Indigenous knowledge varies. It's really hard to answer that question because it depends on the type of indigenous knowledge you're talking about. I gave you Marlene Brant Castellano's definition of the traditional knowledge passed down to the generations, spiritual knowledge, and empirical knowledge—usually about our medicines.
I'm going to tell a story to try to get to that. I think when it comes to something like the medicine wheel, a lot of people understand the medicine wheel teachings. It's a circle with four quadrants. You might have white, red, black, and yellow. Black might be replaced with blue if you're in Cree territory, but not all indigenous peoples in Canada have medicine wheel teachings. Medicine wheel teachings are vast and they're thousands and thousands of years old. You cannot actually cite the original author of the medicine wheel teachings, like APA style. It's impossible.
I remember that years and years ago, they wanted me to review something. It was a health promotion focus. They used the principles of the medicine wheel to talk about health promotion. They had me review this, and nowhere did they acknowledge the medicine wheel teachings. They didn't say where they obtained them, how they obtained them. They might have Googled them. Then they copyrighted that framework based on the medicine wheel. Nobody can use that framework because it's based on our traditional teachings that are thousands and thousands of years old.
I don't know if that's answering your question. It really depends on the knowledge. As a researcher in an academic institution, I firmly believe that some knowledge should never enter the institution because it's too vulnerable. An example of that is our traditional medicines and our traditional healing practices. You don't learn about that in a 12-week program or a four-year degree. It's impossible. You go through, for lack of a better term, an “apprenticeship” for decades, and even then you're not going to have all the knowledge. You never get to the point where you have all the knowledge. You're always learning.
I think there is some knowledge that doesn't belong in copyright at all. You can't copyright our traditional teachings. Think about the sweat lodge ceremony. I've seen students do a dissertation. You have to copyright your dissertation. You're the sole author. That's the whole purpose of doing a dissertation, to advance knowledge. They reported on the sweat lodge ceremony. It happened to be somebody I went to the sweat lodge with. I said, “Do you know that somebody actually wrote about this in detail describing exactly what happens in this ceremony?” and the elder didn't know. This is a thesis document that's publicly available—not too publicly, because it's in the ivory tower.
I know I jumped around and maybe didn't focus on the answer.