In the current, data-driven, technology-driven world, Indigenous knowledge is not always considered or respected. Yet it often exists in the shadow of Western and institutional structures. Entrenched power structures privilege some epistemologies over others. In doing so, they forget the rich cultural heritage woven throughout Indigenous People’s communities. As our society evolves, the costs of this knowledge collapse have broader effects well beyond cultural erasure. These bills would undermine our ability to live sustainably and manage our natural resources wisely.
Indigenous knowledge is deeply connected to traditional ecological knowledge. This unique relationship is key to maintaining biodiversity and sustainably managing the world’s natural resources. This “Green Revolution — which really took off in the late 1960s — led to a historic change in agricultural practices. This was a very vocal and visible departure from business as usual. The focus shifted to more industrialized approaches that frequently overlooked the local wisdom that has kept communities thriving for centuries.
The Neeruganti community of India is an example of how Indigenous knowledge can be vital in modern-day situations. Their knowledge of smart water-management system in Bengaluru changed India’s approach towards smart cities in water management. This recognition underscores the tremendous value traditional practices bring to contemporary problem-solving. These anecdotes highlight the importance of combining community wisdom with national initiatives to achieve environmental progress.
Indigenous construction practices like those brought back to life by the Dharan community provide effective, sustainable, and culturally relevant solutions to modern architectural practices. These practices push back against the “more glass, taller is better” paradigm of ubiquitous porous, high-rise monstrosities. They suggest plans and designs more appropriate to their hot and arid climates, and cultures. These types of methods illustrate how Indigenous practices can be applied to contemporary environmental issues and further Indigenous cultural resurgence while creating sustainable urban spaces.
These Indigenous knowledge systems have immense power. Yet, these sometimes live in oral traditions and embodied practices that are harder to track and easily missed in our rapidly digitizing world. Indeed, around 97% of the world’s languages are considered “low-resource” when it comes to computational applications. This reality is especially damaging because it accelerates the ongoing erasure of Indigenous knowledge from digital spaces. Languages such as Hindi and Swahili, which account for hundreds of millions of people, have a hard time making headway in the data-driven technology world.
English pervades the most popular online platforms and services. Based on Common Crawl’s dataset, which includes more than 300 billion webpages, it constitutes about 45% of all content online. This lack of representation not only continues to silence Indigenous voices, but feeds a harmful cycle that devalues local knowledge. Tamil is an ancient language spoken by more than 86 million people globally. It comprises just 0.04% of the total data, showing the immense data gap many non-English speaking communities have to deal with.
That’s why local organizations such as Seva, founded in 1992, are so important to closing these gaps. Most importantly, along with producers of course, they’re constantly making efforts to protect traditional Indigenous knowledge regarding agriculture and animal husbandry in India. Moreover, they champion initiatives to protect agricultural ecosystems. Seva has been an outspoken and active advocate for the acknowledgement of these systems in larger ecological and agricultural conversations. Through this, they fight to ensure ancient knowledge isn’t lost to the tides of innovation.
“Mode amplification” describes a phenomenon where certain forms of knowledge become amplified while others are diminished, contributing to the erosion of diverse perspectives in global discourse.