ABSTRACT
The concepts and legal precedents of biocultural rights and Biocultural Community Protocols carry transformational potential and noteworthy momentum in general, and within agrobiodiversity, seed, and phytogenetic resource governance in particular. Yet, they face a number of logistical and ideological obstacles. This chapter addresses the contested sovereignties at work and at odds in encoding cosmologically grounded biocultural protections into contemporary national and international governance systems still beholden to settler colonial scales of reference. This tension is acute in the colonial settler and neoliberalized context of the U.S./Turtle Island. Though the U.S. has long played an obstructionist role in international biodiversity negotiations (as longtime holdout of the Convention on Biological Diversity), Turtle Island encompasses a robust diversity of indigenous, African diaspora, and local community biocultural heritages and agrarian resurgences. These dynamic mobilizations remain unrepresented, and arguably undermined, at formal international agrobiodiversity governance fora. The U.S. did recently ratify the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, but to what effect? How do the contradictions of representation (and lack thereof) in this U.S./Turtle Island case study shed light on the broader tensions of international liberalism, multiculturalism, and multilateralism and the related coloniality of intellectual property regimes? What would it take to help move the U.S. from an obstructionist role to a decolonizing force in global governance of seeds and genetic resources? The chapter draws upon the indigenous-led 2019 Atateken North American Regional Declaration on Biocultural Diversity and Recommended Actions to help navigate this question. It also engages the Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels initiative and underlying CARE Principles for indigenous data sovereignty and stewardship, since agrobiodiversity has become valued for the data and digital information therein. Both the Atateken Declaration and the TK/BC Labels help expand the emancipatory possibilities for official recognition of indigenous knowledge and data and seed sovereignty, even within the constraints of liberal internationalism and multicultural multilateralism. They offer key insights for those working to move from the U.S obstructionism to Turtle Island-led decolonization and indigenization within the realm of agrobiodiversity governance and beyond.
