Thank you. Kinana’skomitin.
I agree, I think, with every word you said, but I don't think I could have said it quite as elegantly as you did.
For you, Ms. Cropp, and for Ms. Swami, I struggled for my whole career as an intellectual property professor to try to understand how two paradigms could sit together: indigenous traditional knowledge—which, as you pointed out, Ms. Swami, is collectively held but also is embedded in culture and ritual—and an individualized system that is at the heart of, say, patents in the western intellectual property system.
You have traditional knowledge, which in theory can't be patented, and yet you can pull a string out of it and then patent that. That seems to be not only unfair in result, but disrespectful of indigenous traditional knowledge.
How do we square that? Can we square that? The two systems could exist quite well in isolation, but they don't exist in isolation. How do we bridge that?
Any thoughts are welcome.