Indigenous People view their knowledge in terms of community rather than IP
Kenneth Tupper 2009 (Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, PHD from University of British Columbia, MA and BA from Simon Fraser University) “Ayahuasca healing beyond the Amazon: the globalization of a traditional indigenous practice” [Global Networks Journal Vol. 9 Iss 1] 1471-0374 2543-7097//LC
The concept of intellectual property is foreign to the traditions of many non-Western cultures, especially indigenous cultures. Indeed, 'indigenous peoples do not view their knowledge in terms of property at all - that is, something that has an owner and is used for the purpose of extracting economic benefits - but in terms of community and individual responsibilities' (Battiste and Henderson 2000: 71). At the same time, Eurocentric culture has long denied that traditional indigenous knowledge or practices had any value at all, or if so, that they were part of the intellectual commons and thus free to be appropriated and used without recompense. As Lander (2002: 260) puts it, 'since the Eurocentric colonial assumption is that the only possible knowledge is Western university and industrial knowledge, it follows that only knowledges which correspond to this paradigm can be registered and protected as intellectual property. All other ways of knowing can be freely appropriated.'