A bill that seeks to protect the knowledge and cultural heritage of indigenous people in order to prevent their being taken advantage of by third parties and that was presented to Congress in 2018 has not received the backing of the government.
Legislator Tania Pariona told Sputnik News that “we have presented an initiative of law for the protection of the knowledge and design of indigenous iconographies, as well as cultural expressions to avoid that they are taken by third parties for commercial purposes”.
Cultural appropriation is the exploitation, for commercial purposes, of the cultural heritage of a human group determined by members of an alien group, something that would infringe on economic or intellectual property rights, said the aforementioned website.
The parliamentarian maintains that her project, called the Law that Constitutes the Regime of Protection, Recognition and Promotion of Traditional Knowledge of Indigenous Peoples in Peru (Ley que Constituye el Régimen de Protección, Reconocimiento y Promoción de los Conocimientos Tradicionales de los Pueblos Indígenas en el Perú), focuses on two objectives.
The first is that “there exists a mechanism for the recognition of the collective knowledge of an original people”; and second, the one that contemplates ” economic retribution in favor of the natives” when some third party makes use of its cultural or artistic patrimony.
