Knowledge has not become politicized; it always has been so. Indigenous knowledge systems explicitly recognize this by their responsiveness to the normative aspects of knowledge, to how human power and agency must be constrained if relations of affiliation with other entities are to be acknowledged and maintained – relations which enable our mutual, and multigenerational, survival. Yet the ideology of western science, wedded as it is to the thesis of value-neutrality, insists that issues of power do not enter into knowledge making or shape the dynamics of knowledge systems. The relations of domination and assimilation which characterize imperialism (whether in its historical or contemporary variants), and which facilitate biocolonialism, are thus neither acknowledged nor acknowledgeable.

And so the endangered status of indigenous knowledge systems is recognized, but responsibility for it, complicity in it, is denied:

With the aid of such depoliticization, corporate, academic, legal, and governmental institutions pool their interests and immense resources to extract from these knowledge systems what they find valuable in them.