Ethics

To document a people’s knowledge is to handle something that does not belong to us. This page sets out what we refuse to do, what we commit to, and to whom we answer.

Our intention

EWA will not go to meet peoples who do not wish to be met.

There are still communities, in Amazonia and elsewhere, that have chosen isolation. That choice is an answer in itself, and it deserves unconditional respect. Going to them, even with the best intentions, would already alter them — bringing our objects, our gaze, or even our diseases would set off the very erosion we claim to be fighting. Towards them, our commitment takes few words: do nothing, except protect. Protect their territory, their forest, their silence.

For there is a duty here more urgent than documenting: preventing destruction. The trees being felled are, to those who live beneath, inside, around or behind them, sacred beings. The gold prospectors coming up the rivers bring mercury and weapons. The economic interests that covet these resources destroy, often without even meaning to, the worlds they shelter. Protecting these lands means protecting these peoples — and it is the precondition for everything else.

Our work begins elsewhere: with peoples already in contact with the modern world, whose knowledge has been crumbling for decades. Exile, drought, conflict, schools without mother tongues, young people gone to the cities — the chain of transmission has weakened, and sometimes broken. For them it is often too late to return to an original state: too much has happened. But there remains an immense amount to save.

That is what EWA does, with them and under their control: gathering, recording, translating, connecting. Not to freeze a past inside a museum, but so that this knowledge stays alive and available — to their own children first, who will be able to find their roots in it, and to humanity next. These peoples have spent millennia experimenting with ways of inhabiting the world without exhausting it. Ours shows its limits every day. It would be absurd to let the only long-run experiments we have die out.

Our six commitments

Protect before publishing. Where publishing a piece of knowledge could expose a place, a resource or a person, it does not happen. Doubt always weighs in favour of protection.

Nothing without consent — and consent can be withdrawn. Every recording rests on free, prior and informed agreement, given in the person’s own language and covering what they have genuinely understood. That agreement may be revoked at any time, without justification: the content is then taken down.

Knowledge stays with those who carry it. EWA claims no ownership over what it gathers. We are custodians, not owners. Each community keeps the right to decide what is visible, to whom, and for how long.

Some knowledge will never be published. Restricted rites, sacred sites, knowledge passed on to initiates alone: when a community tells us that something is not to be shared, it is neither recorded, nor archived, nor cited. Other material may be kept under restricted access, viewable by the community alone.

Everything is documented. Each record states who spoke, when, where, under what authorisation and at what access level. This traceability protects people as much as it makes our work verifiable.

No profit without return. If knowledge documented on EWA gives rise to any exploitation — research, product, artwork — the originating community must be informed, involved and a beneficiary. That is the spirit of the Nagoya Protocol; we make it an internal rule.

The four pillars of the framework

These commitments break down into four operational documents. Each is meant to evolve alongside our partner communities.

Consent — How we obtain free, prior and informed consent: in which language, through which intermediaries, in what form — filmed, written or spoken — and how it is withdrawn.

Usage rights — What anyone may do with published content: view, quote, teach, republish. And what remains forbidden without explicit agreement: commercial use, modification, automated extraction.

Data governance — Where the archives are hosted, who has access, who sets visibility levels, and how a community can take back control of its own content.

Protection against appropriation — The safeguards against biopiracy and cultural appropriation: timestamping and proof of prior art, cultural usage labels, and an alert procedure in case of misuse.

What we build on

Our framework is not improvised. It draws on internationally recognised texts and tools:

the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), and in particular its Article 31, which recognises these peoples’ right to control their cultural heritage and traditional knowledge;
ILO Convention 169 (1989), which establishes the right to prior consultation;
the Nagoya Protocol (in force since 2014), on access to resources and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from them;
the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Global Indigenous Data Alliance, 2020): collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics;
the TK Labels and BC Labels developed by Local Contexts, which we adopt in order to attach to each item the cultural conditions of use defined by the community itself.

This framework is a living one. It will be corrected whenever a partner community shows us that it must be.

Report a problem

If content published here concerns you, concerns your community, or appears to have been shared without authorisation, write to us. Any takedown request is treated as a priority, and the content is unpublished during the review — not after.