Indigenous knowledge should play a fundamental role in sustainable development, due to its distinctive nature in the knowledge economy. It represents an important component of global knowledge on development issues, is essential for decision making and is a force to be reckoned with. It is, however and unfortunately, an underused resource in the development process.
The oral nature of most indigenous knowledge makes it susceptible to being forgotten or going extinct because the holders of this knowledge are passing away without transmitting the knowledge:
“In one of the great tragedies of our age, indigenous traditions, stories, cultures, and knowledge are winking out across the world. Whole languages and mythologies are vanishing, and in some cases, even entire indigenous groups are falling into extinction.”
The onus is now on researchers and memory institutions, such as libraries, archives and museums, to document and preserve this knowledge to rectify the gap being created. They need to pay greater attention to indigenous knowledge as a resource that needs to be managed well, particularly in this technology-driven age. They bear an ethical responsibility to respect and protect it, irrespective of whether copyright questions are answered or answerable.
How indigenous knowledge is preserved is fundamental to this. The most common way of preserving indigenous knowledge is by transmitting it orally from generation to generation. Efforts to document it have resulted in recording audio or video, or writing it down, but carrying out this documentation has to be respectfully done. Procedures are changing daily with new technologies emerging, including digitisation of documents, imaging, recording and visualisation using AI technology. More sophisticated formats are evolving which memory institutions have to update and upgrade. Even community members are evolving indigenous knowledge and reinterpreting what it means to them, given the time, their context and their need. Comic books, eBooks, tweets and short skits referencing indigenous knowledge are coming up. Indigenous knowledge content is being adapted to meet technology changes. This makes it challenging to design technologies to interact with indigenous knowledge.
In addition to documenting it with respect, it is vital that researchers acknowledge the holder(s) of the knowledge and accord to them the intellectual property rights in their sharing of the knowledge. Respect in indigenous societies starts with greetings. Greetings are not done without bowing, kneeling, squatting, prostrating, receiving a handshake with both hands, etc. (depending on the varying cultures). In the Yoruba culture, genuflecting when greeting elderly people is a sign of respect. This demonstrates respect for the culture.
Recognising the fact that some of the knowledge shared by these holders should not be made public shows respect. If it is the wish of the knowledge holders, indigenous knowledge should be preserved as knowledge for ‘limited access’ or ‘special request access’, and certainly not made open access. This content might involve rites and special permissions that cannot be disseminated with no concern for how it is used. Many knowledge holders do not share their indigenous knowledge for fear it will be inappropriately exposed, or exploited for commercial gain, without any benefit to them. Biopiracy (using indigenous knowledge for commercial purposes without permission) concerns are germane, wherein indigenous knowledge holders are exploited. Again for instance, some researchers do not even want to deposit their work in institutional repositories because they may be denied access to it later, or they will be exempted from the benefits of the research outcomes. More examples on misuse of indigenous knowledge can be found here.
Different conceptions of authorship or ownership result in barriers to access, even by the very indigenous community members that produced it. For instance, if knowledge holders have given out the trade secret behind weaving a particular kind of native cloth, access to this documented knowledge will be denied to the original knowledge holders and their generations to come. Yet another instance of lack of respect for culture is making indigenous people speak languages not their own. They should own their language and use it for communication and teaching. Outsiders should get interpreters to translate for them, not force the indigenous people to forget their language. A link to more on language and curriculum development is found here.
The policies governing the preservation of indigenous knowledge have to be made, revised, monitored, evaluated and even changed periodically to ensure that the rights of the knowledge holders are protected and that what is maintained in the public domain is restricted to what needs to be there.
We need a seamless collaboration between knowledge holders, researchers of indigenous knowledge and memory institutions to ensure development and respect for culture. Solutions with this aim in mind might be:
- having more rigorous and deliberate documentation of indigenous knowledge;
- using technology responsibly, with consideration for the wishes of the knowledge holders;
- training those who are literate and have smartphones to use social media for indigenous knowledge dissemination;
- developing skills to handle all ICT devices for the preservation of indigenous knowledge;
- ensuring that libraries, archives and museums implement intellectual property rights laws;
- collaborating with stakeholders and partnering with funders of indigenous knowledge preservation research;
- linking up with similar researchers to avoid duplication of effort or overlapping;
- taking decisions on what to leave in the public domain, especially around Open Access concerns;
- prioritising policy development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in cultural heritage institutions;
- forming links and collaborations with multinational organisations and public-spirited individuals to seek funding for Preservation Studies;
- persuading key people in indigenous communities and traditional institutions to work with libraries, archives and museums to preserve IK for current and future generations.
Cultural heritage institutions, their staff and researchers, have a huge stake in indigenous knowledge preservation for future generations, and their activities in this regard must constitute the maintenance of respect for culture. Unity of purpose is ensured when culture is preserved and observed.
Adetoun Adebisi Oyelude, Kenneth Dike Library, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
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