to fulfill its ultimate purposes, the use of such a framework by Indigenous communities is unlike those of software manufacturers or creative communities seeking to encourage free culture or to advance any other settler ideology.297 Rather, restorative licensing is intended to correct for the impact of settler-colonialism on Indigenous peoples’ ability to govern their own cultural creativity and to ensure its ongoing production and circulation. Indigenous policies and legal structures already exist to protect Indigenous cultural expression but are currently not given sufficient legal effect under settler law. The proliferation of restorative licensing aims to compensate for this by normalizing (decolonizing) relations between Indigenous victims, Institutional offenders, and the public over the circulation and use of Indigenous culture going forward.