Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell

by Tyson Yunkaporta

hell. Us-two will have yarns with many people as we journey through fire and water and rock. In my community, yarning is like conversation, but with the futile and passive-aggressive parts removed. The closest equivalent in western culture I can find is thought experiment, which is a ritualised crowdsourced narrative where everyone contributes their insight to the story and every contribution is honoured and included, no matter how contradictory these points of view might seem.

that binds us in common totemic relation. That doesn’t mean everything is peaceful though. Families fight, families split, families harm, and these days the old mechanisms aren’t always in place to stop this. Like everybody in the world, we are struggling right now. There is no sovereign paradise to be found anymore—just mining and pastoral leases encircling villages where the only growth industry is policing.

not here to score points in a culture war. If I’m talking about failing global institutions and destructive empires, that’s not about individuals or communities or cultures—it’s about systems and structures that we are all required to live under at this moment in history, and most of us are intensely unhappy and terrified about it all. I’m not sitting down here with you clutching my historical IOUs; I’m here to share some stories, patterns and systems that might be helpful in the next few decades (and even centuries).

Right story is not about objective truth, but the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities, living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patterns of land and creation. Right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land. Wrong story, wrong way—this means unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought. So, in exploring the pathologies of a world in wrong relation, I have to tell wrong story in this book. This means sharing stories made by individuals or corrupt groups separated from land and spirit (and these include both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people). To understand the perverse incentive systems currently burning our world, I need to carve some objects the wrong way to spark the emergence of cautionary tales. Carving

have to carry around in a bag. This is my first day away in ages, here in this little shack on Djadjawurrung Country in a beautiful forest full of wombats. Melbourne’s been in Covid lockdown for most of the last two years, and I’ve been getting fat and growing psychoses like tumours while the universities remain closed to most staff and my woman and I work from home and raise vigorously neuro-divergent babies and take each twenty-hour day as it comes. Our extended families are in turmoil too and there are frequent horrendous events, but we can’t get back home to help, so we just coordinate bills and bail and beds and bandages from our phones and wallets.

(spirit) is stifled across entire bioregions. Humans as a custodial species are denied access to this land to care for it. This is because an asset can only be priced if it is limitable and excludable, so access must be limited by barriers that are enforced with the threat of violence. The choice of who is granted access to land is determined by a caste system that is organised by laws—zoning and other laws—that create structural inequality. This is the actual reason for marginal groups being imprisoned and killed, by the way—it’s not all down to the old-school discourse that comes out after your racist uncle’s third beer.

I’ve spent a lot of time exploring that world, mostly with thinkers from the US and Europe. My Elders tell me I need to take a break from the American ones particularly, because I’m becoming addicted to their exhilarating ways and they are making me sick in my spirit. So it’s a relief when I get to talk to thinkers from my own hemisphere from time to time. Americans are exciting and fun and make me feel great, but sometimes they scare the shit out of me.

systems that emerged from the period. He brings up the emu story I shared with him, which I framed as a cautionary tale about narcissism. He wryly reflects on representative democracy as a selection operator for ensuring that the worst people are always in power. ‘Wasn’t it clever of us in the eighteenth century to set up a political system based on finding the narcissists and promoting them to the top?’ I suggest that this was a result of flawed reasoning in the Rights of Man workshop that happened after the French revolution. According to the story I heard, they got stuck on the ‘Jewish Question’ and argued about whether that community could have rights or not. Eventually they decided that Jewish individuals could have rights, but their community could not. This little exclusionary bug was later extended to every marginal community and was possibly the reason individualism and collectivism ended up at either end of a political continuum rather than continuing to be two sides of the same coin. Bigotry is a bastard. It’s not my political identity or victim status that causes me to dislike it, though—I hate anything that’s based on logical fallacy and makes systems dysfunctional.

Nicholas has a good joke, but it’s from a Woody Allen movie and I ask him if he’s sure he wants to proceed with platforming an alleged monster. He does, so let’s hear it before we push our canoe into the river and start our journey into the first circle of hell. So, a guy goes to see a psychiatrist and says, ‘It’s not about me doc, it’s my brother. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ Psychiatrist says, ‘Why don’t you have him committed?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but we need the eggs.’ Anyway, the Enlightenment is a bit like that.

But Michel isn’t particularly interested in economics. He wants to talk about bone and stone carving. He says another source of revealed knowledge for him is from prehistoric artefacts. He recalls a carving of a horse in a very strange pose that he’d never seen before. There were spots carved on the horse at specific locations that did not look like natural markings. So he experimented on one of his own horses, massaging in those spots, amazed to find that his horse shifted into exactly the same strange stance as the carving. The horse became very relaxed and calm. But the biggest learning for him came when he realised that this carving was made over six thousand years ago, before the domestication of the horse, which would suggest a very intimate relationship with animals that we would refer to today as ‘wild’. The interspecies intimacy he learned from this ancient carving was central to the knowledge he has recovered about tracking.

from the old days when they used to burn the heather. On heather country, this low shrub is the dominant species and stretches as far as the eye can see. The people who cared for those landscapes came to be known as ‘heathen’ and were gradually removed, converted to Christianity or exterminated. The heather has been burnt off in the right season by humans for so many thousands of years that it has evolved to need smoke for the germination of its seeds. Not many of the seeds sprout without that, so the heather country is gradually dying out these days. The reptiles, insects and amphibians needed for the functioning of the system are dying out too, and some species of birds have disappeared altogether from Michel’s region. This has been explained as a nitrogen-surplus problem in the soil, although the addition of calcium to offset this has not changed the situation. It has also been suggested that pesticides have killed all the insects, leaving the birds with nothing to eat. The birds there (some Dr Seuss–sounding language name I have no hope of deciphering) disappeared decades ago when the traditional burning stopped, and Michel is not settling for a linear explanation with a culprit to sue. He thinks it’s more complex than that. He says that heather smoke is a seasonal signal for beetles and spiders to return to the heather to lay their eggs, which will hatch in time for the baby birds to feast—not all of the heather is burnt, only the dry undergrowth. If that undergrowth ...

Us-two could use that fighting stick to bash any of the weirdos in this wind-blasted circle of hell who try to get handsy with us. The locals all are lustful, transgressive types, sharing pick-up artist tips and revenge porn and moaning about how hard it is to be a male these days, for all eternity. This place may seem an inappropriate setting for women’s yarns, but if you check out the comments section anywhere that women are speaking out online, you might agree that it reflects the reality. There are no safe spaces for women to speak in this civilisation, and our choice to hear their words in this menacing part of hell is all about refusing to flinch or forget this daily reality endured by half the people on the planet right now.

can all agree on that part for the sake of the narrative. When the people and plants were displaced, along with the kingfishers and other animals living at the creek nearby, the area became a Chinese market garden. These immigrants were regarded with suspicion and loathing in the early days of the colony, as they always had good medicine and hygiene, healthy food and clan-based social safety nets in collective economies that ensured everyone was always sheltered, protected and prosperous. You can imagine how much this would annoy you if you were stinking and covered in lice, losing teeth, throwing your shit in the street each morning, visiting a doctor who would nick a vein in your arm to let the evil spirits out, having to drink rum all day to endure the agony of your body and fighting like hell with other settlers who were all trying to stab you in the back in a mad scramble for land and gold and power in the new colony. You’d be mad as hell at the Chinese and their flourishing market garden.

years of restoration in the Kingfisher place. She tells me her father started planting trees along the creek when she was a little girl, clearing out the wrecked cars and rubbish dumped there. As an adult, Maya worked with her community on the restoration of the soil with tonnes of food scraps and worms, and the replanting of native vegetation under the guidance of Wurundjeri Elders. Eventually it became a site for environmental education.

LOCATEDNESS: In Indigenous culture, no information can exist unless it is located. The knower is always located within a map of knowledge and story that is profoundly place-based and corresponds with real landscapes. The paths and habitual routes throughout the knower’s landscape are storied and visualised from a bird’s-eye view perspective. Each point of interest on a path of travel represents part of a story and a repository for knowledge. As Aunty Mary says, ‘I am located, therefore I am.’ RELATEDNESS: In Indigenous culture, no information can exist unless it is in relation to places, entities, people and phenomena in the landscape. Knowledge is held in the relational space between yourself and others, including non-human others. The aunties remind us that our relationships with non-human others in the land form the totemic basis for all our connections in neurology and spirit, which are essential for lasting thought and memory. Information is held in pairs, groups and communities. Knowledge is produced, transmitted and stored within relationships. EMBODIMENT: In Indigenous culture, knowledge is tangible and embodied in physical reality. Landscapes, the night sky, objects, bodies—all act as mnemonic devices, not just in the abstract but in the sense that information is ritually encoded in these things and can be ‘read’ from them.

And now we’ve finally arrived to dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools, but he doesn’t live here anymore. He’s buying up water rights and spearheading land grabs elsewhere. He hopes we’ll tear his house down because it’s insured for more than he could get from selling the place. His nephew (who’s into social justice and deep ecology) is using the house now, holding a spiritual retreat there, and he invites us all in for vodka shots and ayahuasca. Nah, these new masters have no home, no country. They are super-wealthy refugees from the great nations they have gutted and rendered irrelevant, building leaky life-rafts from decentralised autonomous organisations, making a crossing to digital realms without Westphalian boundaries in a bid to keep all their shit while the world floods and boils.

now my boomerang). ‘If western governance is about aspects of control, controlling processes to arrive at predictable outcomes, then Indigenous governance is almost the reverse—the process is the governance. The culture is built on frameworks of unknowingness, uncertainty built into the culture—competing stories which, from a western point of view, would need to be beaten out to find a unified narrative for all people and contexts.’

My sister was murdered recently. I can’t share the details for legal and cultural reasons, so that’s all I’ll say about that, beyond flagging it as an explanation of the barely restrained wrath that bubbles like boiling mud throughout my yarns with Katherine. Besides, I have deadlines and too many dependents who won’t be able to eat or be sheltered if I stop working, so I continue to research and write, instead of attending to this grief that will turn me to stone in the end, if I don’t leave this place and deal with it soon. So I work and wait for the police investigation to end and the funeral to begin, which will be the last of my leave used up for the year, for grief. No margaritas on a beach for me. My holidays are always death wails and shovels and dirt. Year by year, I keep the grief and fatigue at bay by swallowing blobs of rage like amphetamines.

But at least I can earn a good living by talking to an Irish woman on the other side of the planet about it, and in that way I’m more fortunate than most of the people in the world. I’m told daily that I should practise gratitude, but I do struggle with the idea of thanking an invisible man in the sky for giving billions of people lives that are even shittier than mine, in order for some narcissist to buy himself a bigger boat.

soldiers. Katherine says similar militarised narratives and metaphors also taint the natural sciences and asserts again that this is echoed in the discipline of finance. ‘If it’s not military metaphors, it’s sports, which is the same thing but slightly adapted. I try to replace military terms with natural concepts to change the conversation, like “emerge” and “evolve”, so that people can see finance as more of a system and less of a machine.’

The first thing you learn in Economics 101 is this phrase ceteris paribus, which means “all else being equal”, and you put the letters CP in the corner to show that you’re recognising that everything you just proved is “all things being equal”. That’s a lie. All else is never equal in this connected world.’ I quip that this is the economic equivalent of disclaimers like, ‘I’m not racist but . . . ’ or ‘Some of my best friends are . . . ’

Katherine can’t help us find the answer either. What I do know is that trauma doesn’t come from the abuses we suffer—it comes from our loss of dignity afterwards and the failure to make sense of it all by processing it together with our relations. We feel guilt, which is a bit like shame but removed from the collective—individualised, bespoke and driven inwards. It’s not the violence of my youth that keeps me up at night; it’s the shame of that terrible noise I made when I eventually broke down and begged, ‘No, no, please stop.’ I

In my failure to make sense of trauma, I have convinced myself that I have a right to safety and dignity, but am confronted daily with the fact that this is an illusion. So I weave introspective narratives of outrage and they keep me warm, while I try to keep that monster, that pathetic, weeping ghost-of-Tyson-past at bay. No more. The other day I found myself making that same disgusting begging noise for the first time in decades, please stop, please stop, a sound I haven’t made since the day I grew strong enough to smash my tormentor’s nose and blacken its eyes. But my spear was suddenly of no use to me, because I was pleading with someone I love. Our enemies are seldom strangers outside our gates.

time. The other day I caught a taxi to the airport. The driver was belligerent and suspicious of me, and he smelled of horses, but not in a good way. It was that particular scent that could either be stale horse sweat or Tuesday’s underpants on a hot Friday afternoon. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided that he was a horse man. After a while I was silly enough to take my jacket off, revealing a T-shirt with Aboriginal designs printed across the front. The driver glanced angrily at me a few times in the rear-view mirror, then asked me if I was Indigenous. When I said yes, he pulled over and demanded that I pay the full fare up front before continuing. In the competitive game of this empire I have to live in, I had a few moves to choose from at that moment. I could have walked home, or punched him out and gone to jail, or filmed him and posted it online, or taken his name and number and tried to get him fired. But all of those options would have turned him into a bigger problem to inflict on others in the world, so I chose to follow the best option my culture afforded me—making a relationship with him. It was a long cab ride, so I got him to tell me his stories and then shared mine and made him laugh a bit. I recounted the shocking colonial history of my community in a very compelling elevator pitch, and he cried a little, then while he was emotionally vulnerable I set about completely radicalising him. (Yes, that’s just guru trickery, I know, but it was for a go...

Dignity, mutual care and respect are our default settings as a species. Like most mammals, we must also carry the capacity for violent struggle, but that has to be limited by good governance and never held by one person or one group exclusively. It must be accessible to all, moving from actor to actor constantly, just like the Indigenous version of tag. Any weapons used must be beautiful, for display as much as defence, and must be limited in their potential to do large-scale damage.

relatedness. The criteria were established from a literature review and community consultation, outlining four boundary protocols and four cohesion protocols for healthy public violence. BOUNDARY PROTOCOLS: No hair-pulling, kicking or continuing on the ground, and no use of weapons No serious physical harm—have to be able to walk away No collateral damage to non-combatants No unfair fights—consenting agents, combat limits ensuring equal participation COHESION PROTOCOLS: Maintain dignity of everyone present Seek resolution and coexistence Relational accountability beyond the interaction Group governance—adherence to a code

The fourth category of violation involved the Indigenous protocol of ‘fair fight’. This is difficult to define but involves mutual consent, cohesion of intent for both combatants and onlookers, and a general adherence to most of the other protocols being measured. Fair fight is more than the sum of these parts, ensuring that all participants will derive some kind of benefit collectively and individually from the shared experience, not at the expense of victimising and alienating a participant. Combatants don’t need to be evenly matched, but there must be a reasonable chance of a fighter being able to give a good account of themselves. The relative size and skill of combatants can’t be too asymmetrical and there must be a sense that justice is being served. One-third of all the fights viewed were classified as fair fights. Although this vague protocol is more prone to confirmation bias, it should be noted that we were pleasantly surprised by how many of the fights were fair from our point of view, as we had extremely low expectations in this category and had to revise our assumptions about

of settler violence. Dignity was the fifth category, a protocol ensuring the autonomy, reputation and spirit of all participants (including onlookers) is not damaged by the violation of social norms or the loss of control and integrity. There is a sense in this protocol of a person retaining their self-determination and awareness while also fully expressing their passions. Sixty-eight per cent of the fights contained violations of the dignity protocol, with participants compromising their own dignity or diminishing the dignity of another. This figure would have been higher if our ethical protocols had not prevented us from including videos depicting shamefully excessive levels of indignity. We were careful to show respect to the fighters in this way, and immediately stopped viewing any fight that resulted in degrading conditions such as involuntary nudity—a sample selection criterion we called the butt-crack rule. The sixth protocol of responsibility and coexistence was measurably present if participants demonstrated a sense of belonging within a culture or community and adherence to the values of their culture, specifically that participants were ‘fighting for’ the maintenance of their collective value system rather than simply ‘fighting against’ individuals in response to personal slights, or attempting to avoid responsibility for a transgression by ‘kicking up the dust’ through the unnecessary escalation of a conflict. This protocol was demonstrably absent in fifty-eigh...

We noted that outsourcing governance to state institutions did not work in any of the street-fight videos in our dataset. In fact, in every case where police were present, the violence escalated to extreme and lawless behaviour, and community governance ceased. Several of the fights began only after the police arrived. We saw no examples of fights de-escalating with police intervention.

We discovered a significant comorbidity between extreme lawless violence and illegitimacy of the settler state. The more precarious the state in the international context (e.g. regional hostility or isolation, condemnation over lack of treaties and genocidal policies) the more likely it was that extreme lawless violence would occur. This was particularly evident in Israel and Australia, which were the only settler states where we observed firearms being deployed during street fights. We were ashamed to admit we had expected to see firearms mostly in African-American communities, due to our lifelong exposure to American films and television. But we saw no firearms used in these involuntary-settler communities (even when a handgun was visible in a losing fighter’s waistband) and noted our Indigenous cohesion rules were far more likely to be present there than in other US settler communities.

In all settler states observed (except Canada, where nobody seemed to take the fights particularly seriously unless hockey was involved) minority cultures were more likely to exhibit rule-governed behaviours in street fights. That is not to say that whiteness was the common variable here, as the mainstream conflict protocols observed in Taiwan’s dominant culture were the same as those we observed in the other settler states. The dominant culture in every settler state showed the same patterns, including an enforced division in gendered roles, but this was most prevalent in Israel and Australia. In Israel, women were mostly absent, even as onlookers. In Australia women were present in most fights, but their roles as cheerleaders or non-combatant peacemakers were strictly enforced. Australian settler women did on multiple occasions attempt to engage in combat, but in every case the male combatants would immediately stop fighting and work together to prevent female participation. Formerly passionate rivals, even in the midst of extreme rage, would unite as brothers and move together, in ways we observed as almost a collective organism, to separate female rivals either physically or through ridicule and sexualisation, or both. The ridicule usually took the form of violent, sexualised insults or catcalls, which universally seemed to have a depressive effect on the women, who became slouched, tearful and enervated, when moments before they had been highly motivated, energetic an...

I know how this disinformation works, because that technology is fully installed in me now and has become a central part of my operating system. I personally generate at least two different conspiracy theories a week and I’m not even trying—it’s just how my mind processes information now. This means I can’t be trusted to make sense of it all. For example, when I see the same billionaires backing anti-vax propaganda who are also supporting the Big Pharma lobby to oppose price caps on vital medications, I can’t help speculating that pharmaceutical companies would make a lot more money selling vaccines at a steep mark-up to individual consumers instead of mass-producing them for fixed-price government contracts, and suddenly I’ve generated a conspiracy narrative about Big Pharma being behind the anti-vax movement. This is how wrong story is born, with the best intentions and worst methodology. I become concerned about my ideological bias, so I take that ‘political compass’ test online to see what my political brand is. No surprises: I end up as far as the test can measure to the bottom left corner. That would make me some kind of anarcho-communist. I

Can these models be saved if we change their shape from a triangle to a circle, or are they so hopelessly flawed by eugenics and hero’s-journey myths that they need to be abandoned completely? That would mean eradicating somebody’s culture, though, and I’m not too keen on ethnocide as a solution for anything. When I see people trying to decolonise their developmental models without eradicating their cultural inheritance completely, I can’t help but have sympathy for their cause, although it may trouble me for reasons I am unable to express coherently.