during decades of Western academic dominance. Part of this movement of resistance involves the repatriation of material culture, especially religious objects and human remains that are spread all over the world. It also involves the repatriation of immaterial culture, intangible heritage or intellectual property; that is, stories, songs, language and other knowledge recorded in the past and in the present. Guidelines 28 and 29 of the United Nations’ draft principles and guidelines for the protection of the heritage of Indigenous peoples state that:
All researchers and scholarly institutions within their competences should take steps to provide Indigenous peoples and communities with comprehensive inventories of the cultural property, and documentation of indigenous peoples'heritage, which they may have in their custody ... Researchers and scholarly institutions should return all elements of Indigenous peoples’ heritage to the traditional owners upon demand, or obtain formal agreements with the traditional owners for the shared custody, use and interpretation of their heritage (United Nations 2000).
These two guidelines cast a new light on the current development of new information technologies. This paper analyses the example of a CD-ROM that I produced to return and restore information gathered through my work to the Warlpiri people from central Australia (Glowczewski 2000).
Re-appropriation of culture
As a French anthropologist, I started to work with Warlpiri from Lajamanu in 1979. Today, Warlpiri are one of the main desert groups, neighbours to the Kukatja and Pintupi persons of the Western Desert. Like most other Australian groups, the Warlpiri experienced violent contact with Europeans, epidemics, massacres, forced sedentarisation on reserves, unpaid labour, and different government apartheid-type policies; but, in contrast with groups which were exterminated or dismantled through the separation of children from their families, they were able to stay together and maintain part of their culture. Their language is still spoken, unlike many of the 200 languages present in Australia before European colonisation began. After a successful land claim in 1976, the old reserve of Lajamanu established in the 1950s became an Aboriginal managed community.
In this context, I became committed to the repatriation of data collected from the elders in a form that would be useful for the younger generation. Many hours of recordings, on audio tape and on film, formed the core for a multimedia program linking images, sounds and texts for the Lajamanu. The aim was not just to make a database juxtaposing different media, but to structure the information so that it could be used by local school students as part of their bilingual Warlpiri/English program. My hypothesis was that if I could transpose the cognitive map of this society (that is, the way that people organise their relation to space and knowledge), then it would be also easier for non-Aborigines to understand the cultural and spiritual richness of this Indigenous knowledge and the complexity of Warlpiri society.
In 1995, Lajamanu school already had some Macintosh computers, and with the quick development of new technologies in the Australian school system, it was probable