[NA-Discuss] Indigenous Peoples Fellowship Program

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Gordon, and interested Colleagues,

While not specific to the issue of ICANN's Fellowship Program and its
present absolute bar to Indigenous applicants from Canada, the United
States, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia,
the link below is useful, setting the issue of access to policy making
in context.

Recently I'd the pleasure of assisting Ms. Lily Yan, a third year law
student who had interned at GoDaddy last Summer and developed an
interest in the delegation policy for "sovereigns". She was directed
to me by Professor Robert A. Williams, Jr., who assisted Bob Gough and
I in ICANN's first Reconsideration Request (for an Indigenous
Intellectual Property presence within the Intellectual Property
Constituency).

Her paper provides an accessible overview of the issues, unfortunately
time and space available did not allow her to include materials that
Jean Polly was kind enough to provide me, as well as other sources of
primary documents and personal memories.

Ms. Yan's received the first-place award for her paper, "Uncharted
Domains and the New Land Rush: Indigenous Rights to Top-Level Domain",
in the inaugural student research awards given by the Ross-Blakley Law
Library.

It may be read at, or downloaded from, the following URL:

http://www.law.asu.edu/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=67fmPnuMWEY%3d&tabid=803

I recommend this to anyone looking for reading on Indians and ICANN.

For my own part I'll finish what I began during the Joint Application
Support Working Group's lifetime and write a memo on Tribal Bonding
Authority (US) and access to finance capital sufficient to meet the
(sharply elevated over prior new gTLD rounds) financial criteria ICANN
published in 2013/2013 for registry applicants, as I think this useful
in its own right for informing the Community on the question of
Indigenous Access, and directly addresses the organic capacity of
Indigenous Governments to fund "participants" in ICANN beyond the
current small set of such persons.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene Oregon