To Whom Does the Kené Belong?

In September 2017, the Consejo Shipibo Konibo Xetebo—COSHIKOX, which unites one hundred and forty-four communities along the Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon—made a public declaration. A textile company had appropriated the Shipibo geometric patterns, the kené, to adorn its products; elsewhere, a patent had been filed on the dyeing process of a forest plant. The Council did not seek redress through any legal counter: it spoke out, in the name of a people, against an act it named without hesitation.

Spanish

El Consejo Shipibo Konibo Xetebo-COSHIKOX, institución del Pueblo Shipibo Konibo Xetebo, que reúne a 144 comunidades nativas […] se pronuncia contra la piratería del arte cultural, la biopiratería biológica y cualquier forma o modo de vulneración de nuestro conocimientos colectivos, tradicionales y ancestrales.

English

Le Conseil Shipibo Konibo Xetebo — COSHIKOX, institution du peuple shipibo konibo xetebo, qui réunit cent quarante-quatre communautés natives […] se prononce contre la piraterie de l’art culturel, la biopiraterie biologique et toute forme ou manière d’atteinte à nos savoirs collectifs, traditionnels et ancestraux.

Three words anchor the sentence: collective, traditional, and ancestral. The kené is not presented as the work of an artist who might dispose of it, but as a shared, inherited knowledge. And the wrong is not called “copy” or “counterfeit”—terms of merchants—but piracy, the word of those who have had something taken from their own waters. The kené are the patterns Shipibo-Konibo women trace on skin, ceramics, fabric: not an ornament applied to things, but, in their thought, a part of what heals and connects. To detach it from its world and print it on a fabric for sale is not to admire it—it is to sever it from what makes it kené.

The declaration then turns to the specific case.

Spanish

Entre los muchos casos que podrían citarse, los de mayor relevancia se considera al Kené (diseños geométricos) shipibo por la empresa Kuna, Huerta y Goischke, además de otras empresas y la patente del procedimiento del tinte natural del Huito.

English

Parmi les nombreux cas que l’on pourrait citer, on tient pour les plus graves celui du kené (dessins géométriques) shipibo par l’entreprise Kuna, Huerta y Goischke, ainsi que par d’autres entreprises, et le brevet sur le procédé de teinture naturelle du huito.

Two acts, then, and they must be kept apart. On one side, the pattern is reproduced. On the other, the dyeing process is patented—the huito, that Amazonian fruit whose juice darkens the skin and fixes the design. To patent a process is to make it private property, exclusive, enforceable: to transform a knowledge that no one had ever owned into a commodity over which a company holds sole mastery. The Council refuses to let this stand—apropiación ilícita del conocimiento ancestral, illicit appropriation of ancestral knowledge, it says of the three peoples, Shipibo, Konibo, and Xetebo.

We, too, have instruments to “protect” a creation: copyright, patents. But we must see what they protect, and how, before assuming they could apply here. Copyright safeguards the new work of an individual, for a limited time, precisely so it may circulate—so it becomes a commodity to be sold, transferred, and eventually fall into the public domain, returning to the market. It is tailored for commercial circulation. What COSHIKOX defends is the exact opposite: a knowledge without an author, because it is collective; without a birth date, because it is ancestral; and which must not enter the market, because it is inalienable. The kené does not belong to a Shipibo who could sell it. The huito dye cannot become the property of a firm, for it was never anyone’s property to begin with.

What remains is a narrow common ground, named only after the difference: in both systems, taking another’s creation to sell as one’s own is a wrong. But the wrong being redressed is not the same. Copyright avenges an individual deprived of their reward; COSHIKOX defends a people stripped of a knowledge that was never for sale. One counts a loss of profit; the other, an assault on what holds them together. To reduce the latter to a case of the former—“the Shipibo want royalties”—is still to speak the language that made the theft possible.

This is why the pronunciamiento is a thought of the living, not merely a property dispute. The kené binds a design to a hand, a hand to a plant, a plant to a river and a world. To pirate it is to treat a relationship as a detachable thing—to do to knowledge what the market does to the forest: turn a web of connections into a stock of available matter. The declaration closes by demanding of the Peruvian state “un respeto irrestricto de los derechos” of Amazonian peoples’ collective rights. Not: give us our share of the market. Rather: stop carving into pieces what belonged to no one.

The kené does not ask that we stop admiring it. It asks that we not forget to whom—to which people, to which plants, to which world—it continues to belong.