SUMMARY

Many of the policies and practices of the Canadian International Development Agency promote and support the concept of including traditional knowledge systems in project planning and implementation. Because indigenous people are vulnerable to negative impacts of development project, and because their knowledge bases can significantly improve the understanding of these impacts, including traditional knowledge can improve project results, outcomes, and impacts.

Indigenous peoples are self-identifiable as a people, wholly or partially self-governed, and live within larger nations. Indigenous traditional knowledge is a way of life and a process of acquiring and passing on knowledge and understanding. While it contains the database of knowledge it is also a structure of values, stories, language, and social relations; an experience-based relationship with family, animals, places, spirits, and the land. It is a world view. As with any knowledge system, the power of the system is rooted in the experience of many people who have found a means to accumulate that experience into a body of practices and processes that allow greater insight into the world around us than any one person can hope to achieve independently. Traditional knowledge uses indirect indicators that over centuries have proven to predict events accurately. Traditional knowledge models may be mechanistic, but are equally likely to be non-secular or metaphysical explanations.

Indigenous traditional knowledge does not need to be included in every CIDA project, but where an indigenous community is directly or indirectly affected, it is appropriate and important to include it. Respect, trust, equity, and empowerment are the fundamental principles on which the use of indigenous traditional knowledge must be based to achieve successful integration in project planning and implementation. Traditional rights, different concepts of ownership and proprietary use, complementary knowledge bases, and many other factors make the use of traditional knowledge an excellent opportunity for partnership in the planning and implementation of CIDA projects. These same differences however, make it imperative that acquisition and use protocols be established with the indigenous communities as part of project design. Despite the potential advantages, there remain many barriers to integrating traditional knowledge in project planning, such as cultural insensitivity and lack of acceptance of traditional knowledge as valid knowledge, especially because it is partly metaphysical. Appropriate inclusion of the traditional knowledge bases, however, significantly reduces the potential to cause harm and increases the potential to benefit indigenous peoples projects.

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