Cultural Stewardship

Creative work and shared memory can be cared for without being owned.

Cultural Stewardship is the responsibility to keep ideas, works, and records from becoming prizes or instruments of domination, and to preserve them in a condition in which future people can read, question, and reinterpret them.

What this requires

• Do not erase sources or the conditions in which an idea emerged.
• Do not strip away context or turn language into a slogan or weapon.
• Correct errors quietly and visibly enough for the correction to be understood.
• Open access as far as safety and private boundaries allow.
• Do not turn preservation into freezing; leave room for future translation and critique.
• Make it possible to trace what later stewards changed, deferred, and took responsibility for.

Sharing culture does not mean making someone’s life or relationships into material for public exposure.

→ Cultural Co-Growth
→ Inheritance of Intellectual Property and Assets
→ Credit and Accountability
→ Japanese reference edition