Register below for this webinar, held on October 14, 2026 at 2pm PST.
Due to team time limitations, any registrations received after OCTOBER 13th @2PM (PST) will not be reviewed.
About this Webinar:
Researchers, artists, journalists, and others engaged in storytelling often rely on the time, effort, knowledge, and emotions from community voices. These lived experiences and traditional knowledge are transformed into images, recordings, and videos.
Uke’ Contracting System considers how anyone creating oral history or traditional knowledge interviews as part of research or production inquiry ensures the rights of their recordings belong to the knowledge owner. The Uke’ Contracting System re-imagines how storytelling and information gathering can be made to be immediately equitable by giving sole ownership of digital content to the knowledge holder at the initial fixation of copyright for sound, video, and image recordings.
This webinar will introduce the open-access contract template. It will share the story of the document’s origins, walk through the design and development, discuss the use case, and show some early results of use. The development team will be on hand to answer questions and workshop how the template could be best applied within your project.
Featured Speakers:
Hali Dardar (she/her) is an enrolled member of the United Houma Nation, and co-founder of the Houma Language Project and Bvlbancha Public Access. Her work explores interaction design, new media art, and collective processes at the intersection of media, memory, and community. She has past experience in community-centered media production, cultural documentation, and collaborative systems design, including building digital archives, conducting long-format interviews, and journalism linking history to the present. She is currently a Center for Louisiana Studies Fellow at the University of Louisiana (2026-2030), and a former Indigenous Data Champions Fellow (2026).
Jacqueline Jedrych (she/her) is a recent graduate of the Washington College of Law, and is currently working at a law firm in D.C. During law school, she participated in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic, where she provided free legal services related to intellectual property matters. Her work with the clinic focused on copyright and trademark matters, with a particular focus on serving groups that have historically been denied access to the legal system.
Kurt Naquin (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management at North Carolina State University. They study Indigenous cultural programming as a climate adaptation strategy. Kurt has years of experience as an environmental and climate justice communicator and narrative strategist, working primarily in the the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast with communities on the frontlines of the oil and gas industry and climate change. They are a member of the United Houma Nation, and established an Indigenous youth language internship with the Houma Language Project, as a way to engage youth in language and culture reclamation and resist the impacts of climate change in Indigenous erasure.
Madeline Stoeri (she/her) worked on the ‘Uke Contracting System as a third-year law student in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at American University’s Washington College of Law. She has a background in working with government, nonprofits, and small businesses, as well as extensive international experience. Her areas of particular legal interest include the protection and promotion of art and cultural heritage through law. She currently works as a law clerk in New Jersey.
Nancy E. Weiss is a lawyer, scholar, and public-sector leader whose work has focused on advancing cultural engagement and connecting people to information, ideas, and each other. Across government, academia, and the nonprofit sector, she has worked at the intersection of law, culture, information policy, and civic engagement. Nancy served as the first General Counsel of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Senior Advisor for IP and Innovation at the White House, and Counsel for the U.S. Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program. As the Fifth Kaminstein Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Copyright Office, her research focused on Indigenous cultural expression. Nancy is currently a Senior Fellow with the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches Cultural Heritage Law and works with students in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic.
This webinar is a collaborative effort involving the Indigenous Data Alliance (IDA), the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance, the Indigenous Data Exchange (IDX), the IndigeLab Network, the Indigenous Data Law Lab at NYU, and the Sovereign Soils Research Collaborative.