Vol. 10 No. 2 (2011)

Indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems remain for most of the world quite opaque and mysterious. From the smallest community in a jungle, savannah, ice flow, desert, or mountaintop to transplanted indigenous peoples’ communities and individuals located in the middle of a bustling city awareness of the value and importance of the immense variety of knowledge systems has begun to grip the imagination and consciousness of indigenous peoples. This may come as a surprise to our readers, but most indigenous peoples do not categorize, package, or project the knowledge system on which they have depended generation after generation. Like other aspects of culture, a knowledge system simply exists as a part of the
everyday experience. Knowledge systems of all types have become valuable and the object of documentary research in the progressive world of what is now labeled “intellectual property.” Knowledge of plant medicines, animal behaviors, architectural methods, measurements of the cosmos, nutrition, healing practices, entheogens, and child rearing practices, mental illness, producing foods on lands enhancing their beneficial use, and the secrets of domestication are just some of the types of indigenous knowledge embedded in different knowledge systems. As in previous issues, Fourth World Journal continues to unfold the invisible to reveal valuable insights and profoundly important perspectives that continue the process of joining indigenous peoples’ contributions to knowledge to the body of all human knowledge.

Contributors in this issue spotlight critical concerns that bear on the principle of consent so widely touted in international agreements. It is clear by their commentary that the individual states’ have much to do to formally incorporate the principle of consent for indigenous peoples, and of equal or greater import, indigenous peoples must take more deliberate action on their own to create and activate their own instruments for consent.