Colonial attitudes to indigenous knowledge & intellectual property rights

The following entry is a "free write" - 20 minutes spent writing in response to a question, following discussion with my group members, Hannah and Liz. The question was: "Indigenous Knowledge as an area of academic study has only relatively recently been recognized in a broader sense. The UN has been fostering Indigenous Knowledge for some time but has largely pursued the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to draw on Indigenous Peoples' understanding of the environment as a means of developing greater agricultural enterprises. Consider what the implications might be for Indigenous peoples and their entitlement to equality and human rights when you examine the differences between TEK and how Indigenous scholars, in particular, are articulating Indigenous Knowledge/s in the braoder sense as being the Intellectual Traditions of a human group."

This is what I wrote in the first "free write" during our discussion group in class today:
(Our group was taking it as a given that indigenous people should be compensated for their intellectual property rights and knowledge, and trying to chew over some of the issues within that idea.)
The idea of recognizing "indigenous intellectual property rights" is based on a Western concept that knowledge is inside people's heads. My understanding of traditional ecological knowledge is that knowledge is in the whole ecosystem, in the minds and sentience of other living things as well. When indigenous people "know" something, they know it because it has been communicated to them by the living world. But no one person can know everything or should know everything. Any person or people are just links in a web of knowledge that exists in the ecosystem. Western commercial interests see knowledge as a resource to be obtained. Just as oil underground is an "economic deposit," so is the knowledge of indigenous people an " economic deposit" that can be "mined" for commercial gain, in this commercial worldview. So the most forward-thinking Westerners talk about compensating intellectual people fairly for their knowledge, their intellectual property rights. But this views still buys into the idea that knowledge is in people's heads. If knowledge resides in and is given by a whole ecosystem of which people are just one part, then the proper way to "compensate" the source of knowledge would be to give money not only to the indigenous people whose language told Westerners about the knowledge, but also to the whole ecosystem that produced the knowledge. How do you give to an ecosystem? It would require recognizing that ecosystems themselves have rights and can be treated as entities by Western law. And once you grant that ecosystems have rights, the whole colonial system unravels.

The other thing (of many!) that we talked about was the idea that a Westerner who thinks they have some traditional ecological knowledge does not, in fact, have the same thing that indigenous people have when they have traditional ecological knowledge. The indigenous person is a participant in a whole system, in which the knowledge is in the world, not just in people's heads. The Westerner abstracts traditional ecological knowledge from that web, that system, and therefore has something different. Now they just have a commodity. The intellectual person has participation in knowledge, and a gift from the world.

Another idea was questioning the very assumption that one person I system of knowledge (like science) can and should know everything. Media portrays science as conquering the unknown, with the idea that at some point, the unknown will all be known, and that endpoint will be a good thing , a good state to be in. But that is not how actual scientists see what they're doing. The scientist who has completed training and has experienced conducting research understands that his/her knowledge is incomplete and must always be so. "Novice" scientists (students of science) and the general public buy into the idea that knowledge is cumulative, and science "knows" more and more over time. "Expert" scientists, those who are actually practitioners of research, know that this is not how science works. It is a logical necessity that you end up with more questions than you started with, and that any given scientific theory will eventually be proved untrue or incomplete. This is why Thomas Kuhn wrote about "scientific revolutions" -- the idea that scientific theories are always "overthrown" by new theories, and that this process is never-ending. There is no objective of "progress," only the continual replacement of one understanding with a different understanding. Portraying science as "conquering the unknown" is just using the metaphor of colonization of "unknown lands" to describe science, but it's not an appropriate or accurate metaphor. So, in whose interest is it to portray science in this way? Who benefits?