Fifth Annual Indian Law and History Lecture (2025)

The Fifth Annual Indian Law and History Lecture took place on Friday, November 14th, 2025. This lecture series, hosted by the University of Maine School of Law, provides vital programming for the benefit of the legal community in the State of Maine, the Tribes in Maine, and the public. The purpose of this event is to offer opportunities to learn from experts about the field of federal Indian law as it applies in Maine and across the United States.

This year's lecture, "Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property," featured a discussion with Professor Trevor Reed and Dr. Jane Anderson. 

Professor Trevor G. Reed

Professor Trevor G. Reed is a legal scholar and social scientist who studies the impacts of intellectual property law on people and communities. He combines legal and anthropological approaches to understand how regulation of creativity and innovation affects the human experience, including community wellbeing, economic stability, political systems, and local culture.

Professor Reed’s current research looks at how illicit appropriations of Indigenous peoples’ creativity and cultural data impacts their sovereignty today, and what opportunities currently exist to address these impacts. Recent articles in the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and BYU Law Review examined how well American intellectual property laws protect Indigenous creative works from misappropriation and explored what remedies might be available through existing IP frameworks and restorative justice mechanisms when these legal protections fail.  The findings from these studies have been taken up by the Firekeepers initiative, led by ASU’s Labriola National American Indian Data Center with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which works to restore governance over important intellectual resources back to Tribal Nations in the Southwestern United States.

Professor Reed also regularly partners with Tribal Nations in the development of research-based legal frameworks and educational tools grounded in local culture to better promote and protect their creativity and innovation. In recognition of this work, Professor Reed was named an ASU Charter Professor, and his efforts have been reported in journals like the Journal of the Copyright Society, Journal for the Society of American Music, and various news outlets.

Professor Reed strongly believes in building interdisciplinary spaces for Indigenous and Indigenous-allied thinkers to tackle issues of global importance. He led Arizona State University’s Indigenous Innovation Initiative from 2023-2025 and has regularly collaborated with agencies and organizations like the U.S. Copyright Office, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, ChangeLabs, the Association of Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Local Contexts to promote and protect Indigenous creativity and innovation. Since 2017, Professor Reed and Dr. Jessica Bissett-Perea (University of Washington) have spearheaded an interdisciplinary collaborative of Indigenous scholars researching the ways Indigenous sovereignty is expressed, performed, understood, and experienced. A forthcoming volume, Sovereign Aesthetics (Duke Unviersity Press), includes the original contributions of 13 of these Indigenous scholars.

Professor Reed currently serves as an associate justice on the high court of the Hopi Tribe and sits on the executive board of the Section on Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples of the Association for American Law Schools.

Dr. Jane Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies and a Global Fellow in the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law and Policy in the Law School at New York University.  Dr. Anderson has a Ph.D. in Law from the Law School at University of New South Wales in Australia. Their work is focused on the philosophical and practical problems for intellectual property law and the protection of Indigenous/traditional knowledge resources and cultural heritage in support of Indigenous knowledge and data sovereignty.

In 2023 Dr. Anderson was awarded $2.5 million from the Mellon Foundation to support the sustainability and future of Local Contexts.  Local Contexts is a non-profit organization founded in 2010 to support Indigenous communities to manage their intellectual and cultural property, cultural heritage, environmental data, and genetic resources within digital environments through the TK (Traditional Knowledge) & BC (Biocultural) Labels and Notices. Local Contexts provides legal, extra-legal, and educational strategies for navigating copyright law and creating new options for Indigenous control over vital cultural heritage.

In 2023 Dr. Anderson released the film: Awasəwehlαwə́lətinα wikəwαmok – They Returned Home (2023). This film is a collaboration with the Penobscot Nation and was filmed by cinematographer Andreas Burgess. The film was selected to play in the 2023 NatiVisions Film Festival in Arizona. 

Dr. Anderson was recently awarded the prestigious international Guardians of Culture and Lifeways Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM) for their contribution.