Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne & Muscogee) is President and Executive Director of The Morning Star Institute, a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native Peoples’ traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research. A leader in cultural property protection and stereotype busting, Morning Star sponsors the Just Good Sports project, organizes the National Day of Prayer to Protect Native American Sacred Places and coordinated The 1992 Alliance (1990-1993). Ms. Harjo is one of seven prominent Native people who filed the 1992 landmark lawsuit, Harjo et al v. Pro Football, Inc., regarding the name of the Washington football team. They won in 1999, when a three-judge panel unanimously decided to cancel federal trademark protections for the team’s name. The District Court reversed their victory in 2003; the case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals. Her essay, Fighting Name-Calling: Challenging ‘’Redskins’’ in Court, is published in Team Spirits: The Native American Mascots Controversy (University of Nebraska Press, 2001). She also wrote Just Good Sports: The Impact of ‘’Native’’ References in Sports on Native Youth and What Some Decolonizers Have Done About It,’’ a chapter in For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (SAR Press, 2005).

Aroha Te Pareake Mead is a founding member and Co-Chair of the Call of the Earth Steering Committee. Aroha is from the Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou tribes (Maori) of the Tairawhiti and Mataatua regions of Te Ika a Maui the North Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand. She has been involved in indigenous cultural and intellectual property and environmental issues for over 30 years at tribal, national, Pacific regional and international levels. Aroha is also a member of the faculty of Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand. She teaches in the School of Business and Community Development. A proud Polynesian descendant, Aroha’s focus is on the empowerment of local indigenous communities to initiate, manage and provide critical analysis of all research, policy and legislation relevant to them., particularly in the pacific region.

Working Group Documents - Cultural Property Protection

MEMO - A Treaty between Indigenous Nations on the Protection of Cultural Property and Traditional Resource Rights: Asserting Indigenous Nation Sovereignty.

Understanding Maori Intellectual Property Rights by Aroha Te Pareake Mead

The Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples First International Conference on the Cultural & Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples Whakatane, 12-18 June 1993 Aotearoa, New Zealand June 1993

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