If you’re alive on the planet Earth in the Year of Our Lord 2017, you’ve appropriated stuff from other cultures. For example, if you can read this, you’ve appropriated from the English. If you see the number “2017” and recognize it as the current year, you’ve appropriated from Christianity. Hell, the word “appropriated” itself is appropriated from the ancient Greeks. Every culture takes stuff from other cultures and makes it their own.
But not anymore! CBC:
Indigenous advocates from around the world are calling on a UN committee to make appropriating Indigenous cultures illegal — and to do it quickly.
Delegates from 189 countries, including Canada, are in Geneva this week as part of a specialized international committee within the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency.
Since it began in 2001, the committee has been working on creating and finishing three pieces of international law that would expand intellectual-property regulations to protect things like Indigenous designs, dances, words and traditional medicines.
Or you could, I dunno, move on with your life and try to live in the world as it is? Instead of trying to enforce some sort of cultural-purity guidelines?
It’s weird how the stuff everybody takes for granted isn’t considered “culture.” I guess that’s why we take it for granted.
Well, it’s only the UN anyway. It’s not as if anything will come of this.
(Hat tip: Ben McDonald)