More and more, researchers on sustainable development are taking a serious look at indigenous knowledge (IK). They can hardly avoid doing so since IK is like a thread running through the human community, touching on biodiversity, climate and countless other activities. Take shamanism, for instance.

"The origins of Amerindian shamanism are Asiatic, possibly proceeding from millenia of shamanistic religions in Northern Asia and Southeast Asia," says Elizabeth Reichel, a professor of anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.

Prof Reichel defines shamanism as a political and religious technique for managing societies through certain ritual performances, myths, and world views, such that a community respects the natural environment and community life as a social common good. Shamanism is still the basic worldview of 70,000 Amazonian Indians in Colombia and of more than 30 million Amerindians in Latin America, she adds.

Prof Reichel shared her observations with participants at a symposium on indigenous knowledge and sustainable development, held in late 1992 in Silang, Philippines. It was convened by the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (or IIRR, based in Silang) and IDRC.

In the Miritiparana area near the Colombian Brazilian border, says Prof Reichel, shamans practice environmental "accounting": an awareness that action upon the environment always begets reaction. "These indigenous societies can be said to be among the few ones left with a strong cultural tradition of indigenous sustainable development. In Colombia, shamanism is a form of eco-politics, a mechanism for the regulation and control of resources."

Prof Reichel laments the diminishing role of shamans as the government opens Amazonian lands by recognizing land titles. The system creates new forms of land tenure and political representation on top of the old. Where before the shaman decided the best ways to hunt or harvest food and forest products, he is now unrepresented in the new system of elected officials.

"The native people in Asia, Africa, Canada or Latin America have far more in common in terms of their conceptualization of nature and its bearing on our life compared to the rest of the population," observes Kirit K. Patel of the Center for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, in Ahmedabad. "The Inuit, Australian Aborigines, Mohawk and other Indian tribes have always considered that a common thread runs through animals, earth and human beings."

On Malalison Island in the central Philippines, reefs are known by names handed down through generations, and islanders reckon distances in terms of fathoms and take their bearings from human landmarks such as a house on the mainland. The island was chosen by the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) as a pilot site for sea- farming technologies, sea-ranching and the granting of territorial use rights in fisheries. The cornerstone of the project was local involvement, so the research turned to the ways of the fisherfolk.

While the people's fishing methods are specific to the island, "Malalison fishers are not unique," said SEAFDEC's Susana V. Siar. "The islanders are no different from the islanders of the Torres Strait or the raft fishermen and shore dwellers of Brazil, who possess a system of naming sea space and marking specific fishing spots through landmarks."

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND IK

"Many people realize one cannot talk of the value of natural resources in human terms without falling back to what people know about them and how they use them," says Christine Kabuye, the botanist in charge of the National Museums of Kenya's East African Herbarium. "And when it comes to sustainable development, incorporating indigenous knowledge is a must."

The Herbarium has collected data on plant uses since 1900, mostly on medicinal and chemically interesting plants. But it was not until three years ago that it started looking at wild food plants as substitutes for common crops that cannot be grown sustainably on marginal land. The results show that some indigenous food plants are far more nutritious than exotic ones.

"Because indigenous knowledge has been largely derived through oral traditions passed down over generations, much has been lost forever," says Raymond Obomsawin, a senior consultant at the ONAKE International Applied Research Project in Ontario, Canada. "The question of its preservation, expansion and practical use is especially urgent."

IK can be lost in unpredictable ways. The Green Revolution, for instance, made its own contribution, says Gordan Prain of UPWARD (User's Perspective with Agricultural Research and Development), based in the Philippines. "The successful exploitation of wheat and rice germplasm diversity was causing the disappearance of that diversity as farmers switched to the new varieties." The response to vanishing diversity was to collect accessions for more than 50 crops in over 100 gene banks worldwide. But little in the collections has been characterized properly. Without systematic characterization, gene banks are like "pharmacies filled with miracle drugs without labels."

"Almost absent from this potted history of plant genetic resources are the past and present users and originators of genetic diversity: farming households the world over, but especially rural people living in the more diverse and difficult environments of tropical and sub-tropical regions where the great majority of crop diversity is to be found," says Mr Prain. "Modern crop varieties often bring with them novel practices and these combine to erode the communal memory." UPWARD has completed "memory banking" in two communities in southern Philippines where the practices of local farmers with traditional varieties of staple and supplementary crops were documented systematically.

TIME-TESTED RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Conservationists emphasize the importance of IK with respect to biological diversity, which must be preserved before as yet undiscovered species are lost forever. For David Hyndman, a senior lecturer in anthropology at Australia's University of Queensland, converting rainforests and inshore coral reefs into wilderness preserves is "no more than robbing indigenous peoples of their homeland and assigning it an artificial idealized landscape in which humans have no place. Biological and cultural diversity would best be achieved by keeping indigenous people on their homeland and allowing them to employ their own time-tested sustainable resource management."

Another theme addressed by the symposium was access to IK and intellectual property rights. How can local people be protected from exploitation of their knowledge and resources? What compensation can they get for their valuable information?

The annual value of medicinal plants derived from IK is estimated at some $54 billion in 1989. But indigenous people see no financial compensation for the hundreds of years of experimentation and innovation that led to the use of these plants.

"At present there are no provisions for the protection of knowledge rights of indigenous peoples," says Prof Hyndman. "Dissatisfaction with this exploitation led to the fight for indigenous intellectual property rights of the kind granted to universities and individuals for innovative R & D in the form of patents and copyrights." The keynote speaker at the symposium, the Honourable James Bourque, a Canadian indigenous person, urged participants to focus on the practical application of IK in development activities to the advantage of local people. He saw a danger that the retrieval of IK would benefit only the scientific community and the Western world.

"For whose benefit?" asks Shahid Akhtar, Director of the Information and Communication Systems and Networks Program at IDRC. "The indigenous populations must be the main beneficiaries of any information system or network that is established. Western researchers [can] also be users and participants but fundamental issues related to intellectual property rights and research ethics make it essential that original owners and keepers of the knowledge retain access and control."

There must also be opportunities for giving IK wider relevance, according to D. Michael Warren, director of the Center for Indigenous Knowledge for Agriculture and Rural Development, in the United States. Research should look "on the utility of indigenous knowledge and innovations from one ecological zone to a similar zone in a different part of the world."

The symposium identified many such research gaps. These included agriculture, genetic resources, forestry, natural resource management, aquaculture, human health, veterinary medicine and livestock management, and communication and organizations. The role of primary and elementary education in promoting and displacing local knowledge among children also attracted attention.

"A study in a rural Mexican village revealed that non-Indian school age children identified and knew the uses of 37 plants compared to Otomi children able to do the same for some 138 plants," observes Raymond Obomsawin. "Yet, it is the Indian Otomi children who are deemed ignorant and in need of an education." Around the world, institutionalized childhood education, "has undermined viable indigenous traditions of familial based education," he says.

In other disciplines too the professional perspective takes on special importance. To many foresters doing research in Nepal, a formerly forested area that has been reduced to shrubland is considered "degraded." They often advise replanting with high canopy timber.

"From the perspective of the local farmer, with his need for fuel, fodder and grazing land for cattle, such shrubland often has survival meaning, in contradiction to its production meaning to foresters," says Dr Donald A. Messerschmidt, a social forestry adviser to the Institute of Forestry in Pokhara, Nepal. "The benefits of tall timber generally go to loggers and middlemen and seldom to poor farmers. Benefits of shrubland may be many -- more species to harvest, more land available to graze, less erosion and gullying."

Forestry, education and the many other issues related to IK will be further explored by IDRC in coming months, with a view to determining IK research and information priorities. It has begun consulting with IK scholars, indigenous groups and others to guage the need for IK networks.

The symposium has advanced this work by developing recommendations for recording IK, preparing training manuals, communicating and using IK, and for research and policy relating to IK. It also formulated an action plan for an IK network. Discussion on methodology dealt with recording, storage, validation and selection of IK as well as training in all these aspects.

Indigenous knowledge, says IDRC's Shahid Akhtar, "provides the basis for grassroots or local-level decision-making, much of which takes place at the community level in rural areas where the majority still lives. Very little of this knowledge has been recorded, yet it represents an immensely valuable data base with insights on how numerous communities have interacted with their changing environment."

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