IP laws assimilate indigenous peoples by imposing Western concepts of ownership and innovation on their traditional knowledge and genetic resources. They actively disavow and commodify indigenous labor placing communities in a bind, where participation within western systems garuntees assimilation while departure ensures their erasure. Only a complete refusal can solve.

The Assimilative Potential of Intellectual Property Rights Indigenous resistance to biocolonialism faces a difficult dilemma: how to challenge a form of power – in this case, western intellectual property law – “without accepting its own terms of reference and hence losing the battle before it has begun.”33 On the one hand, unless indigenous peoples have “control over their intellectual products, their knowledge stands to be expropriated without any material benefits reaching them.”34 Arguably, one way to maintain such control is to play the legal game upon which the dominant culture insists and adopt intellectual property protection in order to thwart biopiracy. The “Isolates of Historic Interest” to Diversity Project scientists could, for example, embrace the elaborate materials transfer and database access agreements designed for them by Diversity Project proponents. On the other hand, however, there is good reason to question both the adequacy and appropriateness of intellectual property rights as a means of protecting indigenous rights and resources. As Darrell Posey and Graham Dutfield have argued, intellectual property right protection is purely economic, whereas the interests of indigenous peoples are not just economic but political, linked to self-determination35 and the profoundly entrenched inequalities of power and wealth that divide indigenous communities, corporations, and the governments of nation-states. To acquire and defend IPR protection is also a time- and capital-consuming process, requiring costly legal advice and information unavailable to and beyond the means of many indigenous peoples,36 although not of the corporations or governments who would be their opposition in any legal battle. Moreover, Posey and Dutfield note, intellectual property rights have the potential to engender conflict and protracted legal battles between different indigenous communities laying claim to the same technical knowledge regarding a specific resource and its use.37 We have already seen that western intellectual property law is at odds with vital features of many indigenous knowledge systems – by imposing individualized concepts of originality, inventiveness, rights, and informed consent; by eroding the shared nature of much indigenous knowledge; and by converting both knowledge and life forms into commodities to be harvested, altered, packaged, and sold for personal profit. Biocolonialism’s critics regard it as an assimilative process that threatens to transform indigenous knowledge and value systems, as well as the natural world itself, in unwelcome and lasting ways. The adoption of western intellectual property rights to resist biocolonialism is ultimately to be transformed by the same unwanted western values, concepts, and practices: “Protecting traditional knowledge with Western IP is possible at the price of forced epistemological assimilation of the former.”38 Biocolonialism endangers the knowledge, resources, and labor of generations of indigenous peoples. The price of preventing this, by playing along with the dominant society and adopting the protection of intellectual property law, is ultimately assimilation – transformation by the values and practices of that society: “We cannot buy the arguments that we have to play within the field of existing patent and copyright laws to be able to protect our resources and knowledge.”39 Yet the other horn of this dilemma is that “without control over their intellectual products, their knowledge stands to be expropriated without any material benefits reaching them.”40 Meanwhile, indigenous knowledge systems are condemned (when their existence is acknowledged) as closed, changeless, stultifying, and stifling of originality. Such characterizations not only ignore the massive contributions of indigenous peoples – especially medicinal, pharmaceutical, botanical, and agricultural – they also egregiously distort indigenous knowledge systems themselves. If indigenous knowledge systems did not foster agricultural innovation or plant-breeding “originality” (to cite but one instance), the rich diversity of the geneplasm currently held in seed banks and field gene banks would be wholly inexplicable. Within most indigenous knowledge systems, the source of originality is not internalized as the genius of one individual. Rather, the natural world, the community, and the individual are all integrally involved. Individuals are subject to independent forces and constrained by the need to act with respect for the natural world and for future generations. The community grounds and informs the individual. However, because the process of knowing is experientially based, and what one learns depends on individual development, abilities, and preparation, individuals play an essential role in contributing new knowledge to the community. As one young Keres man explains: “You don’t ask questions when you grow up. You watch and listen and wait, and the answer will come to you. It’s yours then, not like learning in school.”41 Such an approach to innovation requires receptivity, reciprocity, and responsibility to the natural and human worlds in which one is situated. It is the result of conducting oneself in, and of relating to, the natural and human worlds in accordance with that normative constraint. This relationship is evident in the Andean practice of conversing with the natural world which is central to their agricultural science. Such dialogue leads one “to emphasize and attune oneself with (the other’s) mode of being, and in company with that other, to generate and regenerate life.”42 It is manifested in their effort to increase the diversity of their cultivated plants by “testing” new varieties. The cultivator does this without obligating the new seed “to get accustomed by force.” It is accepted for a seed that does not “accustom” itself to move away . . . the (cultivator) says simply: “this seed does not get used to me . . . ” . . . and continues “testing” others “to see if they follow him or her.”43 The new knowledge that results from such conversing is a gift. To paraphrase an earlier comment: When gifts are given, the continuity of social relationships (and, we should add, of relationships with the natural world) has the effect that the gift given always remains the givers’. It is inalienable.