Keeping cultures alive: archives and Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights

Archives play an important role in the cultural survival of Indigenous Australians. The wave of colonisation has had such an impact on Indigenous communities and the transmission of culture that access to records, materials, photographs and films is, for Indigenous people, a key way of keeping culture. Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights are Indigenous people’s rights to their heritage. Archival organisations and museums collect and preserve Indigenous people’s culture. In the past, this has been from an ethnographic eye, but the contemporary challenge is to work with Indigenous people to make the archives alive, to foster and promote Indigenous cultural knowledge and cultural expression, and innovation.