L – Generic IPR
Khan 14. Shahrukh Khan was a staff writer for the Harvard International Review. He graduated from Emory University School of law, was a high school teacher at the Success Academy Charter Schools, and was a Legal at Blackstone. He currently works as an associate at Reed Smith LLP. “A new kind of colonialism: the ramifications of intellectual property rights” https://go-gale-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA364854935&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=07391854&p=AONE&sw=w&aty=ip&enforceAuth=true&linkSource=delayedAuthFullText&oweAuth=true&userGroupName=umuser&u=umuser. Accessed through the University of Michigan. Kkang
Indigenous peoples have been marred for centuries by the incredulous theft of knowledge they obtained, and even resources they use. The thieves are superior, more developed powers that jealously protect the rights to knowledge that is not rightfully theirs. They then refuse to recognize that the true ownership of such precious information belongs to Native Peoples. Indigenous knowledge is stolen without the slightest consideration to the powerful implications that it comes equipped with. The moral repercussions behind such an ethical system leads to loss of Native culture and sustainability and a shift from using Native knowledge and resources for social needs to profit generation. These problems are exacerbated by the use of Intellectual Property Rights (LPR), and the situation has delved to the point where nations bypass indigenous consent and wrongfully patent their knowledge and resources.
Why Indigenous Knowledge Is So Important
Knowledge of the natural world is not limited to science. Peoples spanning across the world have developed, over many years, a set of culturally rich knowledge systems that have been a result of the environments that they live in. Indigenous knowledge revolves around the environment and is of a largely ecological type. It is also referred to, by the World Bank, as the "traditional knowledge of the uses of plants" and even "ethnobotany."
These knowledge systems hold great importance to the culture and understandings of the people that they belong to and their interactions with their environment: in medicine and the fight against disease, in spiritual worldviews and religion, in agricultural productivity, and even in the struggle to cope with a dynamic environment. Indigenous knowledge also plays an essential role in the sustainable rehabilitation of rangelands, thus strengthening the rangelands' natural capacity for resilience.
In recent years, indigenous knowledge has garnered attention as a valuable contributor to natural resource conservation as well. It has a dynamic, culture-specific context and is generally holistic in nature. As Jonathan Rouse in his 1999 article "Global Dissemination of Indigenous Knowledge" noted, it is sometimes labeled as "local" to emphasize its very localness because it is "embedded in its particular community, it is contextually bound" and "it requires a commitment to the local context." The word 'indigenous' can also suggest that knowledge is "unique to a particular community or ethnic group."
Indigenous knowledge rightfully belongs to the people who use it within the context of their local environment because survival was the intended purpose of this knowledge. When it is used in another setting however, this knowledge becomes a tool of exploitation.