ABSTRACT
Museums, archives and universities are key sites from which ideas about indigenous peoples and cultures emanate. A watershed moment came in 1990 with the enactment in the United States of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This legislation introduced a process for museums and other federally funded institutions and agencies to return "human remains", "funerary items", "sacred objects" and "objects of cultural patrimony" to lineal descendants and "culturally affiliated" tribes. Local Contexts is an online platform developed to address the needs that Native, First Nations, Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples in largely settler-colonial contexts have expressed around intellectual property and the protection of their intangible digital cultural heritage in museums, archives and libraries. Initiatives like the Traditional Knowledge Labels move beyond protecting token instantiations, and strive instead to incorporate something of the originary cultural systems of knowledge in which these tokens are embedded, but not necessarily as a singular form of "property".
