Indigenous Issues and Biomimicry: Are They Compatible?

A former colleague of mine just rang me to ask me if I knew about biomimicry (which I do - plus I do have a Bioengineering T-shirt)). She is an Indigenous person who has her children attending an exclusive private school.
Today her daughter came home with some homework that linked the discipline of biomimicry under the same heading as the study of Aboriginal people and culture.
This raises the question - are these 2 things compatible?

Biomimicry is the relatively new discipline of science whose aim is to produce innovative inventions based on the mimicry of nature, for example Velcro which was modeled on the way that stuff sticks to hairy dogs. The Biomimicry website defines the term thus; a new discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.

So I believe it is a valid question to ask how a school curriculum may legitimately marry biomimicry with the study of Aboriginal culture.
I think that even the definition given by the biomimicry site is flawed in its suggestion that Nature has ideas and that some are better than others and even this analysis, in itself would conflict with Indigenous culture.
The 'lumping together' of these 2 separate core learning areas displays racism in one of it's dangerous aspects, i.e. the desire to marry western business models and Indigenous culture by suggesting that appropriation can and should occur, and indeed might be beneficial to the planet we live on. I imagine that many biomimicrists may also not endorse such a view either.
To marry the idea that the study of Aboriginals is conducive and complimentary to biomimicry is, to my mind ludicrous and displays the mind of an educator who is prepared to exploit and appropriate Indigenous culture for capital gain and corporate greed. An overstatement perhaps but the inference that Indigenous culture should be studied so as to benefit the business world of biomimicry is indeed an insult to the integrity and complexity of Indigenous people and their culture.

Intellectual property rights are a huge minefield which I'm sure I will get around to discussing in more depth in future articles, particularly when I get around to writing articles about another area of my expertise - which is natural and Indigenous medicine.