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Akena 12 Akena Adyanga (PhD.) is a Senior Lecturer at Kabale University and also, the Dean Faculty of Education. He obtained his PhD. from the University of Toronto in 2014. In 2015, he taught at the University of Toronto and was later a postdoctoral fellow at the College of Education, University of South Africa (UNISA) Pretoria in 2016/2017. He has been a teacher with the York Region District School Board (YRDSB) in Toronto from 2011 – 2016. (Francis., “Critical Analysis of the Production of Western Knowledge and Its Implications for Indigenous Knowledge and Decolonization”, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 43, No. 6, September 2012, pp. 599-619, DOI: 1 0. 1 1 77/002 1 9347 1 2440448, Accessed on JSTOR via University of Michigan Library System, DOA: 6/27/24)//LFS – LMH

Implications of Western Knowledge Production on Indigenous Knowledge The discussions related to Western knowledge production and its implications to indigenous knowledge are so crucial since we commonly view formal education as sites in which knowledge is produced and transmitted to learners from teachers, academic literatures, and other materials. Wotherspoon (2004) elaborates that we must recognize that knowledge is not only disseminated, but also produced, in educational settings. Participants at all levels of the educational system contribute to knowledge production in a variety of ways through discussions, problem solving, and engagement in everyday activities. Knowledge is shaped not only as it is continuously interpreted, processed, and reinterpreted in the interactions among instructors and learners in educational settings but also through the experiences and understandings brought in from outside schooling. When knowledge is produced by an external actor and imposed on an educational system or society, it becomes biased and negatively influences the indigenous knowledge of a people; this external imposition is disempowering and colonizing. In a similar vein, "the production of knowledge, new knowledge and transformed 'old' knowledge by the colonizers" becomes a commodity of colonial exploitation (Smith, 1999, p. 59). This negative interaction between Western knowledge imposed on an indigenous cosmology tends to undermine the norms, values, and gendered contexts that maintain morality and harmony. Unfortunately, in the contemporary education system, Western knowledge does not give indigenous knowledge any considerable credibility, thus intellectually marginalizing it. This is because individual knowledge reproducers in society impose their project on other societies and educational systems by reproducing subjective, repressive knowledge. The imposition by individual knowledge producers detrimentally affects the society by ignoring the basic principles of indigenous knowledge, which are the foundation of indigenous societies. To remedy this apparent oversight in African societies, Shockley and Frederick (2010) identify seven fundamental constructs or principles of Afrocentric education thus: Identity - the importance of identifying the Black child as an African; Pan-Africanism - the idea that all Black people in the world are Africans; African culture - the long standing tradition of Blacks using African culture to sustain themselves and bring order to their lives and communities; African values adoption and transmission - inclusion of an African ethos into educational process for Black children; Black nationalism - the idea that Blacks, regardless of their specific location, constitute a "nation"; community control with institution building - the ability to make important decisions about the institutions that exist in one's community; and education as opposed to schooling - education is the process of imparting on children all things they need to provide leadership within their communities and within their nation, while schooling is a training process, (p. 1214) To understand how deeply a system of knowledge may be influenced by the individual and the society, I will illuminate how Western knowledge was entrenched through formal education in Uganda. Also, the implications of Western knowledge production on indigenous knowledge during colonial times in Uganda are examined.

Indigenous scholarship challenges Western authority to interpret knowledge, so in North America decolonizing theorists create neologisms. This diction is invented to describe Indigenous place in modernity. Deloria Jr. and Forbes postulated theories about intellectual resistance in unsubtle ways. Their work describes subjugation as one-sided. Indigenous knowledge is ignored (Forbes 1960, 1998; Deloria Jr. 1970, 1998). Though Forbes and Deloria Jr. challenge each other over the theory and practice of Indigenous knowledge, they argue from the common platform of resistance. Deloria Jr. advocates active defense of Indigenous rights under the rule of law. Forbes, like many writers, searches for the decolonizing verbal modality that connotes an Indigenous aspect (mode just). As an example of work to translate Indigenous theory, Forbes offers the notion that the study of Indigenous knowledge in the Western Hemisphere would be called "americology." Forbes (from the southwest) echoes Sioui-Wendat (from the northeast) who calls the individual actualization of Indigenous self-study an "auto-histoire." Sioui-Wendat further describes Indigenous self-knowledge as "americity" (Sioui Wendayete 1992a). Similarly, Churchill and Jaimes-Guerrero developed a description for intellectual resistance they call "indigenism" (Churchill 1992b, Jaimes Guerrero 1999). Finally, in Tribal Secrets (1995) Robert Warrior declares that there is a century-long literary tradition of resistance in the Americas that gives rise to the advent of the conception of "intellectual sovereignty" for self-determination. Attacking what he calls the "essentialist understandings of Indian culture," Indigenous writers concomitantly expressed the "central concern for critical reflection in the midst of political action" (xvii, 29). Warrior studies Indigenous literature for its understanding of the "presuppositions of the culture that has come to dominate both the land and the people" who are hardly passive and unreasoned (68). Warrior's description of longstanding intellectual sovereignty coincides with many writers who have advocated sovereignty since the 1800s. The practice of Iroquois resistance indicates how widely applicable Warrior's thesis may be (Six Nations 1924; Gawithra 1990; Hall c.1975; Alfred 1994, 1998). By the late 1900s self-determination veered into land claims and resistance to further colonization, such as the ecologically thinking Indigenous activism critiqued by Krech III (Goodleaf 1995; LaDuke 2000; Pennybacker 2000). Specifically, Iroquois people defend intellectual and territorial properties as self-determination for inventing their future (Jaimes Guerrero 1999; Greene c.1960; Colorado 1991; Mohawk 1977; Johnson 1997; Mann 1999; Doxtater 1998; Porter 1998; Brant 1985, 1984; Rickard 1999; Niro 1992). The mission is to set the story straight. Euro-scholarship ignores Indigenous knowledge for the purpose of promoting its own narrative structures based on Western knowledge that decides what is true. Hobsbawm argues against an Indigenous narrative while supporting a Marxist historical narrative that says Indigenous knowledge is actually "peasant consciousness." Wallerstein, Hobsbawm, Krech, and Diamond perpetuate the authority of Western knowledge as the Great Transformation or the "Great Leap Forward."

In his discourse theory, Michel Foucault convincingly shows how knowl- edge and power are profoundly interconnected in Eurocentric societies. Seek- ing knowledge, the "will to truth," covers up the will to power, and discourses of the academy and larger society become agencies of power. Their production is "at once controlled, selected, organised, and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures" that render them a "system of exclusion (historical, mod- ifiable, institutionally constraining)" (Foucault 8, 10). This system of exclusion relies heavily on public institutions and their practices: pedagogy, print, the pub- lishing system, libraries, and laboratories (Foucault 11). Thus, discourse is both agent and subject of control, limitation, and exclusion; and academic and scientific disciplines are controlling instruments of discourses and of power. According to their "rules of exclusion" that operate with neo/colonial self/other dichotomies, they separate valid from invalid, progressive from traditional, scientific from un- scientific, logo-centric from irrational knowledge and methodology. They have thus produced and buffered the predominant Western Cartesian-Newtonian worldview and cemented and disseminated it in discourses of the academy, which, in this way, assigns primacy to knowledge based on reason, logic, science, and empirical proof and excludes knowledge based on observation, oral tradition, di- gressive thinking, and even the spiritual. Indigenous epistemologies are associ- ated with the latter categories, grounded in Indigenous traditions and worldviews. Therefore, as a Western-based logic suggests, Indigenous knowledges cannot be- long to the legitimate materialistic worldview of true science, reason, and logic. They, to speak with Foucault, "speak the truth in a void"- they are not in the realm of truth of mainstream discourse because they do not obey the rules of the Cartesian-Newtonian "discursive 'policy'" (17). There are many statements by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike illustrating this hegemonic thought system ingrained in the academy. George Hob- son holds in his article "Traditional Knowledge Is Science" in 1992 that "Western scientists have a tendency to reject the traditional knowledge of native peoples as anecdotal, non-quantitative, without method, and unscientific [...]. From our scientific ivory towers we tend to ignore basic knowledge that is available to us." Western educational institutions have discounted Indigenous knowledges and nurtured the belief that non-Western cultures "contribute nothing to the develop- ment of knowledge, humanities, arts, science, and technology," which Mi'kmaw scholar Marie Battiste terms "cognitive imperialism" (Hobson).4 Colleen Mc- Gloin et al. state that it is necessary to reinstate "knowledges that are often omit- ted from the realm of the western episteme" (3). ["T]he academy," writes Kuok- kanen, " has ignored, overlooked, and dismissed [Indigenous] ontologies- in fact, the academy's structures and discourses are built on the assumption that there only is one episteme, one ontology, one intellectual tradition on which to rely and from which to draw" (3). Kovach reinforces the fact that prioritized Western- based research practices and policies reproduce colonial relationships in the acad- emy (28). And Mihesuha and Cavender Wilson reproach the North American academy explicitly for condoning structural racism: "Gate-keeping, ethnic fraud, biased writings, favoritism, ignorance, racism, and exclusion are only a few anti- Indianisms we face regularly" (13). 5 Many definitions of Indigenous knowledge abound in political, ecological, and cultural studies discourses. I have found Battiste's definition most useful: Indigenous knowledge is an extensive and valuable knowledge system. According to the categories used by Eurocentric knowledge, it is a transcultural (or intercultural) and interdisciplinary source of knowledge that embraces the contexts of about 20 percent of the world's population. Indigenous knowledge is systemic, covering both what can be observed and what can be thought. It comprises the rural and the urban, the settled and the nomadic, original inhabitants and migrants. [...] Indigenous knowledge comprises all knowledge pertaining to a particular people and its territory, the nature or use of which has been transmitted from generation to generation. [...] Indigenous knowledge is an adaptable, dynamic system based on skills, abilities, and problem-solving techniques that change over time depending on environmental conditions. Its premises are grounded in holism and relational world views, and it defies cate- gorization as it operates, to speak with Western categories, in an interdisciplinary and transcultural mode (Battiste). Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete speaks of "Na- tive Science," explaing that "it is a metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and 'coming to know' that have evolved through human experience with the natural world. Native science is born of a lived and storied participation with the natural landscape. [...It] is the collective heritage of human experience with the natural world" (2-3). Indigenizing the academy means foremost synthesizing the two knowledge systems in a rather holistic approach toward science and research, transforming the Western understanding of Indig- enous knowledge and carving an academic and scientific space where Indigenous values and knowledges are respected and supported (Mihesuha and Wilson 2; Al- fred 88), where Indigenous methodologies, decolonizing perspectives, and critical reflexivity are included, where multiple truths are accepted, where epistemic dif- ferences are bridged, where guidelines for ethical research are applied (Kovach 27-33; Kuokkanen 143; Tuhiwai Smith 7), and where subjectivity, spiritual compo- nents, and sacred knowledge have legitimate value beside objectivity and empiri- cal evidence (Kovach 67; Wilson 55).6 Indigenous scholars mostly apply an inclu- sionist approach to indigenizing the academy, i.e. they acknowledge respectful work of non-Indigenous scholars, including Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, a other critical theories that help to expose and overcome Eurocentric hegemonies in Western societies, discourses, and educational systems (Tuhiwai Smith 165-66, 185-91; Kuokkanen 142; Kovach 48, 86; Graham Smith in Kovach 88, 91-92).

At the same time, Indigenous academics warn that the predicament of includ-ing Indigenous knowledge into Western-dominated academies risks transforming oral-based epistemes into print-based ones (Kovach 12), validating Indigenous knowledges and methodologies solely according to Western standards, subjecting the knowledge to Western control (Grenier 13, 55), and, moreover, potentially appropriating, tokenizing, and exploiting these knowledges as happens in the pharmaceutical industry.7 Indigenizing the academy must thus proceed according to the principles of respect, recognition, reciprocity and responsibility (Grenier 42; Evans et al. 5; Kovach 67; Kuokkanen 144 ff. 157; Wilson 77). Integrated re- search approaches must counter neocolonial patterns in universities, must not be extractive, and must be accountable to Indigenous standards, honoring a tribal worldview (Kovach 28-29). And the academy must go beyond the hackneyed and token "giving of respect" and seriously engage with Indigenous epistemes (Kuok- kanen 149). It is essential to understand Indigenous knowledges and practices not as static, solely traditional, and directed at a precolonial past, but as dynamic, innovative, and changing according to neo/colonial influences, new technologies, and political developments (cf. Grenier 6).8 Likewise 'Western' and 'Indigenous' perspectives must not be seen as entrenched oppositions but as polar points of a contact field where both knowledge systems face each other from various posi- tions within the field, depending on the discipline and aspect, degree of openness of the discipline, and the history of their contact. Pertaining to the environmental sciences, for example, they might be fairly close, while in chemistry or econom- ics they might still have immense gaps between them. The objective is to bring the knowledge systems closer together and encourage them to develop mutual respect, understanding, and eventually cooperation. In general, however, Indigenous scholars notice that there are two knowledge systems in place with one almost arrogantly ignoring the other, simply because of its historically developed authoritative power position. There is still not much collaboration between Indigenous and Western people, scholars, and scientists and there is little respect for, or genuine interest in, Indigenous knowledge and observations on the part of Western academia. This is largely due to sanctioned Western hegemonies, cultural and intellectual, but also to often very diverging worldviews as Kuokkanen states, "[FJrom the perspective of indigenous peoples, liberal humanism and its values- equity, individualism, rationalism, progress, and democracy, among others- are inherently problematic in that in many cases they run squarely counter to key principles of indigenous philosophies and worldviews" (19). And yet, Western science cannot meet the challenges of, for example, envi- ronmental problems on its own. Louise Grenier argues on the basis of Darshan Shankar: "Western technoscientific approaches are (in themselves) an insufficient response to today's complex web of social, economic, political, and environmental challenges. The paradigm in support of 'one technology or one knowledge system fits all' has been debunked. IK [Indigenous knowledge] systems suggest a different approach to problem solving" (11). The academy will fail to achieve its objectives if it continues to exclude Indigenous epistemes, as its knowledge is based only on a fraction of world knowledge (Kuokkanen 153, 157)- the point being to alert Western scholars and scientists to this fact.

. Critical Race IP as Decolonizing Praxis In the historic piece "Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation," Derrick Bell, Jr. observes that "Leroy Clark has written that the black community's belief in the efficacy of litigation inhibited the development of techniques involving popular participation and control, that might have advanced school desegregation in the South." 291 Bell, who echoes the criticism of Civil Rights Movement leaders such as Dr. King, goes on to observe that "the problem of unjust laws … is almost invariably a problem of distribution of political and economic power." 292 If we accept Bell's principle as true, then it is necessary to find productive  extra-legal as well as legal approaches to anti-racist and anti-colonial resistance within the context of intellectual properties, ones which are not invested in conservative law and economics models. Following Bell's lead and his conceptualization of racial realism, 293 we offer as one avenue for locating such radical approaches: decolonial theory. Addressing the structural sources of the unequal distribution of political and economic power that Bell raises as a primary cause of racial non-neutrality in law is a central goal of decolonial theory and practice, which have become increasingly central to anti-racist and anti-colonial strategy among academics and activists. While we do not mean to suggest that decolonial theory is the one right answer to reworking race and intellectual property, we maintain that its understanding of the nexus of (neo)coloniality, narratives of progress, power, and knowledge is a useful one to deploy to undo intellectual property's racial and (neo)colonial logics. Moreover, decolonial theory can be thought together with other types of critical theory, including CRT, feminism, and queer theory in order to imagine new ways of creating radical multiversalities. As such, it creates space for a complex and multifaceted engagement with race, (neo)coloniality and intellectual property that addresses the fundamental historical power dynamics that shaped laws of knowledge production. In short, it is only through the death of the (European/American) human 294 that Others can claim their place as radical equal partners in humanity. 295 Decoloniality, as Walter Mignolo describes it, addresses the "hidden agenda" of modernity, 296 namely an investment in coloniality. For him, coloniality "names the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today of which historical colonialisms have been a constitutive, though downplayed, dimension." 297 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano describes decoloniality's centrality in creating systems of power which embrace Otherness, writing "decoloniality is an alternative accent - one marked by pluriversal commitments, geohistorical attentiveness, and biographical configurations." 298 As such, the "coloniality" in decoloniality does not simply describe the process and reparation of  colonization, it describes the logics of progress, enlightenment, development, and democracy which made the domination of Other peoples, in its many racist and (neo)colonial manifestations, a thinkable option. Modernity and coloniality are, therefore, fundamentally intertwined, with the former often offering ideological and narrative justifications for the latter. Per Anibal Quijano, (neo)coloniality operates through a "matrix of power" 299 with four component parts: economic control, authority, patriarchal domination, and knowledge and subjectivity. 300 Quijano explains the scope of coloniality, as well as its tendency to permeate other forms of oppression: In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge … as well as their products and work. The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised [sic] expression, intellectual or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers' own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. These beliefs and images served not only to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic. 301 For Quijano, the colonization of power was the underlying impetus for the creation of the category of race, the original move which made all other forms of domination possible. 302 Moreover, colonization's objectification of the colonized, i.e. rendering them the objects of study instead of producers of knowledge, conceptually voids the idea of Other knowledge. 303 The four categories of the colonial matrix that Quijano identifies articulate areas in which colonizers exercised their power to effect total control over the colonized and their knowledge. Decolonization, therefore, requires a "de-linking" from the colonial matrix of power and its ideological commitments to modernity,  with all its component parts. 304 Put differently, decolonial theory and praxis conceives of "epistemological reconstitution," 305 which makes space for "another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality." 306 Wanzer-Serrano defines decoloniality as: Any practice, discursive or otherwise, that facilitates a divestment from modernity/coloniality and invents openings through which decolonial epistemics can emerge… . Delinking requires changes in both content and form … . It requires being oriented toward shifts in our genealogies of thought, including drawing authority from colonized spaces/voices and resisting latent imperialisms - even when such resistance may not be exclusively oppositional. 307 Decoloniality is also distinct from dewesternization, a practice which attempts to create radical multiversality through the already existing frameworks of global governance and neoliberal capitalism. 308 We are skeptical that dewesternization, as Mignolo defines it, can play any role in undoing intellectual property's valorization of economic productivity, investment, and profit, or its deep and entrenched fidelity to racial capitalism. The post-Lochner and post-Fordist world imagines creatorship as labor performed in the service of national economic survival. Consequently, we imagine the decolonial as the radical departure from law and economics and racial capitalism as well as racism and (neo)colonialism. That is not to say that incrementalism is unimportant in moving toward a decolonized world; rather that the struggle for social justice in intellectual property law appears to necessitate undoing and remaking economic models that fuel racial capitalism. In this section, then, we situate decoloniality as a practice which can be used to unmake intellectual property's investments in whiteness and racial capitalism, particularly because of its overarching engagement with the underlying epistemologies of knowledge production and its transnational scope. We first define coloniality, a practice which is both historical and contemporary, with reference to decolonial understandings of the term and then examine how decoloniality might be used to think through intellectual property's "possessive investment in whiteness." 309 In doing so, we offer  decoloniality as an avenue for theoretical and practical exploration vis-a-vis intellectual properties. As we show, spaces of knowledge production that break with the demands of coloniality already exist, and we model what may come next. 310 Coloniality, as formulated by Mignolo and Quijano, implicitly includes intellectual property regimes, which incorporate core principles of modernity into their frameworks for governing property ownership. Whether understood through the history of devaluing the knowledge of racial Others, including slaves and indigenous peoples, the imposition of predominantly European intellectual property rights regimes on the developing world, the commodification of traditional knowledge, or the implicit imposition of development agendas on the regulation of knowledge production, intellectual property law reinforces the central premises of modernity and beliefs in the inequality of people of color that underlie them. Because intellectual property law is deeply embedded within and committed to reproducing modernity/coloniality, legal reform without undoing its fundamentally European values is unlikely to succeed in creating more racially just information paradigms. 311 Put differently, decolonizing intellectual property is a necessary prerequisite to undoing the racial hierarchies that are embedded within the law itself. While this does not mean that we should abandon attempts at legal reform, it does mean grappling with the underlying power dynamics through which intellectual property regimes were and continue to be produced. Read as such, decolonization is a complementary project to CRT, one that looks beyond even the ideologies which inform law's racial non-neutrality. Decolonial thinking might therefore be read as overlapping with CRT but with a broad commitment to undoing the damage of modernity/coloniality on the world, including its structures for information economies. Nelson Maldonado-Torres uses the framework of decoloniality to construct a framework for not simply anti-(neo)colonial resistance but  also anti-racist thinking. Following W.E.B. DuBois and Sylvia Wynter, he argues for the centrality of modernity/coloniality in the construction of racist regimes. For him, as with Fanon, "decolonization is about the creation of a new symbolic and material order that takes the full spectrum of human history, its achievements, and its failures, into view." 312 Yet the path of decolonization is not shaped around "overcoming" Empire or (neo)colonization as Fanon intimates. 313 It is constructed through radical departure from the logics of modernity. Maldonado-Torres continues: Taking Du Bois and Wynter's lead, I would like to suggest that from the perspectives of the repeatedly racialized groups of modernity, particularly indigenous people and people of African or Afro-mixed ex-slave descent, but also Jews and Muslims, a concept of Being premised on what is often referred to as the dialectics of modernity and the nation, and their supposed overcoming by the emergence of imperial sovereignty or Empire, miss the non-dialectical character of damnation. That is, in short, that what are changes for many, for those whom Frantz Fanon called the condemned of the earth seem rather to be perverse re-enactments of a logic that has for a long time militated against them. 314 Here, the decolonial is about creating something beyond the dialectic of modernity and coloniality, a framework that can radically embrace and center Otherness. His work is instructive here, as it offers us space for conceiving of how the decolonial accesses the problems of racism and (neo)coloniality in structures of knowledge production. In the remainder of the section, we unpack how delinking might look, as a set of scholarly and activist perspectives, guided by an ethic of decolonial love, that reorients us toward hearing the voices of the Global South so that we might begin disrupting what we know and how we come to know those things, but not necessarily in ways that are accountable or attempt to answer to the West. 315 Anderson, who spoke on this at Race + IP 2017, dreams of "de-colonial futures" in the context of intellectual property law. 316 While she predominantly focuses on indigenous knowledge, her work asks us to consider how and why decolonial theory might inform attempts to reimagine intellectual property law. For Anderson, decolonizing indigenous knowledge, at least in part, includes the creation of a new  system of labels and licenses whereby indigenous peoples have control over how information and objects are managed. 317 One functional outcome of such licensing projects - as well as the attendant pushes to leverage human rights as a means of protecting traditional knowledge 318  - is to revalue knowledge that has been consistently marginalized, in part by highlighting the right of its creators to dictate how and when it is used. Scholars such as Boateng and Basole also examine ways of addressing the devaluation of traditional knowledge. Both scholars suggest even the terms "traditional knowledge" and "indigenous knowledge" are problematic because they create categories of information within intellectual property regimes. 319 Identifying traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge frequently involves differentiating it from information produced in Western contexts in ways which are legible to international intellectually property regimes. However, as Okediji and Coombe point out, such intellectual property regimes were built on a foundation of coloniality which refused to categorize information produced by the colonized as knowledge. 320 These critiques operate as delinking moves, which question the narratives that modernity has laid out for non-European knowledge. They also exemplify the type of critical practice that might aid in reimagining intellectual property law,. Delinking decoloniality in the context of intellectual property requires the rejection of narratives which categorize Other knowledge as secondary or inferior to that of Westerners, whether implicitly or explicitly. Terms such as "traditional knowledge," "indigenous knowledge," and "folklore" are dangerous precisely because they create a bifurcation between that knowledge produced informally, often by non-Westerners, and "real" knowledge. Resisting such narratives, for instance by advancing narratives of bio-piratical theft from the non-Western world and reclaiming memories that might otherwise be erased from the canon, are important first steps in remaking the laws of information. The step, which follows pulling back the curtain on the implications of the modernity/coloniality binary for intellectual property  law, however, is a more complicated one. Decolonization requires reconstituting universality in a manner, which, instead of substituting the European for the totality, creates space for the embrace of multiple perspectives, in a manner, which is both democratic and cosmopolitan. While we do not offer a model to supplant that of modernity/coloniality, we note that several nations, such as India, 321 Ghana, 322 and South Africa, 323 are remaking intellectual properties through the embrace of digital databases, local models of intellectual property protection, and rejection of international intellectual property regimes. Moreover, decolonizing practices can unfold at the individual level as well, through resistive performative practices, such as discursive interventions and arts. Our goal in highlighting both the undoing of narratives of modernity/coloniality in intellectual property and practices which supplant Western intellectual property law is to point to further avenues of research for Critical Race IP scholars. Existing scholarship in these areas suggests that attending to decoloniality as a means of interrogating the intersections of race and intellectual property is likely to be a fruitful avenue for further research.

Three recent trademark cases -- Harjo, Blackhorse, and Tam -- illustrate the inescapable intersections between race and intellectual property rights. The litigation in the first two cases, initiated by Suzan Shown Harjo, Amanda Blackhorse, and a group of Indigenous activists, contested the protectability of a famous NFL football team's trademark on the basis that it is disparaging to Native Americans. 37 The lawsuits that Harjo and Blackhorse filed spanned decades  [*685] and raised important questions about the protection of racist mascots in the instant cases and more generally. 38 While Blackhorse was ultimately victorious in securing the cancellation of the Washington R**** trademarks, her legal triumph was short lived. The outcome in Tam raised fundamental questions about the constitutionality of Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act and, accordingly, the recently announced outcome in Blackhorse. 39 While these three cases raise rather obvious issues around race and representation, I am interested in how the reasoning upon which their holdings turn implicate questions of racial chronopolitics. I approach the analysis of temporality through CRTIP, a constantly evolving critical framework for applying Critical Race Theory to intellectual property cases. CRTIP is, as Keller and I define it, "the interdisciplinary movement of scholars connected by their focus on the racial and colonial non-neutrality of the laws of copyright, patent, trademark, right of publicity, trade secret, and unfair competition using principles informed by CRT." 40 CRTIP identifies "a body of scholarship with shared tenets about the racialized hierarchies inherent in IP law and its attendant ordering of knowledge." 41 Theorizing at the intersections of Critical Race Theory and intellectual property is not intended to force scholars into CRTIP as an analytic framework. Rather, it is to introduce one way of reading intellectual property scholarship that takes up questions of race and (neo)coloniality together, in a larger, always emergent conversation about racial justice."Intellectual property's economic structure is 'always already' raced," 42 because capitalism's orientation to knowledge is always already raced. Betsy Rosenblatt, for instance, demonstrates about copyright law that "[i]t rewards appropriation of materials perceived as primitive, raw, or 'folk' by purveyors of dominant culture, while punishing appropriation of materials that it associates with higher culture or views as already completed." 43 As such, copyright law operates as "the language of the colonizer." 44 Kara Swanson similarly shows about patent law that its "ideology of slavery reached into the technical bureaucracy of the patent office, an arena of law and of the administrative state frequently considered outside politics." 45 As such, patent law implicates "an ultimate claim of whiteness as intellectual property." 46 Knowledge, in both instances, is ordered in a manner that centers whiteness and its attendant estimations of the value of creation and knowledge. Trademark law too produces and entrenches visual economies of whiteness. Rosemary Coombe writes that trademarks "denied or downplayed the cultural and ethnic differences of some 'Americans'" through "the medium of the consuming body and embodiment...of others whose claims to an American subjectivity were complicated by contemporary relations of subjugation." 47 Put differently, America's visual culture, as constituted through trademark law, constituted whiteness as valuable by objectifying people of color. One way that the "scopic regime" 48 of trademark law operated was through the articulation of people of color as primitive, i.e. from a time past. As Coombe puts it, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "we see preoccupation with the frontiers of civilization and the containment of the primitive." 49 In the sections that follow, I explore how Harjo and Blackhorse not only reinforce temporally based race discrimination by portraying Native Americans as primitive but also illustrate how the manipulation of time through legal procedure can advantage certain litigants over others, with considerable racial and colonial consequences. 50

Walker 04 Walker is a scholar, leader, and advocate for peace. She is Director of Juniata College’s Baker Institute, Director of –Imagining Together: Platform for Arts, Culture, and Conflict Transformation, and Director of the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. (Polly O., "Decolonizing conflict resolution: addressing the ontological violence of Westernization." The American Indian Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 3-4, summer-fall 2004, pp. 527+., Accessed on Gale Academic Online via University of Michigan Library System, DOA: 6/27/24)// LFS – LMH

In this article I have argued that Western problem-solving models of conflict resolution are not culturally universal as some authors claim. Rather, they reflect unacknowledged cultural underpinnings of Western worldview. I further maintain that assertions of cultural universality of Western models represent a form of ontological violence by marginalizing Indigenous ways of conflict transformation. A number of scholars argue that Western problem-solving models of conflict resolution, rather than being acultural, merely fail to make explicit the cultural basis of their own approach (Avruch and Black 1991). For example, the cultural parameters of Western conflict resolution often remain at an "out-of-awareness" level: We think of the practice of mediation as the application of techniques ... yet these techniques are embedded within a surrounding cultural framework of unrecognized and taken for granted conceptions of the social world. This cultural framework consists of ideas about when to fight and when to compromise, notions of the self in relation to others, and theories about which third parties are entitled to intervene in problems and in what ways. To those who share this implicit framework, it is simply the natural and sensible way of doing things. (Merry 1987, 1) Indigenous peoples who do not share this implicit framework may find their worldviews and ways of transforming conflict marginalized or suppressed. Current literature on culture and conflict resolution criticizes the application of Western paradigms to conflicts involving Indigenous peoples (Grose 1995; Beattie 1997; Yazzie 1995) and urges further research to determine the conflict resolution methods of other cultures (Avruch and Black 1991, 31-37). In the last ten years a growing number of researchers have addressed Indigenous processing of conflict, including Beattie (1997), Garrett (1998), Grose (1995), Huber (1993), LaResche (1993), LeBaron (1995), Walker (2001), and Yazzie (1995). Nevertheless, the majority of formal research on processing conflict continues to focus on Western methodologies. Western problem-solving models are frequently imported into Indigenous communities with few modifications (Beattie 1997; Grose 1995; Lederach 1995). Ron Kraybill describes this proselytization of Western conflict resolution stating that, "Where religions send missionaries, conflict resolution organisations send trainers" (1996, 22). Elements of ontological violence are evidenced in the marginalization of Indigenous approaches to conflict transformation through the promotion of Western approaches. These differences in worldview are more than cultural points of interest. They are the sites of political contestation of power. Indigenous methods of conflict transformation are marginalized within the Western discipline of conflict resolution. The Western methods of resolving conflict that are often imported into Indigenous communities are based on an extremely different worldview. Western societies' power and willingness to implement their models without consideration of Indigenous worldviews perpetuates ontological violence, the forceful introduction of one worldview to the extent that it marginalizes or suppresses another worldview. Decolonizing the discipline of conflict resolution involves developing a deeper understanding of, respect for, and acknowledgement of Indigenous worldviews. The decolonizing process also involves creating support for Indigenous people to be able to access conflict transformation processes that are in alignment with Indigenous worldviews.

CAGED KNOWLEDGE: DOCUMENTATION AS A COLONIAL STRATEGY The documentation of Indigenous Knowledge has become an exceptionally popular method for including IK in academic research and environmental policy and for assisting in the recovery and protection of IK. (22) Documenting or digitizing Indigenous Knowledge is a seemingly benign way of appearing to recover Traditional Indigenous Knowledge while at the same time increasing access to the knowledge and vastly increasing the potential for its exploitation. Yet coercing our knowledge to conform to the rules of the colonial power structure serves only to further denigrate and attack the nature of Indigenous Knowledge. When knowledge is made into a text, it is translated from Indigenous languages into English, locking its interpretation in a cognitive box delineated by the structure of a language that evolved to communicate the worldview of the colonizers. (23) it is also stripped of its dynamism and its fluidity and confined to a singular context. It is void of the spatial relationships created between Elder and youth. It becomes generalized and depersonalized. It is separated from the land, from the worlds of the spirits, from its source and its meaning, and from the methodologies for transmission that provide the rigor that ensures its proper communication. It becomes coerced and manipulated into a form that cannot possibly transform or decolonize. (24) Rather than documenting knowledge we should be protecting the land and the Indigenous processes for the transmission of Indigenous Knowledge to younger generations. In other words, we must strengthen the oral tradition, teach children how to learn from the land and how to understand the knowledge of the land. From the perspective of Indigenous Peoples, how you learn is as important or perhaps more important than what you learn, and Indigenous educational programs must use culturally inherent ways of teaching and learning IK. They must be land-based, and they must provide opportunities for youth to interact with Elders and Traditional Knowledge holders on Indigenous terms. (25) Language programs must work toward teaching English-speaking children the cultural and conceptual language, not just the indigenous equivalents of English. (26) Indigenous Knowledge will not be relevant or of any use to the process of liberation if it exists only in documented Elders' interviews. Indigenous Knowledge must be lived, and so we must think very carefully about how we are preparing our children to live their cultural knowledge in the coming generations. ENGAGING INDIGENISM Engaging in anticolonial strategies for the protection, recovery, and maintenance of IK systems means that academics, Indigenous Knowledge holders, and the political leaders of Indigenous nations and settler governments must be prepared to dismantle the colonial project in all of its current manifestations. Academics who are to be true allies to Indigenous Peoples in the protection of our knowledge must be willing to step outside of their privileged position and challenge research that conforms to the guidelines outlined by the colonial power structure and root their work in the politics of decolonization and anticolonialism. This Indigenous approach is critical to the survival of Indigenous Knowledge and ultimately Indigenous Peoples. Anticolonial strategies for the recovery of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge systems require a deconstruction of the colonial thinking and its relationship to IK. They require a critical analysis of colonialism and how it has led to the current state of IK. They require the recovery of Indigenous intellectual traditions, Indigenous control over Indigenous national territories, the protection of Indigenous lands from environmental destruction, and educational opportunities that are anticolonial in their political orientation and firmly rooted in traditions of their nations. These strategies will create the spaces necessary for the recovery of Indigenous Knowledge systems using the processes, values, and traditions inherent in those knowledge systems, while fostering the political mobilization to stop the colonial attack on Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples in future generations.

MINOBIMAATISIIWIN: DECOLONIZING TEK AND THE REVITALIZATION OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN ABORIGINAL COMMUNITIES Remembering is regarded as an important step in beginning the process of decolonization: "To remember is a way to re-know and re-claim a part of your life." (62) We have to remember who we are. We have to invest in learning all aspects of our knowledge, including processes (how we come to know, through stories and experience), places (in our communities, on the land), products (the knowledge itself), and people (our own personal development for fulfilling our visions/responsibilities). (63) We have to tell our versions of this story. We often find ourselves in the position of reacting to the colonizers, and we spend too much precious time and energy deconstructing their intents, labels, and activities. (64) Maybe we need to spend more time being proactive in our communities. This is not to say that there is no role for deconstructing Western concepts, especially those that supposedly represent us. It is important to understand and dismantle the process of colonization and how it has impacted our communities. (65) But this is not essentially what we are about. It is what we have to do to stay sane and better understand the intentions of the colonizer and therefore resist them. When we do this, however, we may not be paying enough attention to our own people, our own knowledge, and what makes us who we are. Indigenous people are essentially creative people! Our worldview is about Creation, about being co-creators, transforming ourselves and re-creating ourselves as we need to meet our challenges. Winona LaDuke refers to this creative process as "Minobimaatisiiwin," which refers to rebirth and our goal to strive for a good life. (66) LaDuke states that if we focus on Minobimaatisiiwin, then we will be practicing IK. As she says, "There is no way to quantify a way of life, only a way to live it. (67) It is this way of life that sustained us for generations, that got us through very troubling times. It is the way that will guide our future. This article represents nay version of the story as I know it. I teach my story to my class. It is the only way I know how. I believe one of the most important lessons that I have learned throughout my own process of learning IK and TEK in both personal and professional settings is that IK is a circle; it is part of the larger cycle of creation and re-creation. If we reclaim our original instructions that encourage us to think in terms of cycles, such as the Thanksgiving Address and the Anishinaabe Creation and Re-Creation stories, we are brought back full circle. That is what we have to do with our knowledge: bring it back full circle so it lives in ourselves, our communities, our nations, and our children. Hopefully we will not have to rely on books, databases, and lectures to tell us who we are. I did not come to this understanding with ease. I have in fact been challenged many times by my students. At the end of the Indigenous Traditional Environmental Knowledge course that I teach, I ask students to tell me again what TEK means to them. I tell them they cannot deconstruct it (we already did this), and they are encouraged to share in whatever way they feel most comfortable (storytelling, song, art, poetry). My only rule is, "don't write it down." They are not permitted to write a formal paper. Over the years I have received many insights from students in this retelling. Illuminations I would never have gained otherwise have appeared. I believe my TEK course is a mutual learning experience benefiting both myself and my students. The revelation that stands out most in my mind came from a very frustrated non-Aboriginal student who told me when I assigned the exercise that he did not know what TEK was; he felt as though he was back at the beginning of the semester! "Exactly," I responded, "TEK is a circle; we are back to where we started." "This is not a problem," I explained, "if you let go of your linear thinking and the idea that we are supposed to get from point A to B, then you will find this exercise easier to bear." I explained that TEK, from all Aboriginal point of view, is about what you have learned and how you have learned it. The next week I was pleasantly surprised when he shared his view of TEK to the class. He returned to the beginning, to IK. He spoke about the seven grandfathers' teachings of the Anishinaabe tradition. He presented each person in the class (and there were exactly seven) with a gift that he had made. He spoke to each person as he presented his gift, telling each person why he had made them a particular gift and how it related to one of the teachings of the seven grandfathers. From each person in the class he had received a teaching over the course of the semester. This process reflects the truth of Gregory Cajete's observation that "The value of the effort, the coming to know, is found in the journey, in addition to or rather than, the end result." (68) I always stress that IK must be viewed as a circle and as a process of regeneration and re-creation. It must not be constrained by linear thinking. Part of this emerged from my own discomfort with the idea that IK was disappearing, that as Elders pass on, we are losing much knowledge. It is not that I disagree--I grieve in my own life the passing of my grandparents and great-grandparents and the loss of the knowledge they took with them--I just do not believe it is the whole story. I believe IK comes from many sources, including Creation itself. This is what the stories tell me. We learn from the spirit world; we learn from plants, animals, the sun, the moon, and from each other and from our children. TEK or IK, as Aboriginal people understand them, are not linear. It is not a simple matter of transferring knowledge from elder to youth, although this is an important process as well. I have heard Elders say that we learn much from children, that they are closer to the spirit world than we are. They also teach us patience. If one thinks in a linear fashion, it is easy to see why there is the widespread belief that IK is disappearing. I believe it is a welcome and exciting prospect that we can learn IK from our children and those yet to be born. There is hope, and that must count for something. It is true that IK comes from our ancestors, but it will also come from our future.

1 The Limits of Laws Even well-intentioned legislative revisions that leave unchallenged power relations (e.g. white supremacy) and prevailing ideologies (e.g. colonizer mentalities) fail to advance their targeted triple-helix of rights. For instance, laws putatively established as anti-discriminatory may actually undermine Indigenous sovereignty, as in Australia where the settler state – still presuming its own moral superiority, and unwilling to share power – is not required to consult Aboriginal communities before imposing ‘special measures’ (e.g. criminalizing alcohol possession) to ensure their ‘adequate advancement’ (: 28). Legislative reforms may be further hampered by a lack of appropriate implementation and enforcement by those in power – or with power – who do not support the laws’ ideological underpinnings (). Indeed, American Indian rights activists point out that treaties between tribes and the federal government are inadequately respected (). International law, generally favorable to Indigenous people’s interests and concerns, is notoriously weak as it is largely unenforced, relying (other than rare instances of armed intervention or economic sanctions) on states’ voluntary compliance, often based not in ideological commitment but in their desire to maintain positive diplomatic relations (). Meanwhile, if a law contradicts social norms (), assumed entitlements, or neoliberal expectations, citizens and/or companies will overtly or covertly resist it, reinforcing the conditions it sought to eliminate. In Paraguay, for example, an Indigenous community’s hard-won land rights exacerbated conflicts with non-Indigenous neighbors’ and industries’ (extra-)legal claims to those lands and resources (, ). Nonetheless, legal processes and advocacy can change ideologies (). Ultimately, legal frameworks and decisions shape social norms, moralities, customs, and social structures (; ; ; ). Indigenous leaders’ international legal advocacy shifted discourses about, understandings of, and ideologies surrounding Indigenous people’s rights (). As social expectations shift, so do power dynamics; ideologies can ‘embolden’ groups and individuals ‘to view themselves as rights holders’ and challenge threats (: 58). International law, for instance, imbues localized Indigenous rights struggles with a sense of legitimacy and a ‘base’ from which activists present specific demands in national and international forums (: 447), as the triple-helix’s three strands coevolve.

Decolonization is often perceived as a means to uncover the histories of the colonized, those whom Frantz Fanon refers to as the “”, and bring their stories to the awareness of the mainstream. However, it is often confused with any social justice endeavor including diversity, equity, and inclusion and often devoid of a critical analysis of power, history, and sociopolitics.  This lack of critical introspective analysis of power, hegemony, and the historical and continuing dynamics of internalized and systemic oppression in contemporary health and higher education structures, results in the reproduction of colonial logics of commodifying human beings, labor, space, and knowledge. 

What this looks like is the maintenance of a power hierarchy in global health that is still predominantly white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, male, and European/American. It looks like institutional-community or (neo)colonial-(neo)colonized processes, practices, and policies of funding, partnerships, and program/project development that replicate colonial dynamics of extraction and exploitation. It looks like curricula that re-marginalize, de-prioritize, and minimize the lived experiences, expertise, and epistemologies of indigenous communities. It looks like narratives that obscure the interdependent causative relationship of the development and wealth of Europe and North America and the under-development and poverty of their past and present colonies. It looks like discourse that ignores the role of (neo)colonizer economic and national security decisions and policies that suppress indigenous independence. It looks like co-opting and bending the decolonization discourse to adhere to Eurocentric constraints such as viewing situations in binary terms and, therefore, in “tension” versus in multifaceted, intersectional, and in harmony. Constraints such as framing approaches as pragmatic vs philosophical as opposed to each informing and depending on the other. It looks like language that reinforces the hegemony of Europe and North America over the rest of the word such as “Global North” and “Global South” or defining nations by economic status set to Euro-American indices of prosperity and development. It looks like the absence of a commitment to justice and engagement with  

We have observed a lack of reference and deference to  scholars, thinkers, practitioners, and activists in the rush of Euro-American do-gooders to institutionalize decolonization centers, departments, positions, apply for grants, and create programs, projects, and curricula. This ironic rush to colonize the decolonization movement is done without reflecting on (neo)colonizer intellectual connectivity to indigenous and majority world critical inquiry, often as a result of ongoing epistemological exploitation. Giants such as Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, George Sefa Dei, Chizoba Imoka, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Amilcar Cabral, Es’kia Mphahlele, and many others are omitted from discourse as institutions mobilize to incorporate “decolonization” studies into their neo-liberal academic framework. Institutional norms, epistemologies, ontologies, praxes, policies, and processes built on Euro-American neo-liberal values of the hierarchical dualism of the individual over social, human over environment, and industrialized or “developed” over non-industrialized are expected to embrace what Tshepo Madlingozi and Frantz Fanon describe as a  , and what Joel Modiri defines as  The attempt to incorporate the disruptive  of undoing colonization within colonial frameworks and matrices is itself an act of colonization as it ignores the inherent intent of decolonization and presents as an unwillingness or an inability to change. It is also emblematic of the ego-centrism and lack of self-introspection that often peppers well-intended decolonization actors and their actions.  Often, they do not do the work of reaching down into that deep place of knowledge inside oneself to touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there, and see whose face it wears, so that the personal as the political can begin to illuminate their choices. Often, they do not submit themselves to the endless personal and political fracturing that is decolonization. The urgency dictated by white guilt leaves little space and time for actual reflection, deconstructing, deconditioning, relationship-building, and structural dismantling. Thus, grassroots indigenous and Majority World leaders are left in the dust, their ideas co-opted in the rush to “solutions”, while colonial power paradigms and dynamics are left intact, patterns of oppression and structural injustices remaining unfettered and reinforced. 

While the class system and gender hierarchy were maintained to protect the power of rich white males in an emerging white societies, the racial caste (i.e., racial slavery and segregation) was invented to keep indigenous and enslaved peoples at the bottom of white societies so that they would provide their labor and other resources freely or cheaply. As the ideology of whiteness was used to exterminate Native Americans and to transfer their resources to white society, it was also used to explain and justify racial slavery and segregation. The settlers conveniently invented “Indian savagery” through the ideology of 4 whiteness and committed genocide on indigenous Americans (Roediger 1991) and other indigenous peoples. Although many authors explained the role of colonial violence in the Americas and in other continents, they did not explore the connections among capitalist incorporation, various forms of violence, and colonial terrorism. Competing European colonial forces engaged in state-sponsored terrorism that was practiced in forms of unjustified wars, organized and systematic mass killings, mutilation and trophy taking, ecological and cultural destruction, and spreading of lethal diseases and continued subjugation. By engaging in such crimes against humanity, the European colonial forces had laid the foundations for the economic and political supremacy of North America and Western Europe in the global capitalist world system. The terrorist attacks on the life and liberty of indigenous peoples by European colonial powers and their collaborators also destroyed existing institutions and economies and exposed the conquered peoples to poverty and famine-induced “holocausts” (Davis 2001). The destruction of indigenous cultures and institutions resulted in massive deaths (Polanyi 1944: 159-160).

The European colonial powers used their superior military forces and collaborators to enslave and colonize directly or indirectly pre-capitalist societies around the world to exploit their economic resources and labor power through looting, piracy, terrorism, genocide, expropriation, annexation, and continued subjugation. Consequently, the original accumulation of wealth and capital occurred in the West; this accumulated capital gradually facilitated the transformation of mercantilism into industrial capitalism and the expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and increased the demand for raw materials, free or cheap labor (mainly slaves), markets, and the intensification of global colonial expansion in the world (Marx 1967; Rodney 1972). With the development of capitalism, further division of labor, the advancement of technology and organization capacity in the form of state, the interstate system, and the transnational corporation, and with the limitless capacity to accumulate more capital in a globalized world, certain human groups have demonstrated their capabilities to impose their power on other human groups through political violence that has involved war, terrorism, and genocide. The colonizing nations of the West had justified “their scramble for foreign territories as fulfillment of a sacred duty to spread their form of civilization to the world” (Bodely 1982: 12). These countries used the discourses of the superiority of their race, culture, civilization, and Christian religion to promote and justify destructive and exploitative policies, such as terrorism, genocide, and economic exploitation. John H. Bodely (1992: 37) characterizes the genocide and ethnocide committed by such nation-states as “an immense human tragedy.” The more Euro-Americans advanced in technology and organizational capacity, the more they engaged in terrorism and genocide in order to satisfy their group and individual economic interests. As we shall see below, European countries, such as Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Belgium started capitalist colonial expansion to the Americans, Africa, Australia and Asia through engaging in terrorism, genocide, and gross human rights violations and at the same time claimed the superiority of their cultures, religion (Christianity), race, and civilizations. The development of capitalism with its political structures, nation-states, enabled European colonialists to expand and commit terrorism and genocide so that they could extract resources. According to Elizabeth Colson (1992, 278), “Economic systems have emerged that created massive conflicts of interests between classes and also nations. Technologies empower those who are able to seize control of the state apparatus and enhance the stakes for which people contend . . . the further creation of technologies that enable humans to play with destructive emotions and habituate themselves to violence under conditions that give them the pleasure of terror without expectation that it will recoil upon them.” The state and its agents originally monopolized various forms of political violence. Most social scientists of the nineteenth century justified “a deliberate and violent political act carried out as national policy in order to gain access to the natural resources controlled by” indigenous peoples, and “espoused ‘scientific’ evolutionary theories that explained the destruction and suggested that it was inevitable” (Bodley 1992, 38). Terrorism as an instrument of massive violence to terrorize indigenous peoples emerged with the racialized capitalist world system. It was practiced through colonialism, servitude, and racial slavery in order to transfer the resources of the indigenous peoples to European colonialists and their descendants between the 15th and 19th centuries. Most of those indigenous peoples that survived terrorism and genocide were reduced to the status of slavery or semi-slavery (see De Las Casas 1992). Under the guise of “scientific” theories, most Western scholars have justified the destruction of indigenous peoples; they have made “scientific” claims to justify the gross human rights violations and to promote Euro-American personal and group interests at the cost of the indigenous peoples. Accepting ideologically and culturally blind thinking has prevented most of these scholars, colonialists, their descendants, and collaborators from critically understanding the meaning and consequences of colonial terrorism and other crimes against humanity.

When European states colonised countries, the land ownership systems of the original inhabitants of those countries generally underwent a radical transformation21 or, as in the case of Australia, were extinguished altogether.22 Unable to find land rights justice within settler societies, some indigenous groups from countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand took their cause to seats of power in Europe. For example, delegations of Māori travelled to England in 1882, 1884, 1914 and 1924 in an attempt to meet with monarchs.23 Among the petitions organised by the Aboriginal leader William Cooper was a petition of 1937 addressed to King George V. It contained 1,814 signatures of Aboriginal people, and asked for Aboriginal representation in the Australian Parliament.24 In 1923 Deskaheh, a chief of the Cayuga, travelled to the League of Nations as a spokesman for the Six Nations of the Iroquois League.25 In essence he wanted the League of Nations to help the Iroquois League gain the sovereign independence and territory that had been agreed to by King George III but was now opposed by the Canadian Government. Anthony Fernando, whose mother was Aboriginal, left Australia for Europe in the early 1900s. Deported from Italy to Britain in 1923 for distributing pamphlets declaring the extermination of indigenous people by the British in Australia, he spent his days in England in sole protest, at one stage regularly appearing outside Australia House in London in a coat covered with toy white skeletons.26 The skeletons, he said, depicted the fate of his people. These and other attempts like them generally ended in failure. The Australian authorities never forwarded Cooper’s petition. Deskaheh left Geneva without success, and died alone in New York in 1926. Fernando died in a mental hospital in Essex in 1946. Indigenous people nevertheless persisted with the strategy of globalising their fight for justice. The evolution of the UN system, which began with the United Nations Charter of 1945, created new opportunities for them. The language of human rights treaties seemed full of evocative promise: ‘All peoples have the right of self-determination’ (Article 1.1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The indigenous networks of political mobilisation and negotiation that evolved around indigenous peoples’ issues concentrated on developing a broad rights-based agenda at the highest levels of international law-making.27 However, IP remained a technically obscure subject and there was little understanding of its connections with indigenous knowledge systems. This, as the next section makes clear, began to change slowly in the 1980s.

Ohiyesa (Isáŋyathi) expressed such critique in the context of the quantified religion of Christian missionaries in his book From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). Another Indigenous critic of Euro-bourgeois society, Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Onʌyoteˀa·ká), expressed a direct critique of industrial capitalism. Her influences from both Onʌyoteˀa·ká traditions and the contemporary social-democratic labor movement are very evident: Some of the gravest problems in this country today are to be found in the industrial world of the white man. With all his acumen, with all his advantages, with all his training, the great masses of labor (who make the things he wears and the things he eats, and who serve the money despots) are by no means rewarded for their toil or taken care of when they need care, much less have they the leisure or the means or the energy for higher education[…]

Instead, they speak and act in favor of contingency as the site of oneness. There is oneness in abstraction, there is Being which is Nothing, and there is oneness in manyness, in rhythm, in Becoming. The “ontological difference” of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger — between merely incidental and dependent beings and foundational Being — is alien to Indigenous thought. Indigenous thought concerns the being of beings rather than the Being of beings. As Cajete says: The Native American paradigm is comprised of and includes ideas of constant motion and flux, existence consisting of energy waves, interrelationships, all things being animate, space/place, renewal, and all things being imbued with spirit[…] The constant flux notion results in a ‘spider web’ network of relationships. In other words, everything is interrelated. If everything is interrelated, then all of creation is related. If human beings are animate and have spirit, then ‘all my relations’ must also be animate and must also have spirit. What Native Americans refer to as ‘spirit’ and energy waves are the same thing. Traditional Indigenous ways of thought are thinking and living in Becoming, not searching for any fundamental experience of Being. This informs Indigenous critiques of abstraction or otherworldliness brought by Westerners. That includes otherworldliness which claims to be being-in-the-world but shrinks away in disgust from the mundane — in Heidegger the inauthentic being of das Man — and excludes it from authentic Being.

In response to indigenous peoples’ general unwillingness to prostrate themselves to capitalism, the Canadian state is engaged in a sustained effort to dispossess them of their land. This ranges from legal manipulations to outright violence, as the pressures of capitalist expansion over the last two decades have intensified, indeed militarized, the colonial conflict between Canada and indigenous nations. The formal land claims process, for example, facilitates the expansion of capitalist development onto indigenous territories. It’s extremely slow and bureaucratic, taking up to fifteen years after a claim is initially made before the process is commenced. That’s at least fifteen years more time for indigenous lands to be whittled away and/or poisoned. Or fifteen years for poverty and frustration in communities to grow, leading to out-migration and making the communities more vulnerable to one-sided deals with corporations. Furthermore, the federal government has made the extinguishment of Aboriginal title a prerequisite of any land claims settlement they’ll agree to. This involves relinquishing collective ownership over land and subsurface resources of large parts of traditional territories – as is the case with the James Bay and Nisga’a comprehensive agreements. Extinguishment – a legal form of dispossession supported by Supreme Court decision and pursued zealously by the government – is a major barrier to the fair settlement of land disputes and reinforces the colonial status quo between the Canadian state and indigenous nations. Even where treaties exist, they are repeatedly ignored and their terms are systematically broken by governments in the interest of economic development or national security. This is the reality underlying the events at Oka (where the local municipal government tried to appropriate land for a golf course), Ipperwash (where the military stole land and physically removed members of the Stony Point community in order to build an army base during the second World War), and today in Caledonia (where housing developers are trying to build on Six Nations’ treaty land). These are but three of the countless examples of state-sanctioned theft of treaty lands that have gained national attention because of indigenous resistance in the face of serious political and military pressure. In fact, in the Delgamuukw decision (derided by the Right and the business community as unambiguously pro-Indigenous) the Supreme Court actually defends the government’s right to appropriate indigenous land for economic reasons. Of course, never too far removed from these strategies of dispossession is military force, which we have seen mobilized in recent years at Oka, Gustafsen Lake, Burnt Church and Ipperwash. It also remains a threat at the Six Nations standoff in Caledonia. While the state may wish to pursue its colonial strategy in the tidier bourgeois legal realm, it will make recourse to military violence to enforce its agenda where necessary. The lesson for the Suretée du Quebec after Oka and the RCMP after Gustafsen Lake was to invest more resources in military weaponry in preparation for future confrontations. Canadian colonialism – like colonialism around the world – has always had its bloody side. If indigenous nations won’t be compliant, capitalist expansion will be defended by violence. The agenda of dispossession is not simply the misguided policy of shortsighted or self-interested business or political leaders. It is central to state and corporate relations with indigenous communities, driven by the demands of the capitalist economy and shaped by a deep-seated racist view of First Nations as uncivilized and unwilling or unable to economically develop their territories. This consideration must not be forgotten in the struggle against Canadian colonialism.

While international and national regimes have extended some protections to the cultural property of indigenous peoples, in many respects the results have not corresponded to their needs. Although there has been some participation by indigenous peoples in the development of these laws, the result has, nevertheless, largely been the creation of top-down, international norms that have yet to take shape and that are rarely sufficiently multi-faceted to encompass the differences among indigenous groups. 94 As such, the laws promulgated often are either too broad or too narrow to adequately capture the distinctions and nuances among indigenous groups and their particular cultural properties. 95 Another problem with the top-down model is that it imports Western intellectual property regimes into indigenous communities. 96 Academics, activists, and indigenous peoples alike view such importation with great skepticism. One scholar warns that great care must be taken not to [*87] impose dominant legal systems wholesale upon traditional knowledge communities: "traditional knowledge deserves and requires greater recognition and protection through legal means, without unduly compromising its essence." 97 Some scholars claim that extending Westernized intellectual property rights to indigenous communities constitutes neo-colonialism, 98 in that it simply borrows the language and methods of the oppressors and, in doing so, further empowers the oppressors. 99 Others maintain that addressing the problem of appropriation, distortion, and destruction of cultural property with a new form of property rights is just a "Western form of problem solving." 100 Whether these particular criticisms are on point, it is clear that the core motivations behind the creation and design of Western intellectual property rights, as well as the paradigm to which the protected knowledge must correspond, simply do not fit indigenous communities. 101 It is therefore logical to challenge the efficacy of imposing on indigenous groups today the same intellectual property structure that has failed them in the past.

The factory system is then at once responsible for some of the biggest problems for the Caucasian mind. Here are some of the evils to which it has given birth: child labor, employed in place of adult employment, with light-running machinery because it is cheaper; industrial accidents, due to large machines without protective appliances, because protection is an item of expense to the employer and the laborer himself is still too ignorant to demand protection before he takes the work that at any moment may take his limb and life; factory regulation and unemployment; unsanitary conditions and long hours — though the last two have been improved by legislation in the past few years, they are by no means above reproach today. Unemployment is the result of the invention of labor-saving machines and the unsettled condition created by differences between labor and capital. Here, Kellogg directly critiques the wage labor indoctrination that many Indigenous peoples were forced through at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. For her, wage labor and “the factory system” are at the heart of the extremely different values and ethics identified by Alfred. Kellogg then goes as far as to identify “communistic” cooperativism and autonomous community economies on such a basis as a means of survival for her nation and others against the real subsumption of capital. In this she preceded Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), who today discusses Indigenous ethics as a “mode of life” apart from Euro-capitalist society, and points to the example of the Dene Declaration program as also aiming at cooperative societies for autonomy. Kellogg and Coulthard both take influence from the non-Native working class movement in the form of socialist critique from within the very heart of capitalist society, while retaining their distinct Indigenous standpoints.