Michael I. Asch is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. Dr. Asch graduated with a B.A., majoring in Anthropology, from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. Dr. Asch’s research has primarily engaged issues pertaining to relations between First Nations people and Canada, focusing on political, cultural and legal contexts. His publications include the books: Kinship and the Drum Dance in a Northern Dene Community (1988), Home and Native Land: Aboriginal Rights and the Canadian Constitution (1984) and the edited volume, Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada. Currently, Dr. Asch is researching issues concerning representation of Indigenous peoples in anthropological theory, alternative ways to construct relations between Self and Other in Western political thought and on treaty relations. He served as an advisor with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and with the Dene Nation from the mid-1970s through the late 1990s. Professor Asch is currently a member of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) and the American Anthropology Association. Professor Asch was recently awarded the Weaver-Tremblay award for distinguished service to Canadian applied anthropology, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Kelly P. Bannister is currently a SSHRC Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria and a Research Associate with the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance (Faculty of Law and School of Environmental Studies). Since 2000, she has been a Research Associate with the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance (Faculty of Law and School of Environmental Studies). In 2001, she developed the Community-University Connections initiative to help foster respectful and mutually-beneficial collaborative research approaches at the University of Victoria.

Dr. Bannister has B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Biochemistry/Microbiology from the University of Victoria. She completed a Ph.D. in Ethnobotany/Medicinal Plant Chemistry in 2000 at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Botany. Her doctoral research was in collaboration with the Secwepemc First Nation and examined antimicrobial properties of Secwepemc food and medicinal plant resources. Dr. Bannister also undertook a review and critical analysis of the Canadian intellectual property rights system for protecting Indigenous cultural knowledge, so as to protect the Secwepemc plant knowledge shared during her dissertation research.

Dr. Bannister remains keenly interested in the opportunities and conflicts created by university research, ethics and intellectual property rights policies in research involving cultural knowledge. Her recent work has focused on participatory research approaches and community protocols as tools for protecting cultural knowledge and heritage. She works in this area with several First Nations groups in British Columbia and Indigenous communities abroad.

Russel Lawrence Barsh is currently the Director of the Samish Indian Nation's research program in human ecology, archaeology and marine biology in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Prof. Barsh is a graduate of Harvard Law School and has been an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge (1993-2000), and an Associate Professor of Business, Government and Society at the University of Washington (1974-1984). His numerous published articles include How do you Patent a Landscape? On the Hazards of Dichotomizing Cultural Property and Intellectual Property (1999).Over the past 25 years, Prof. Barsh has been involved in a variety of projects dealing with Indigenous Peoples of Canada and abroad. Some of his most recent projects include studies of the use of traditional medical knowledge by the pharmaceutical industry (for First Peoples Worldwide), and the scope and extent of genomic research on Indigenous Peoples (for the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management). He has also been a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme and the International Labour Organization, the United Nations agencies that provide the greatest amount of technical and financial aid to Indigenous communities. His book, Effective Negotiation by Indigenous Peoples, was published by the International Labour Organization in 1997.

Catherine E. Bell is a Professor of Law at the University of Alberta. She has also been the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research of Law at the University of Alberta and a Visiting Professor at the University of Niigata Japan, University of Victoria, Program of Legal Studies for Native People (University of Saskatchewan) and the Akitsiraq Law School, Nunavut. She has also been a lead faculty member for a course on jurisdictional arrangements between Canadian and Aboriginal governments offered through the Banff Center for Management Aboriginal Leadership and Self-Government Program. She currently teaches in the areas of Aboriginal law, property law, and dispute resolution. She has presented papers at national and international conferences and has written widely on the issue of repatriation and Aboriginal rights to cultural property including: "Protecting Indigenous Cultural Heritage in Canada: Kitkatla v. B.C." (2001) 10(2) International Journal of Cultural Property 246; "Limitations, Legislation and Domestic Repatriation" (1995) Material Culture in Flux, University of British Columbia Law Review, Special Issue 149, "Aboriginal Claims to Cultural Property in Canada: A Comparative Analysis of the Repatriation Debate" (1992b) 17(2) American Indian Law Review 457 and with Robert Paterson "Aboriginal Rights to Cultural Property in Canada" (1999) 8(1) International Journal of Cultural Property 251. She is also the author of Alberta's Metis Settlement Legislation: An Overview of Ownership and Management of Settlement Lands (Canadian Plains Research Center, 1994) and with the Metis Settlements Appeal Tribunal Contemporary Metis Justice: The Settlement Way (Native Law Centre, 1999). She is also co-editor (with Dr. D. Kahane) of Intercultural Dispute Resolution in Aboriginal Contexts: Canadian and International Perspectives (U.B.C. Press - in press). She has acted as an advisor to First Nations, Metis organizations and provincial governments on these and other issues.

Professor Bell is the recipient of numerous research grants and has experience conducting applied legal research in partnership with First Nation and Metis communities. Current research projects include work with the U'Mista Cultural Society on reforms to Canadian laws concerning the export and import of Aboriginal cultural property and the First Nation Protection and Repatriation of Cultural Property Project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. As principal researcher on this project, she is responsible for administration of the project budget, coordination and implementation of the community based case studies, overseeing the project website, coordination of project workshops and conferences, and coordination of research outcomes. She will author some of the community cases studies, author research on repatriation of cultural property and co-edit the volumes that will issue from this study.

Rosemary J. Coombe is the Canadian Research Chair in Law, Communication and Cultural Studies at York University in Toronto. Professor Coombe received both her B.A., majoring in Anthropology and Political Science and her LL.B. at the University of Western Ontario. She later completed her Master's and Ph.D., majoring in Law and minoring in Anthropology, at Stanford University.

Dr. Coombe has focused her professional efforts on the relationship between culture and intellectual property law. Of her many published works, Dr. Coombe has recently received honourable mention in the Law and Society Association's Herbert Jacob Award for her book The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law (1998). Her extensive research history includes a project entitled Indigenous Peoples & the Globalization of Intellectual Property Norms (2000). As an educator, Dr. Coombe has taught courses including Owning Culture: The Cultural Power of Intellectual Property and Intellectual Property, Human Rights and Development. Some of her recent publications may be found online at www.yorku.ca/rcoombe.

Dale Cunningham has practiced law in Edmonton since 1999. He received his M.A. in 1986 and his LL.B. in 1998, both from the University of Alberta. He joined the firm of Field LLP in 2001. He practices general litigation with a primary focus on Aboriginal law. He is currently a member of the firm's legal team representing hundreds of Aboriginal clients pursuing claims for damages suffered while at residential schools. Mr. Cunningham has been a guest speaker on residential school issues at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law and at various conferences and workshops sponsored by Aboriginal organizations in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Prior to practicing law, Dale was a sessional lecturer at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton. Dale has also taught courses at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Business and its Department of Sociology.

Robert Gary Howell is currently a Professor of Law and Director for the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. Professor Howell graduated with his LL.B. from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He later received his LL.M. from the University of Illinois. Professor Howell has focused much of his professional aspirations in the area of property law. Of his many published writings, Professor Howell recently co-authored the book Intellectual Property Law, Cases and Materials (1999).

Some of Professor Howell's teaching/research interests include Intellectual Property and the Managing of Intellectual Property and International Trade. Previously, Professor Howell has been a visiting Professor for the Program of Legal Studies for Native Peoples, a pre-law program in Property for Native students. Professor Howell has been a consultant to the Canadian Federal Government and the British Columbia Provincial Government for various intellectual property topics. He has organized and chaired several national and international conferences, including Asia-Pacific Comparative Law Project - Intellectual Property Law and Policy, held at the National University of Singapore.

Marianne Ignace is the Academic Coordinator of the Simon Fraser University Aboriginal program in Kamloops, and is Associate Professor of Anthropology and First Nations Studies at SFU, and an associate faculty member of the SFU Department of Linguistics. Her doctoral thesis on Haida discourse and kinship, The Curtain Within, was published by UBC Press in 1989. Since the mid-1980s, she has carried out continuing research on Secwepemc language and culture, including working with elders from all seventeen communities. During the past 15 years, she has also worked on Aboriginal language teaching and curriculum in the Secwepemc Nation, but also with Haida, St’at’imc, Nuxalk, Hilzaqvla and Sm’algyax language teachers and elders. In 1998, she wrote the Handbook for Aboriginal Language Program Planning in British Columbia. She is the mother of 8 children, and, through using Secwepemctsin (Shuswap) in the home with her younger children, has experienced the rewards and challenges of keeping a First Nations language alive.

Ron Ignace is a member of the Secwepemc Nation. He was elected Chief of the Skeetchestn Band from 1982 to 2003, and served as Chairman of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council for several years. He was also a founding member and Chair of the Assembly of First Nations Chiefs Committee on Aboriginal Languages from1997 to 2003; a founding member of the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society (SCES) and president from 1987 to 2003, and co-chair of the Aboriginal university partnership between SCES and Simon Fraser University in Kamloops , B. C., where he has taught courses in Secwepemc Language and First Nations Studies. He was a member and chair of the First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation of British Columbia from 1995 to 1999 and is presently chair of the National Task Force for (Inuit, Metis, and First Nations) Languages and Cultures appointed by the Canadian Minister of Heritage.

Darlene Johnson

Susan Marsden is currently the Curator of the Museum of Northern British Columbia, in Prince Rupert, B.C. After graduating from the University of Toronto with an Honours B.A. in Philosophy, and from the Professional Development Program at Simon Fraser University, she moved to Gitanyow where she married and raised a family. She was adopted into the House of Gwin'uu and participated actively in Gitksan community life. She has worked as a teacher in several Gitksan communities, developed culture and language curriculum for the Gitksan and Tsimshian, coordinated research for the Gitksan Wet'suwet'en Tribal Council in preparation for Delgamuukw v. A.G., and coordinated and conducted research for the Tsimshian Tribal Council. As Curator of the Museum of Northern British Columbia, she has overseen the development and design of its new facility and its developing role as a cross-cultural institution.

Susan Marsden's academic interests include Ancient History, Geography, and Philosophy. She is especially concerned with the preservation of ancient knowledge. She has presented numerous papers on oral history and archaeology, and her periodical articles include The Tsimshian, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the Geopolitics of the Northwest Coast Fur Trade, 1787-1840 (with Robert Galois) (1995), Defending the Mouth of the Skeena, Perspectives on Tsimshian Tlingit Relations (2000) and Adawx, Spanaxnox and the Geopolitics of the Tsimshian (2002). She is co-author of the book Tribal Boundaries in the Nass Watershed (1998).

Eric McLay (UBC 1999) is an archaeologist who specializes in the Coast Salish region on the Northwest Coast. Eric has been working with the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group since 2001 assisting in treaty negotiations and the development of heritage policy for the protection of Culture & Heritage. Eric has a strong professional interest in integrating First Nations in heritage site management and helping to reconcile aboriginal interests over their ancestral cultural property.

James A.R. Nafziger is the Thomas B. Stoel Professor of Law and Director of International Programs at the Willamette University College of Law. After receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a J.D. from the Harvard Law School, Professor Nafziger was Henry Luce Fellow and later Administrative Director of the American Society of International Law. He is a former Fulbright lecturer at the National Autonomous University in Mexico and Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. He received the Burlington Northern Foundation Award for "excellence in teaching and scholarly activity" and the University President's Award for Excellence in Scholarship, in both cases the first given to a member of his law faculty.

An elected member of the American Law Institute, Professor Nafziger serves as President of the American Branch of the International Law Association. He is on the Board of Directors of the United Nations Association-USA and is Treasurer of the American Society of Comparative Law. He has also been a member of the Executive Council and the Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law and has chaired the Sections on International Law, Immigration Law, International Legal Exchanges and Art Law of the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Nafziger is a former President of the Oregon International Council. He has served as Rapporteur and principal drafter of the Buenos Aires Draft Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and is the author of three books, over 80 articles and 50 published writings.

Mr. Nafziger has published:
Conflict of Laws: A Northwest Perspective (1985)
"Seizure and Forfeiture of Cultural Property by the United States" (1998)
"The New Fiduciary Duty of United States Museums to Repatriate Cultural Heritage: The Oregon Experience" (1995)

Val Napoleon is from northeastern British Columbia and is of Cree, Saulteaux, and Dunneza heritage. She is also an adopted member of the Gitanyow (Gitksan) House of Luuxhon, Ganeda (Frog) clan. She worked as a community activist and consultant in northwestern B.C. for over twenty-five years, specializing in health, education, and justice issues, and she has served on a number of provincial, regional, and local boards. Val received her LL.B. from the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, in April 2001 and was called to the bar in 2002. Val is completing a Ph.D. (law and society) at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. Her dissertation will explore the consequences of major litigation on Aboriginal people’s internal social relationships and relationships with the land. Val joined the University of Alberta in January 2005 to teach in the faculties of law and native studies.

Val’s current interests are Aboriginal legal theory and legal reasoning processes, customary law, cultural property, self-determination and governance, imagining Aboriginal issues that are beyond the confines of the western legal rights framework and reactions to colonialism. Her work on the project will include co-editing the first volume of case studies with Catherine Bell.

George P. Nicholas is Associate Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, and Director of Simon Fraser University's Indigenous Archaeology Program in Kamloops. Since moving to British Columbia in 1990 from the United States (he is an American Citizen), he has worked closely with the Secwepemc and other First Nations, and has directed a community-based, community supported archaeology program on the Kamloops Indian Reserve for 14 years. His research focuses on intellectual property rights and archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, the archaeology and human ecology of wetlands, hunter-gatherers past and present, and archaeology theory, all of which he has published widely on. He is a member of the Society for American Archaeology's Committee on Curriculum and currently serves as editor of the Canadian Journal of Archaeology.

Prof Nicholas's Bio

Brian Noble  is an anthropologist of transcultural processes. Professor Noble's research is on Aboriginal knowledge, resource, and cultural rights in shifting local-global economic and information technology regimes. His current project, "Rites of Trading Rights: The Interventions of Indigenous Custom in the New Economy" considers the political and moral economies of new intellectual property regimes in relation to First Peoples in Canada and elsewhere. This extends on his previous ethnographic research on cultural property and knowledge politics in relations of Museums and First Nations.

Dr. Noble also has expertise in critical anthropology of bioscience and technology as public culture, with longstanding interests in museum and mass-mediated knowledges of dinosaurs, primates, and other animalian forms. He has had research affiliations with a number of Aboriginal communities and agencies including the Piikani Blackfoot of Southern Alberta, the Kwakwaka'wakw of south coastal B.C., the Woodland Cree of north central Alberta, the Indian Association of Alberta, and the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs. He is currently a co-organizer of the 2003 30th Anniversary Meetings of the Canadian Anthropological Association (CASCA), developing its Central Plenary Session "Indigenizing the Global: Anthropology and 50 Years of Aboriginal Struggle for Self-Determination".

Publications:

2003 "Circumventing Customary Transaction: WIPO's Search for the Facts of Traditional Knowledge Exchange", Forthcoming in Innovations Around Property-thinking: Dialogues Between Law, Policy and Ethnography, T. Crook and A. Holding (eds.), Oxford: Berghahn Books.

2002 "Nitooii‹The Same that is Real: Parallel Practice, Museums, and the Repatriation of Piikani Customary Authority." Anthropologica Spring 2002.

2001"Rites of Trading Rights: Blackfoot Tipi Designs, WIPO, and the 'Pitfalls' of Compartmentalism", presented at the annual meetings of the American Ethnological Society & Canadian Anthropological Society, Montréal.

2001 Panel [Organizer]: "Cultural Rights in the Making: Contestations of Indigenous Knowledge Practices and Global Intellectual Property Encroachment", annual meetings of the American Ethnological Society & Canadian Anthropological Society, Montréal.

2000 "Who Changes When Culture Comes Home? Impassioned Objects, Kwakwaka'wakw Customary Rights, Reconfigured Experts", paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco.

Richard Overstall (B.Sc. Geology, LL.B.) practices law in Smithers, British Columbia. He worked for ten years as a geologist conducting mineral exploration in Ireland, the Yukon and British Columbia. He has also been involved in a number of community-based land and water issues in northern British Columbia, including halting Alcan's planned Kemano hydro-electric expansion on the Bulkley and Nechako watersheds, researching forest practices and policy, and evaluating the cause and effects of acid mine drainage. Since 1980, Richard has worked with the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en peoples in the Skeena watershed on the interaction of their legal and social systems with those of the dominant Canadian society, particularly in the areas of land use and criminal justice. He coordinated the scientific evidence for the Delgamuukw Aboriginal title case and currently assists Aboriginal peoples in their Aboriginal title and treaty strategies. He is also co-author of Tribal Boundaries of the Nass Watershed (1999).

Robert Kirkwood Paterson is currently Associate Dean, Graduate Studies, Research & Exchanges, for the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia. Professor Paterson is Chair for the Faculty Graduate Studies Committee and a member of the Faculty Research Committee. Since receiving his LL.B. from the Victoria University of Wellington and his J.S.M. from Stanford University, Professor Paterson has over 25 years invested with the University of British Columbia. Professor Paterson is currently an Assistant Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property and a member of the Cultural Heritage Committee for the International Law Association.

To his many accomplishments, Professor Paterson has maintained an interest in the area of international problems of cultural heritage, including those associated with movement and property rights. To his credit, Professor Paterson has organized an international conference, Material Culture in Flux, on the law and policy of the repatriation of cultural property. Professor Paterson has many written works, including articles such as The Protection of Cultural Property in International Law (1996) and Claiming Possession of the Cultural Property of Indigenous Peoples (2001).

Robert Paterson will coordinate the project particularly as it relates to comparative analysis and international law and will co-edit (with Catherine Bell) publication of the academic research papers. He brings expertise to the project in the areas of museum law, domestic and international cultural property law, and New Zealand cultural heritage laws.

Heather Raven (Nakasheohow) is a member of the Brokenhead Ojibway First Nation that is located in present-day Manitoba. In a hurry to join the work world, she left high school before graduating and over the next ten years worked in a car wash, numerous fast food restaurants and as a library clerk. The value of a post-secondary education became evident and she completed a B.A. with a major in Medieval History at the University of British Columbia. As there was not a huge demand for medieval historians in the Vancouver area, she completed her law degree at U.B.C. Heather was called to the bar of British Columbia in 1987 and practiced employment law in Vancouver prior to her appointment at The University of Victoria, Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor in 1992. As Coordinator of the Aboriginal Law Program, she directs the Academic and Cultural Support Program and teaches courses in employment law, legal process, legal mooting and Aboriginal law. Professor Raven is currently a member of the Law Foundation Board of Governors and has served as a member of The British Columbia Police Commission, The British Columbia Public Service Appeal Board and on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law.  

Heather Raven was instrumental in phase one of the project. In addition to assisting in the coordination of that phase, she is co-author of the U'mista Cultural Society case study.

Brian Thom is Senior Negotiation Support for the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (HTG). He has a central role in tripartie negotiations on land, governance, resource management and fiscal relations, and is lead negotiator on park co-management and land use planning, and has lead community-based research on territorial boundaries, traditional land use and occupancy, and community land use planning. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from McGill University in 2005, having written and published articles on local land tenure systems and intangible cultural property; social meanings of oral tradition; the role of culture in relations of power between the state and indigenous peoples; and Coast Salish culture and history.

Bruce Ziff  is a professor of law at the University of Alberta where, in 1988, he received the Rutherford Teaching Award. Professor Ziff has also been a visiting professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, and at the University of Wollongong (N.S.W.). He has served as a consultant on land titles reform in Ukraine, and as special counsel to the Alberta Law Reform Institute, where he prepared a report on reform of the law concerning the matrimonial home.

Professor Ziff is the author of Principles of Property Law (Carswell: Toronto, 2000), currently in its third edition, and Unforeseen Legacies: Reuben Wells Leonard and the Leonard Foundation Trust (Toronto: U. of T. Pr. & Osgoode Society, 2000). He is the editor of A Property Law Reader: Cases, Questions and Comments (Carswell, 2004) and Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation (Rutgers U.P., 1997) (with Pratima Rao).

Norman Zlotkin is currently an Associate Professor and Director of the Academic Support Program of the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan. He received his LL.B. from the University of Toronto in 1969 and his LL.M. from the University of London in 1970. His background includes practicing law until 1981, specializing in the rights of Aboriginal peoples, including hunting, fishing and trapping rights litigation and land rights litigation. He has also served as Research Director for the University of Saskatchewan Native Law Centre for a number of years and has previously been an advisor to the Assembly of First Nations and Nishnawbe-Aski (northern Ontario) on constitutional law. He has also been an advisor to First Nation governments, band councils, organizations and individuals across Canada. Some of his recent publications include a co-authored chapter (with Michael Asch) in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equality and Respect for Difference entitled "Affirming Aboriginal Title: A New Basis for Comprehensive Negotiations" and also "Interpretation of the Prairie Treaties" found in Beyond the Nass Valley: National Implications for the Supreme Court's Delgamuukw Decision.