Ethics and Politics in Indigenous Research

1. Ethics and Politics in Indigenous Research Bobby Banerjee International Graduate School of Management University of South Australia

2. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Audre Lorde

3. Discourses of Aboriginality • Anthropological “discovery” of the Aborigine produced “objective” knowledge that excluded any possibility of dialogue. • The creation of a particular form of knowledge about Aboriginality is linked with the power of organizing and regulating Aboriginal life (Anderson, 1995)..

4. Orientalism “Orientalism (is) a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. This cultural production of the Other provides the West with a flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of relationships with the Orient without ever him losing the relative upper hand” (Said, 1979).

5. Knowledge as Conquest • Biotechnology and intellectual property rights on biological resources as technologies of colonialism. • Profound incommensurabilities between indigenous and western epistemologies. • No separation of ecology, society, economy, polity and ethics in indigenous epistemologies. • Western knowledge becomes “science” whereas indigenous knowledge remains “tradition”. • Common property as “bundle of relationships” vs common property as “bundle of economic rights”.

6. Whose Knowledge? • The Neem dispute: Plant genetics as a ‘novelty’, constructed as ‘intellectual property’ of corporations requiring ‘protection’. • The problem of biopiracy. • Patenting plant genetics: The transformation of seed custodians into seed consumers.

7. TRIPS “…(We were able to) distill from the laws of the more advanced countries the fundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property…Besides selling our concept at home, we went to Geneva where we presented or document to the staff of the GATT Secretariat…What I have described to you is absolutely unprecedented in GATT. Industry identified a major problem for international trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal, and sold it to our own and other governments…the industries and traders of the world have played simultaneously the role of patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing physicians”. (Monsanto manager).

8. Whose Forests? “The measures to mitigate climate change currently being negotiated are based on a worldview of territory that reduces forests, lands, seas and sacred sites to only their carbon absorption capacity. This world view and its practices adversely affect the lives of Indigenous Peoples and violate our fundamental rights and liberties, particularly, our right to recuperate, maintain, control and administer our territories which are consecrated and established in instruments of the United Nations” (IIFC 2000).

9. Resistance? “When we rose up against a national government, we found that it did not exist. In reality we were up against financial capital, against speculation, which is what makes decisions in Mexico as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America, South America – everywhere”. Subcomandante Marcos Zapatista Spokesperson

10. Resistance? “The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and security policy”. Mexico, Political Update, Chase Manhattan bank.

11. Research Ethics • “Research which is culturally safe, which involves mentorship of kaumatua (elders), which is culturally relevant and appropriate while satisfying the rigor of research, and which is undertaken by a Maori researcher, not a researcher who happens to be Maori”. (Irwin, 1994). • “Research by Maori, for Maori and with Maori”. (Smith, 1995). • Kaupapa Maori challenges a universal approach. It must be able to address Maori needs or give full recognition of Maori culture and value systems (Reid, 1998).

12. Academic Skull Measuring “This is where academic research has failed Indigenous communities. One portion of non-Aboriginal society tries to understand more about Aboriginal communities and once the communities are analyzed, subjectified and reconstituted, the task is done, the research over with no value to the Aboriginal communities who are the subjects of the research” (Katona, 1998).

13. Zapatismo “Zapatismo is not an ideology, it is not a bought and paid for doctrine. It is…an intuition. Something so open and flexible that really it occurs in all places. Zapatismo poses the question: What is it that has excluded me? What is it that has isolated me? And the response is different for Mexican Indians than it is for North American Indians or the immigrants in Europe or the resistance movements in Asia or for blacks in Africa. In each place the response is different. Zapatismo simply states the question and stipulates that the response is plural, that the response is inclusive and must be tolerant” Subcomandante Marcos

14. A Reminder “I believe my own culture. Black fella way. Right way. Proper way. Bining way. Balanda should listen. And believe. How many times we gonna tell him?” Yvonne Margarula