Local Contexts

Local Contexts supports Indigenous communities to manage their intellectual and cultural property, cultural heritage, environmental data, and genetic resources within digital environments. Local Contexts recognizes the inherent sovereignty that Indigenous communities have over knowledge and data that comes from their lands, territories, and waters.

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Local Contexts also provides a new set of procedural workflows that emphasize vetting content, collaborative curation, ethical management and sustained outreach practices within institutions. For researchers, Local Contexts provides specific Notices that support the recognition of Indigenous interests and function as place-holders on collections, data, or in a sample field until a TK or a BC Label is added by the community to replace it.

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Local Context hosts the Local Context Hub which  allows Institutions and Researchers to generate Notices and engage with Indigenous communities about the appropriate use of the TK & BC Labels. You can register with the Local Contexts Hub here.

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Source: Local Contexts

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Local Contexts was founded by Jane Anderson and Kim Christen in 2010. The primary objectives of Local Contexts are to enhance and legitimize locally based decision-making and Indigenous governance frameworks for determining ownership, access, and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical, contemporary and future collections of cultural heritage and Indigenous data. Local Contexts is focused on increasing Indigenous involvement in data governance through the integration of Indigenous values into data systems. Local Contexts offers digital strategies for Indigenous communities, cultural institutions and researchers through the TK (Traditional Knowledge) & BC (Biocultural) Labels and Notices. Together they function as a practical mechanism to advance aspirations for Indigenous data sovereignty and Indigenous innovation.

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Source: Local Contexts, "About Local Contexts."

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The Local Contexts project grew from the needs of Indigenous and local organizations who wanted a practical method to deal with the range of intellectual property issues that arise in relation to managing cultural heritage materials. Emerging from Mukurtu CMS platform’s use of traditional knowledge fields to incorporate traditional knowledge and copyright concerns, Local Contexts started as a way to provide strategies for managing, sharing, and protecting digital heritage. In an increasingly complex legal, social and cultural environment, the TK (Traditional Knowledge) & BC (Biocultural) Labels offer Indigenous communities the tools to add cultural and historical context and political authority to cultural heritage content in non-Indigenous digital archives, libraries, museums and other digital repositories globally as well as to their own local digital heritage archives. 

The BC (Biocultural) Labels extend the TK Label initiative to genetic resources and within the biological and genomic data sciences. The BC Labels were conceptualized and developed by Jane Anderson and Maui Hudson in 2019. Focused on accurate provenance, transparency and integrity in research engagements with Indigenous communities, this initiative offers the possibility for substantive change in how biological data from Indigenous contexts can maintain cultural relationships and responsibilities, connecting Indigenous people and places over time with data and in the metadata and with future researchers for the cultural, ecological and commercial benefit of Indigenous peoples. The BC Labels have broad international interest and are being initially piloted in Aotearoa, New Zealand with new use cases developing in the US, Australia and Canada.

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Source: Local Contexts, "About Local Contexts, Project History."