Disaggregating Authenticity: Intellectual Property's Inherent Limits for Indigenous Culture

<p><span>From the Zia Sun Symbol to Mixe textiles, Indigenous culture has long been a target of cultural appropriation. Scholars across law, anthropology, and Indigenous studies have documented how intellectual property doctrine fails to adequately protect traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions from harmful appropriation. In response, advocates have sought to better protect Indigenous creativity. Yet these proposals—including ostensibly <i>sui generis</i> regimes—remain grounded in intellectual property concepts. This continued reliance assumes intellectual property law can be adapted to this purpose without first interrogating whether they are conceptually aligned.</span></p> <p><span>Disaggregating the meanings of authenticity reveals the limits of intellectual property. At present, authenticity remains a socially constructed, shapeless thicket in the legal literature. A taxonomy of authenticity’s underlying values is generally lacking, let alone in the context of Indigenous cultural appropriation.</span></p><span>This Article centers the perspectives of Indigenous peoples and consumer markets to disaggregate authenticity in this context into four underlying dimensions: uniqueness, creatorship, place, and tradition. The first three share meaningful conceptual overlap with what intellectual property law values and protects. The fourth does not. That gap is not accidental. Intellectual property looks forward, rewarding the new and novel. Tradition looks back, deriving value from historical practice and inherited norms. This structural tension reveals that while intellectual property-oriented reforms could be conceptually aligned with the first three dimensions, protecting Indigenous interests in tradition will require looking beyond intellectual property.</span><span></span>