IP key – without copyright protection, Indigenous people have no way to prevent appropriation. But no recognition link – Indigenous people can exploit Western legal systems for real gains.

In a letter to online shop Patowl, the Ministry identified printed t-shirts that carried designs mimicking the labor-intensive hazme si puedes (“do me if you can”) embroidery of the Zapotec Indigenous people of the community of San Antonino Castillo Velasco, Oaxaca.

Further, Culture Minister Alejandra Frausto demanded a “public explanation on what basis it could privatize collective property.”13 However, Mexican Indigenous communities have few channels to seek legal remedy from Zara, Anthropologie, and Patowl or any legal deterrence from subsequent acts of appropriation. They must instead turn to public pressure as a source of accountability.

Anthropologie, Patowl, and Zara did not just appropriate cultural symbols or modes of production, but also tamped the modes of resistance within these crafts. McCafferty and McCafferty argued that objects associated with the Postclassical Mexican crafts of spinning and weaving “carry iconographic messages relating to an explicitly female pattern of symbolic communication” through which women “engaged in a conversation about female power.”14 Pitarch observed that in Mesoamerica, textiles function as a means of “sensible abstraction” and observed that “textile inflections serve as a coextensive form of expressing relationships of opposition, inversion, mediation, or interchange.”15

In contrast, Urban Outfitters settled with the Navajo Nation, which had sued the fashion retailer, not for the design of products, but the way in which they were marketed. Instead, the Navajo Nation cited the term “Navajo” to describe a line of products. However, the Indigenous community had registered and owned the trademark to the term Navajo.16 In response to the Navajo Nation’s legal action, Urban Outfitters argued that the term “Navajo” had become a generic term for a style of design and was therefore not subject to trademark protection. However, the Navajo Nation maintained that the term “Navajo” was a protected trademark and that Urban Outfitters’ use of the term and associated imagery was an infringement of the Nation’s intellectual property rights. The conflict was ultimately settled out of court, with Urban Outfitters agreeing to stop using the term “Navajo” on its products and to remove any existing products that used the term from its stores and website. The settlement also included financial compensation to the Navajo Nation.