Uke’ Contracting System

Why does the digitization of oral knowledge transfer the ownership through digital copyright?   

We have prototyped an interaction design and legal process over two years which addresses Indigenous data sovereignty by creating sole ownership at the initial fixation of copyright for sound, video, and image recordings. 

Bvlbancha Public Access (BPA) is a fully-Indigenous New Media art initiative that collects stories, facilitates interaction design, new media art, and community on Indigenous identity in the Gulf South. Within these relationships, and within our Indigenous lived experience, we interact with vulnerable Indigenous Gulf Coast communities (approx 30,000 Indigenous people) who are impacted by coastal climate change. The intensity and visibility of this change has created an influx of research projects, artists, journalists, and climate solvers engaged in research and storytelling around lived experiences within South Louisiana. These projects often extract time, effort, knowledge, emotions, and stories. This extraction of labor is considered an exchange or investment in research, reports, news, or other endeavors with the potential for impact. Often, this potential for impact fails to materialize into significant quality of life changes in return for inter-generational lived knowledge. BPA believes we can re-imagine how storytelling and information gathering can be made to be immediately equitable. We see this specific, localized issue within the Gulf South Indigenous communities as a patterned issue of data extraction across minoritized global communities who engage in inequitable intellectual knowledge transfer within research, journalism, and media production activities. 

Our interaction design, the Uke’ Contracting System, considers how anyone creating oral history or traditional knowledge interviews as part of research or production inquiry ensures the rights of their recordings belong to the knowledge owner. In 2022 we developed the core idea within our ongoing partnership with Ripple Effect, and we refined this system in 2023-2024 within the ongoing Language Keepers interview series. 

Within the Solve Challenge we want to get support to create robust and equitable intellectual property forms and further prototype and test human interaction designs with six Indigenous Gulf South knowledge keepers. We would love to be partnered with mentors who can help us deepen our process of equitable intellectual property management and extend the breadth of this interaction to cover other forms of digital media. 

This is a test of a human interaction design and the legal format of this prototype. We have been approached by curricula designers, humanities researchers, climate storytellers who are requesting early access to this system when we complete the prototype. MIT can support this broader application by assisting us in scaling this idea. 

We aim to fundamentally change the relationship of research which includes human data. As this project expands, we want to consider how knowledge keepers can gain residual profit from their inter-generational investment in lived experiences. We acknowledge that this is a massive ripple in the current procedures of institutional research and organizational data management, and we recognize MIT as a partner with the ambition and resources to begin this shift.

Through our work engaged in Indigenous media BPA has been able to narrow down one data sovereignty issue we aim to challenge as the lack of communicative design between the relational aspects of community knowledge and the transactional aspects of institutional production.

 One way to perceive this procedural difference is by thinking of how different perspectives may acquire fruit. In relation-based or community-based contexts, people with traditional knowledge perceive knowledge as something nurtured through relationships. Consider this as the perspective where fruit grows on backyard trees. Within this context, knowledge is free because the equitable value is the work, love, and resources put into the tending of the community relationships. In transitional and production contexts start off with this understanding that knowledge is a natural item they must “re-source.” Consider this as the perspective where fruit is purchased at a store. This resourcing can be done through the process of some scalable acquisition procedure. The equitable value is the resources that the buyer provides within the exchange of resources.  

We begin by acknowledging that these perspectives are vastly different perspectives of the same function. Our solution is an interaction designed to improve both realities. By engaging both perspectives, we have considered the following design constraints:

• System must create legal backing to require transactional knowledge acquisition procedure to maintain relation-based inquiry and knowledge sourcing practices.

• System must allow knowledge holders to benefit from residual income from knowledge sharing.
• System must reduce institutional legal burden of rights management and ethical use.

 The system is a dual contract method. Interviewees first sign a work for hire agreement. This states that the interviewee is hiring the researcher to digitize their knowledge, which securely puts the copyright ownership of this material into the hands of the interviewee. This is a departure from the de facto joint ownership standard. The second document is a copyright license agreement where the researcher can request limited use of the material for a specific purpose. This license requires fees on the part of the researcher, is non-exclusive, and can be revoked by the knowledge holder.

 The individual copyright ensures the ownership of the material can be inherited and forms a connection between community relations. This copyright provenance which assists researchers and future archivists in shared informational stewardship. The limited and revocable license ensures interviewees and researchers stay in relation for the duration of their knowledge use and affirms Indigenous practices of knowing and being are maintained where Indigenous knowledge is present. The price agreement and non-exclusivity ensures Indigenous lived experience are equitably “harvested” rather than extracted. This allows the knowledge holder to control and profit from the proliferation and duplication of their lived experience recordings.

The Uke’ Contracting System calls us to reflect upon the ecological kinship of generational lived experiences of Indigenous peoples connected to the Gulf of Mexico. We represent vast systems of knowledge sustaining deep coastal resiliency while on the front lines of rising sea levels and coastal erosion due to climate change.

As a system, Uke’ is part of a technological genealogy developed in the Mississippi delta region. While our many tribes and nations have distinct languages which preserve Indigenous knowledge, we also have a shared Mobilian trade language which survives across the multiple language communities. This universal way of communicating is an interface that allows for exchange of ideas while at the same time respecting the distinctions between speakers.

The people who use Bvlbancha Public Access as a platform for sharing traditional knowledge aspire to reciprocal methods. Uke’ therefore benefits our community by connecting us in the same ways that our waterways do. As particles of various sizes flow and fall through water to form sediment, pieces of knowledge from fragments to vocabularies should be able to flow through our system. The end result is the formation of layers of embedded knowledge that is as tied to place as the end user.

All Bvlbancha Public Access team members (Hali Dardar, Jean-Luc Pierite, and Ida Aronson) have lived experience within Indigenous Gulf South communities. The project lead Hali Dardar is the co-founder of the Houma language project, a language reclamation effort begun in 2013. Dardar is based in the Gulf South full-time. All members of the Solve team are part of Indigenous language reclamation efforts, and have proven consistent engagement with Indigenous culture keeping for 5-10 years. 

This project is designed from our collective decades of experience working within our communities through language elicitation, community archiving, and oral history documentation with elders and culture bearers. We are also informed by our individual careers within research, education, and storytelling institutions. The first collaborators and co-designers of this interaction system were Indigenous language keepers, and minoritized language leaders from Louisiana. Their input and needs closely guided the direction of this project. Much of the design of this project comes from our experience organizing the Indigenous Gulf Stream, a New Media online biennial of art and thought from Indigenous Gulf South artists. These biennials connect our team in collaboration with 20-30 contemporary Indigenous artists within our region. This contracting system is closely inspired by what we have developed as our ethical working media agreements within this ongoing relational project. 

The Bvlbancha Public Access team is currently undertaking a project on a revival of the first French tragedy written in Louisiana which is based around events from inter-tribal history. Interviewers will be implementing the Uke' Contracting System in coordination will community participants and will help refine the end-user experience.

The project is currently at a prototype stage. It has been implemented for some previous media projects through Bvlbancha Public Access. In 2022 we developed the core idea for this project through our ongoing partnership with Ripple Effect, a water literacy non-profit who develops water-based STEM activities for K-12 classrooms of the Gulf Coast. We designed this interaction in collaboration with three Louisiana language keepers as we elicited water-based vocabulary as a way of introducing localized knowledge into Earth Science curriculum. We realized its potential to support work beyond its original use in 2023 in design collaboration with a non-Indigenous documentary team who consulted BPA to assist with ethical issues surrounding rematriating original footage to individual Indigenous community members. In 2024 we refined this system for use with publicly accessible content within the ongoing Language Keepers online interview series.

This Solve is a test of a human interaction design and the legal format of this prototype. We have been approached by curricula designers, humanities researchers, climate storytellers who are requesting early access to this system when we complete the prototype. MIT can support this broader application by assisting us in scaling this idea.

Within the Solve Challenge we want to get support to create robust and equitable intellectual property forms and further prototype and test human interaction designs with six Indigenous Gulf South knowledge keepers. As MIT is the leading institution of developing systems and fostering change, it is one of the best places for us to gain insight around these complex digital intellectual property rights, licensing, and access issues. Our team could benefit from the Solve Challenge support in clarifying the way we describe this innovation, and assist us in pitching this change in a way that invites recursive feedback and curiosity from the breath of stakeholders involved in implementing this change. We would love to be partnered with mentors who can help us deepen our process of equitable intellectual property management and extend the breadth of this interaction to cover other forms of digital media.

 The next steps on this project is to access support resources to bolster the legal documents, continue to test and refine human interaction design, and consider paths to implementing a technical tracking tool to assist community members in accessing and licensing their copyright. Scaling the project has the potential for engaging with blockchain technologies which we feel would require partnerships through Solve.

Hali is a tribal member of the United Houma Nation. In 2013 she co-founded the Houma Language Project, a volunteer collaborative to reconstruct and share the Uma language.

The landscape of Indigenous peoples and intellectual property can often be defined in relation to colonial systems such as the legal frameworks of nations states. Beyond this relationship, there are systems and genealogies of knowledge that predate contact. This is based around insights gained from language documentation among Indigenous peoples and endangered language communities. Uke’ centers these insights to foster a holistic and reciprocal system for an exchange of ideas.

This solution is innovative as it provides the core fulcrum point to initiate an system-wide shift in how we perceive the value of lived experience. It assists knowledge keepers in Indigenous communities and beyond to ensure their knowledge is maintained and cared for within a relational system of mutual benefit.

Implementation of this change on a social level could improve the comfort Indigenous communities may have with sharing information for global benefit as it ensures they maintain relational benefit and profit from their contributions.

Inputs

Ten years of Indigenous community feedback and Institutional work experience.

Processes

Testing and gaining feedback on interaction design from Indigenous knowledge keepers, gaining depth of information to create impactful legal forms to express this interaction, and develop communication skills to articulate this process.

Outputs

A legal contracting system with a clearly communicated interaction design which cultural knowledge keepers and institutions can advocate to implement within their project and lifeways

Outcomes

Cultural knowledge keepers are able to gain economic benefit from their maintenance of intellectual property, and institutions have clear paths of provenance, copyright and use constraints

Impacts

Cultural Knowledge keepers and institutional production maintain positive relationships where there is mutual benefit in partnership and collaboration

Our impacts are inspired by the following three articles within theUnited Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples:

• Article 3 “Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

• Article 12 “Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains”

• Article 13 “Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.”

Impact

Increased equitable relations between storytellers, researchers, and lived experience knowledge keepers

Indicators

Knowledge holders are able to benefit from selling multiple limited licenses to the use of a single interview within their intellectual property

Institutions are provided a clear point of contact for the use of data, and are provided clear regulations for maintaining meaningful relationships in a manner which connects the quality of relationships to the quality of their potential data set. 

Indigenous communities benefit by maintaining value of intellectual property generated by individual members

Knowledge holders and Institutions of research using the Uke’ Contracting System participate in cross-community exchange of ideas that shares best practices while respecting proprietary and sensitive data points

This solution relies on 10 years of Indigenous input and feedback on the nature of relationships. This relational technology is expressed in the interaction design's concern for continued interaction and beyond the initial digitization point. It is important that this process begins with creating a solid and equitable interaction. We see this interaction expanding into a scalable and flexible set of consent forms which can be applied to a dearth of contexts where Indigenous knowledge meets transactional systems. Expanding outward, we can see future growth where the tracking of these rights are maintained by blockchain technology, and the can be formed into a mutually beneficial resource net of Indigenous knowledge.

We currently operate in Louisiana.

We are a team of three with a network of Indigenous Gulf South artists and knowledge keepers with whom we collaborate.

Hali Dardar - United Houma Nation

Jean-Luc Pierite - Tunica Biloxi

Ida Aronson - United Houma Nation

Our team has spent over a decade interacting with our community in formal roles of cultural heritage. Our professional careers within academic research, community non-profits, and institutional archives have provided insight into this holistic solution.

The core idea for this project began in partnership with Ripple Effect in 2021 through designing Indigenous language water vocabulary for K-12 STEM activities. In 2023 we recognized the broader impact through a design contract around the ethical issues of rematriating footage to Indigenous interviewees. In 2024 we refined this system for use with publicly accessible content within the ongoing Language Keepers online interview series.

Bvlbancha Public Access strives to ensure the composition and consensus structures of the our organization accurately reflect the historical cultural structure of Gulf of Mexico Indigenous communities. This is implemented through our standard to maintaining diversity in connections to the lands and waters of the Gulf of Mexico, cultures, races, tribal communities, gender orientations and sexual orientations within our organizing structures and collaborative relationships.

All organization directors (current, prospective, or potential) must publicly communicate their personal relationships and lived community experiences within Indigenous communities within the Gulf of Mexico. Our board prioritizes electing directors whose relationships and lived experiences within Indigenous communities of the Gulf of Mexico is generational.

Bvlbancha Public Access started life as a fiscally sponsored project of the National Performance Network. Since 2020 our organization has produced content promoting the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples connected to the water and lands of the Gulf of Mexico. Our main line of programming is a biennial Indigenous Gulf Stream. From time to time, we have delivered special content related to storm resiliency efforts and special projects as determined by our community members.

We see Bvlbancha Public Access as the first client to use this new interaction design system as a core process to equitable media production. This design solve is a core business asset which we implement in the design and production of all our media output. Developing and scaling this process can ensure our work in highlighting the voices and values on the Gulf South Indigenous speakers and thinkers provides a return on investment to all of our Indigenous collaborators.

In the past year, Bvlbancha Public Access participated in the Le Lab initiative based at the Nous Foundation in New Orleans, Louisiana. Through that program, our leadership team went through professional development and mentorship by Denise Frazier from the New Center for the Gulf South and an MLK Visiting Scholar. In recent months, our team has taken steps to incorporate and file as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Louisiana. We are currently working on an annual budget which will be less than $50,000 for the first three years of business. We believe in setting smaller attainable goals to build momentum as we further engage our community members. As we grow financially, we will increase capacity to scale the social impact of our work.