Indigenous Knowledge

The popular use of the term Indigenous Knowledge to denote an information set has emerged internationally over the last fifteen years. To illustrate how globally and electronically networked Indigenous Knowledge activity has become in this short period, one need only do a Google search on the term. Last week such a search pulled up 2,610,000 hits in 0.07 seconds. A short browse of front pages of the first thirty in the list included references to: newsletters, conferences, scholarly papers, guides, bibliographies, websites, gateways, programs, databases, resource indexes, and registers of best practice. These first thirty also crossed Africa, Ethiopia, Alaska, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, the US and China. Topics crossed Indigenous Knowledge systems and science, agriculture, land husbandry, forest management, biological diversity, bio-prospecting, intellectual property, community rights, values and protection. The presence of Indigenous Knowledge on the Internet demonstrates considerable engagement and intersections with Indigenous Knowledge issues globally by Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests. There is also a growing scholarship around the issues (Agrawal, 1995a, 1995b; Ellen & Harris, 1996; Eyzaguirre, 2001; Nakata, 2002) and UN activities and mechanisms that seek to support the rights of Indigenous peoples in relation to knowledge (WIPO)