Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

by Tyson Yunkaporta

The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.

Yarns are like conversations but take a traditional form we have always used to create and transmit knowledge.

The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.

All Law-breaking comes from that first evil thought, that original sin of placing yourself above the land or above other people.

Perhaps the transferrable wisdom here is simply that most young men need something a little meatier than mindfulness workshops to curtail the terrifying narcissism that overtakes them from the moment their balls drop. Maybe then they won’t grow up to be the men who start wars in the first place.

these people lack their own authentic identities and therefore can only find comfort in assaulting his.

If you want to take control of your life or work toward some kind of sustainable change in the world, you need to harness the power of story.

There is more to narrative than simply telling our stories. We have to compare our stories with the stories of others to seek greater understanding about our reality. It

Story-mind is a way of thinking that encourages dialogue about history from different perspectives, as well as the raw learning power of narrative itself.

Narrative is the most powerful mechanism for memory. While isolated facts go only to short-term memory, or to midterm memory with repetition (as with study for exams), story goes immediately to long-term memory. If you can make up a story connecting metaphors, locations, and language triggers to help you remember something you are studying, it will save time and increase your long-term recall.

It is never productive to criticize the thinking of people dealing with the stresses of surviving on the margins of society. We hear about our shortcomings in the media every day—we don’t need to hear that from one another as well.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Ah, but somewhere in between action and reaction there is an interaction, and that’s where all the magic and fun lies.

The child in your pinkie for kinship-mind. Its mother in the ring finger for story-mind. Her husband in the middle finger for dreaming-mind. His nephew in the index finger for ancestor-mind. All of them connected in spirit through pattern-mind in the thumb.