IEK system is depleting at a very faster rate. For many developing economies and especially in Africa and third world countries IEK is the basis for survival and environmental protection. Since last few decades this knowledge system is depleting at a very faster rate and need to to be protected for sustainability of the ecosystems.
Indigenous knowledge refers to the understandings, skills and philosophies developed by societies with long histories of interaction with their natural surroundings. For rural and indigenous peoples, local knowledge informs decision-making about fundamental aspects of day-to- day life.
We hardly know anything of the species in this world, but we can preserve knowledge through research and publishing and herbaria, museums, etc.
TK documentation is primarily a process in which TK is identified, collected, organized, registered or recorded in some way, as a means to dynamically maintain, manage, use, disseminate and/or protect . TK documentation can take many shapes and forms – through written registries and files, video, images and audio; in a traditional indigenous language or other languages; and using modern or more classical technologies (digital versus written filing). It may be:
- Writing down medicinal preparations
- Taking notes about herding traditions
- Digitizing ancient manuscripts
- Photographing land and agro-forestry management activities
- Videotaping traditional agricultural practices and technologies
I think through research findings and experiences we can preserve it.
Protection of Tribal/Indigenous Knowledge
Traditional Knowledge and IP: Quiz World Intellectual Property Organization https://www.wipo.int/tk/en/tk_quiz_2020.html?utm_source=WIPO+Newsletters&utm_campaign=2997f120fb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_29_01_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bcb3de19b4-2997f120fb-254898449
It all narrows down to the policies in place and the level of their enforcement
It is immensely important to protect the indigenous ecological knowledge system in the present context. Many of the knowledge systems is at the verge of extinction and these need to be protected. The academicians and researchers can document these through their contribution. The indigenous people should be promoted for such activities.
Due to constant, constant impoverishment, decreasing areas of natural ecosystems, biodiversity decreases, and environmental sustainability decreases. In this regard, documenting and protecting the local ecological knowledge system is an important issue. Universities, research institutes and entities managed by environment ministries play a key role in collecting data on extinct species disappearing from the Earth's surface from many unique natural ecosystems, gathering this information for future generations and for the purposes of possible future reconstruction of industrially and civilizationally degraded unique natural ecosystems. who conduct research in this area, gather knowledge in specially created archives and databases, and run gene banks that are dying out of species of flora, fauna, etc. some of which have not yet been fully understood and documented, natural biodiversity and sustainability are rapidly decreasing. It is necessary to increase the expenditure and scale for the protection of natural biodiversity and nature sustainability to reduce the risk of future climate, natural and biological disasters, including epidemics, pandemics, etc. from the Earth's surface many unique natural ecosystems, gathering this information for future generations and for the purposes of possible future reconstruction of industrially and civilization-degraded unique natural ecosystems. The importance of improving database systems, knowledge bases, gene banks etc. as part of the regional and global ecological knowledge system is growing.
Greetings,
Dariusz Prokopowicz
Beyond mere documentation, which can raise issues about previous indigenous agreements, we shall consider fair trade, analog forestry, agro-ecology and organic production as credible options for documenting, conserving and valuing TEK.
Preserving the indigenous culture and customs alongside the current major shift towards the globalized technological and manmade systems can be a daunting task. However, this doesn't mean we should give up on protecting their way of living as long as they want to. One way of doing that would be the use of participatory and deliberative interventions to depict and make implicit values explicit in the context of indigenous people way of living. These approaches and interventions aims at including the community's opinion in assessing the current way of living, recent changes to their way of living and whether it's considered positive or negative, their environment, and toward the different ecosystem services existing in their area. If you would like to learn more about the topic, then I would advice you to read the following article: The importance of deliberation in valuing ecosystem services in developing countries—Evidence from the Solomon Islands (Kenter et al., 2011)
It is necessary to manage a database, and then go to indigenous communities to learn about the methods and techniques they use to protect their natural resources, without drastically affecting them, to the point of endangering their stocks, for which You must be careful to inform them about the purpose of the work to be carried out in their communities, whose objective is to publicize the knowledge that has allowed them to survive in harmony with their environment, so that future generations can learn from them and establish a balance between satisfying the needs of the growing society and the sustainable use of the environment.
Indigenous knowledge relating to the ecological system has been replaced with bio-piracy, and intellectual property rights related to local resource genetic engineering without acknowledging community knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing within the scientific world is key by recognizing and incorporating indigenous knowledge as part of policymaking, interventions, and information database management. Clear examples emanate from agroecological practices involving the concepts of seed saving, biodiverse farming methods, and intangible cultural methods.
How to document? 1) Do research...especially invite anthropologists to do that...because they have a very suitable paradigm for this kind of research: ethnoscience. Indigenous knowledge in anthropology is the focus of ethnoscience research which now has many branches -mostly in ethnobiology- such as ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnomedicine, ethnopharmacology, ethnoveterinary...etc...then there are: ethnoecology, ethnoastronomy, ethnopedology, ethnoornithology, ethnoichthyology...etc...you have also ethnotechnology, ethnoarchitecture, for arts there are: ethnoart, ethnochoreology, ethnodance, ethnoaesthetics....many indigenous knowledge have been documented by social reserachers, especially anthropologist - their ethnographies contain many kinds of IK; 2) record the activities of the people practicing/using their IK in daily life (adopt the methods of the anthropologists: participant observation); 3) publish the results of the researches and recordings in good form (beautiful books), if possible also in the language the indigenous people or the national language of the indigenous people; 4) display in museums the material culture expressing the IK; 5) rewrite the IK in simple, accurate n interesting way for school children, so they know and inherit the IK; 6) make videos or films on people practicing their IK with good and interesting narratives (invite anthropologists and writers to teach how to do these); 7) held seminars, conferences, discussions on various topics from IK (anthropologists have been doing this for many years)... those are the main things that we can do...
How to protect ? 1) publish the results of the researches on IK, produce videos / films (invite video/film makers to do that); 2) establish national policies to protect and develop IK; establish regulations on IK or a kind of "copyright" regulations; 3) establish database; 4) create programs to help peoples to collect their IK and publish them; 5) establish national policies to acknowledge the IK's as national intangible heritage; 6) invite and ask UNESCO to acknowledge the special IK's in the country as world intangible heritage..
Hope the above points will help.....good luck....
Some ideas here:
https://terralingua.org/our-projects/biocultural-diversity-toolkit/
https://biocultural.iied.org/
https://swed.bio/news/indigenous-and-local-knowledge-in-ipbes-traditional-knowledge-in-the-cbd/
The record of indigenous ecological knowledge must be documented based on their own cosmogonic beliefs, because we cannot separate one from the other. His knowledge comes from the ancient relationship that exists between the physical, the spiritual and nature. But this is very difficult due to the continuous and persistent meddling of many universities and institutions in their communities, I say this from my own experience, since for my work I must make myself to different populations and they build a wall to protect their wisdom, this for that all those who have previously approached them have only sought to extract benefit for them, through theses, dissertations, inspiration or the like, without even giving the community deserved credit. which indicates that even after more than 500 years the exploitation of indigenous communities continues to exist. Only that they no longer take gold and silver, now they take the knowledge of centuries from their ancestors, as observers of the rapid loss of this knowledge, we can only offer our services as scribes and witnesses; ocumentando by means of video-blog, what happens.
Managing database, documentation in the form of stories, poems can help it. We need to preserve it in our minds and we need to allow change of the same so that it can enrich itself.
Interesting contribution, I will search further on this topic but still think that things have evolved and taken a new shape in terms of documentation.
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