Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

by Tyson Yunkaporta

I want to reverse that phenomenon. I want to use an Indigenous pattern-thinking process to critique contemporary systems and to impart an impression of the pattern of creation itself. I want to avoid the ubiquitous Indigenous literary genre of self-narrative and autobiography, though I will include some anecdotes and yarns when examples are needed. What I say will still be subjective and fragmentary, of course, and five minutes after it is written it will already be out-of-date—a problem common to all printed texts.

The hope is this: that from this liminal point of view us-two might be able to see some things that have been missed, glimpse an aspect of the pattern of creation, and run a few thought experiments to see where that pattern takes us. It worked for Einstein, who seldom set foot in a lab but simply said, “If this, then this, then this,” creating simulations in a Dreaming space to produce proofs and solutions of startling complexity and accuracy.

The basic protocols of Aboriginal society, like most societies, include respecting and hearing all points of view in a yarn. Narcissists demand this right, then refuse to allow other points of view on the grounds that any other opinion somehow infringes their freedom of speech or is offensive. They destroy the basic social contract of reciprocity (which allows people to build a reputation of generosity based on sharing to ensure ongoing connectedness and support), shattering this framework of harmony with a few words of nasty gossip.

In our traditional systems of Law we remember, however, that everyone is an idiot from time to time. Punishment is harsh and swift, but afterward there is no criminal record, no grudge against the transgressor. Perpetrators are only criminals until they are punished, and then they may be respected again and begin afresh to make a positive contribution to the group.

We’ve spent a lot of time sparring in a traditional style that was once done with stone knives. The rules of engagement are that you can only cut your opponent on the arms, shoulders, or back (extremely difficult to do) and—here’s the kicker—at the end of the fight the winner must get cut up the same as the loser, so that nobody can walk away with a grudge. It’s hard enough to cut somebody on the back with a stone knife when they’re trying to do the same to you, but it’s even harder when you know that every time you cut them you’re really just cutting yourself. In our yarns following these sessions we decided this kind of combat forces you to see your enemy’s point of view, and by the end of it you can no longer be opponents because you’re connected by mutual respect and understanding.

When Max recites a hundred digits of pi, he is not stepping outside his identity; he is singing a pattern of creation from north to south. He does not need to have an Elder’s level of knowledge to do this. He needs only to perceive the pattern in what he does know. Keepers of knowledge see him behaving in this way and know he is ready to be responsible for additional knowledge, so they pass on story to him. This is how Indigenous Knowledge works.

Sky country is seen in our stories as tangible, having mass, in a way that reveals an understanding of dark matter. All that celestial territory is in constant communication with us, exerting forces upon us and even exchanging matter in the form of rocks crashing through our atmosphere. Our stories show our ancient understanding of the way asteroids form craters, a realization that only entered scientific knowledge a few short decades ago.

Thinking about the shape of the world Max describes and the thin skin around it, I reflect on the physics of our creation stories and the way rocks wear away over time into balls. I perceive a pattern in the universe whereby the most efficient shape for holding matter together is a sphere. I might say to the growing number of flat-earth theorists out there, “Blow me a flat bubble and I’ll consider your theory.” But that would be placing myself in a greater-than position, so I need to check myself and pay attention to them, remembering that there is always value in marginal viewpoints. So I listen to them online and realize that the sphere is not the final shape of this creation process. Our own galaxy began as a sphere and flattened into a disk, and the earth is gradually flattening itself too, as it spins like a lump of clay on a wheel. It’s only flattened by just over twelve miles at the poles so far, but it’s getting there. It’s a good thing I didn’t dismiss the flat-earthers out of hand; otherwise I might never have understood that properly. But what use could come from that kind of thinking? Well, a thought experiment might yield a few applications. Packaging, for example, might make more efficient use of space and resources if we considered that you can get a hell of a lot more into a small sphere than a big box. But then what would stop those spheres from rolling off the shelves? The flat-earthers resolve this—just squash the spheres down a bit. Thank you, flat-eart...

For the purposes of the thought experiments on sustainability in this book, an Indigenous person is a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land base, as part of that land base. Indigenous Knowledge is any application of those memories as living knowledge to improve present and future circumstances.

There are three arcs (or petals, as I now think of them) around the center circle that show the way our social system is mapped onto the creation pattern, with three generations of strong women around every child—sisters/cousins, mothers/aunties, and grannies. The granny’s mother goes back to the center and becomes the child, and all of them cycle through those roles forever, the spirit of the child being born back through the land. Each one also occupies all of the roles simultaneously—so the sister is also somebody else’s aunty, and grandmother to her niece’s daughter. In this way the system itself is different according to the relational context of the person who is seeing it at any given moment. If you are the child at the center, you see one set of relations, but if you are understanding your own child’s point of view, you see another set. The child’s aunty is also somebody’s child, at the center of her own system. Every time you meet someone and establish your relationship to that person, you are bringing together multiple universes. There is no way to be an outside observer of this system—you have to place yourself in it in order to see it in three dimensions, and you must move around and connect within it in order to see multiple other dimensions. From the outside it is just a flat image.

Civilizations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves. They can never be Indigenous until they abandon their city-building culture, a lesson the Elders of Zimbabwe have handed down from bitter experience through deep time.

A city is a community on the arrow of time, an upward-trending arrow demanding perpetual growth. Growth is the engine of the city—if the increase stops, the city falls. Because of this, the local resources are used up quickly, and the lands around the city die. The biota is stripped, then the topsoil goes, then the water. It is no accident that the ruins of the world’s oldest civilizations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn’t desert before that. A city tells itself it is a closed system that must decay in order for time to run straight, while simultaneously demanding eternal growth. This means it must outsource its decay for as long as possible. For this reason, a city is dependent on the importation of resources from interconnected systems beyond its borders. The city places itself at the center of these systems and strips them to feed its growth, disrupting cycles of time and land and weather and water and ecological exchange between the systems. The exchange is now going only one way. Matter and energy are still neither created nor destroyed in this reaction; they are directed into static heaps rather than cycled back through and between systems.

I think West's studies of cities contradicts a lot of what is written here.

I can still hear the bulldozers coming, and I can no longer hear the frogs. But I can see the flowers.

The people may rise up against tyrants in the name of liberty, shattering the halls and towers of the powerful, but then the ruling systems will simply embrace the idea of freedom, tweak it a little, and continue with business as usual. Liberty becomes the right of land-owning white males to vote, then changes form again to include males of every class, then again to include females, and so forth. It constantly shape-shifts, eventually enshrining the freedom of corporations to make messes they cannot be held accountable for, to bribe governments to change laws allowing them to damage people and land at will, no matter who the people vote into government. In this way, liberalism has been frequently rebranded to vanquish competing ideologies. The success of liberalism lies in its ability to wear whatever shape a population projects through disruption or dissent. Thus at the beginning of this millennium it remains the only show in town. It is an illusion that currently dominates the globe.

This limiting range of governance paradigms denies the existence of a myriad of forms of human society developed over eons of existence. These new paradigms ignore the fact that it really is not possible to maintain massive nations and cities in any sustainable form. Civilizations over the last few millennia have done unspeakable damage to the systems necessary for existence, but this is nothing compared to what has happened in the last century or so with the emergence of a global system of great industrial nations. I won’t insult you with endless statistics about extinction rates and topsoil loss and climate change and toxicity levels in every breath of air and every drop of water on the planet, statistics that will be out-of-date a few months after I write them as these disasters continue to multiply. Suffice to say that from my birth up until this point, well over half of the vertebrate species on the planet have become extinct. The 20 percent of the planet that has been left as habitat for the remaining species has been reduced to a series of isolated systems that are unable to exchange uncontaminated matter and energy to maintain complexity.

Don't agree re: cities but do agree re: threat we pose to the planet's maintenance of complexity.

Old Nyoongars and Yorgas in Perth tell stories about a group of three totemic entities that work together in miraculous ways. Certain butterflies always lay their eggs on a particular bush above the nest of a particular species of ant. The ants collect the eggs and take them down into the nest. When the larvae hatch, the ants carry them up to eat the leaves of the bush at night and then carry them back down again. When they grow too heavy to carry, the ants bring the leaves down to them. The larvae grow a jelly on their sides when they eat those particular leaves, and this is the food that the queen ant eats. The larvae then spin cocoons in the nest for the final stage of the process, after which they fly out of the nest as butterflies and begin the cycle all over again.

Preindustrial cultures have worked within self-organizing systems for thousands of years to predict weather patterns, seasonal activity, and the dynamics of social groups, then manage responses to these complexities in nonintrusive ways that maintain systemic balance. While interventions are possible from within these dynamic systems, they cannot be controlled from the outside. Systems are heterarchical—composed of equal parts interacting together. Imposing a hierarchical model of top-down control can only destroy them. Healthy interventions can only be made by free agents within a complex system—agents referred to in chaos theory as “strange attractors.” Could you be a strange attractor within your institution? It is a risky endeavor in a culture that attaches negative meanings to words like “chaos” and “anarchy,” equating them with disorder and ruin. But chaos in reality has a structure that produces innovation, and “anarchy” simply means “no boss.” Could it be possible to have structure without bosses?

sustainable systems cannot function without the full autonomy and unique expression of each independent part of the interdependent whole.

Diversity is not about tolerating difference or treating others equally and without prejudice. The diversification principle compels you to maintain your individual differences, particularly from other agents who are similar to you. This prevents you from clustering into narcissistic flash mobs. You must also seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents who are completely dissimilar to you. Finally, you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and therefore sustainable.

If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions. Knowledge, value, and energy in truly sustainable networks of interaction are prevented from remaining static and unchanging by the final protocol.

There are so many adolescent cultures in the world right now, reaching for the stars without really knowing what they are. Adolescent cultures always ask the same three questions. Why are we here? How should we live? What will happen when we die? The first one I’ve covered already with the role of humans as a custodial species. The second one I’ve covered above, with the four protocols for agents in a complex dynamic system. The third one us-two will look at next.

The chemical burst of pleasure we feel when genuine knowledge transmission takes place occurs from the creation of new neural pathways. These are connections between two points that were previously unconnected. Jokes are one of the most pure examples of this neural creation event; most humor is based on two ideas coming together in a new way: puns, rhymes, double meanings, unusual circumstances, accidents, exposed delusions, and contextually inappropriate content are examples of this. The chemical rush we get from sudden neural connections in jokes is so intense and pleasurable that we laugh out loud. This kind of humor and joy in learning is a huge part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation. But there are two kinds of joy. One is characterized by lightheartedness, and the other is marked by fierce engagement and deep concentration. Both give pleasure by increasing connectedness and complexity in the neural systems of learners. There needs to be an interaction between abstract (spirit) and concrete (physical) worlds of knowledge for this kind of complexity to develop fully.

If you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge that you are learning, then when you pick up that object or even just visualize it, you instantly remember what you learned. It has become a tangible metaphor, an overlap between the two worlds. This is why a lot of cultural objects have special significance in Aboriginal societies—knowledge is encoded into them in a creation process that is sacred. This is how traditional message sticks work. This kind of haptic knowledge is also encoded in relationships, which is why kinship systems are so central to our cultures. If you learn something with somebody, you might have trouble remembering it on your own but recall it in vivid detail when you are with her again, or if you think of her or call out her name.

Your gut has its own independent nervous system that is still a mystery to modern science. If your head is cut off, your gut will continue to function on its own until it dies from lack of oxygen. There is no name for this in English, but every Aboriginal language has a term for it. In my language it is ngangk pi’an. In Western Australia some people call it ngarlu. This is the seat of your big spirit, your higher intelligence. In Anglo cultures it is vaguely acknowledged when people refer to “gut instinct.” In Eastern cultures it is the center of a person’s chi. In all cultures it grounds a person in the living world and connects us to all things. In the Aboriginal world, the energy of the gut must be kept clear and constantly moving through mental, spiritual, and physical cultural activity, or it will become stagnant and make a person sick.

Any knowledge passed on as discrete information or skills is doomed to failure through disconnection and simplicity. Knowledge transmission must connect both abstract knowledge and concrete application through meaningful metaphors in order to be effective. Without this sacred and joyful act of creation, our systems become unstable and deteriorate. You need cultural metaphors of integrity to do it properly. Working with grounded, complex metaphors that have integrity is the difference between decoration and art, tunes and music, commercialized fetishes and authentic cultural practice. When metaphors have integrity, they are multilayered, with complex levels that may be accessed by people who have prerequisite understandings.

For this chapter I paid homage to that Western cliché by carving two wooden clubs. In my clan these are referred to as yuk puuyngk, or Law sticks. They communicate custodial claims to places and stories, asserting cultural authority and even ownership of objects and resources. They can be stuck into the ground to show a claim to a place or to objects alongside them. The stories of the person carrying them may be etched or painted on the business end of the club. Smaller ones may also be used as message sticks to carry stories and knowledge to different groups and territories. But if you dug them up in the ancient dirt at the bottom of a cave, it would be hard to imagine any utility for them beyond bludgeoning.

Yarning is more than just a story or conversation in Aboriginal culture—it is a structured cultural activity that is recognized even in research circles as a valid and rigorous methodology for knowledge production, inquiry, and transmission. It is a ritual that incorporates elements such as story, humor, gesture, and mimicry for consensus-building, meaning-making, and innovation. It references places and relationships and is highly contextualized in the local worldviews of those yarning. It has protocols of active listening, mutual respect, and building on what others have said rather than openly contradicting them or debating their ideas. There is no firm protocol of only one person speaking at a time, although the mutual respect protocol ensures that interjections are in support of what a speaker is saying, enriching what is being said.

The primary mode of communication in yarns is narrative—the sharing of anecdotes, stories, and experiences from the lived reality of the participants. Sand talk may be incorporated as people sketch images on the ground (or even in the air) to illustrate a point or to map out a place. Physical demonstrations are included as people act out events occurring in stories. Sharing drink or food is often part of the ritual—most commonly cups of tea today. Often yarning will occur around a shared material cultural activity like weaving, painting, string-making, Ceremony preparation, and even things like crossword puzzles and setting up birthday party decorations.

To domesticate an animal in this way you must: Separate the young from their parents in the daylight hours. Confine them in an enclosed space with limited stimulation or access to natural habitat. Use rewards and punishments to force them to comply with purposeless tasks. Effectively, the Prussians created a system using the same techniques to manufacture adolescence and thus domesticate their people. The system they invented in the early nineteenth century to administer this change was public education: the radical innovation of universal primary schooling, followed by streaming into trade, professional, and leadership education.

Now, as ever, the creation of a workforce to serve the national economy is the openly stated main goal of public education. And, as ever, the inmates of this system are told that their enthusiastic compliance with forced labor will be in their best interests at some future point. Germany’s compulsory education system expressed six outcomes in its original syllabus documents: Obedient soldiers to the army. Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms. Well-subordinated civil servants. Well-subordinated clerks for industry. Citizens who thought alike on most issues. National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. And it spread like wildfire: to Hungary in 1868, Austria in 1869, Switzerland in 1874, Italy in 1877, Holland in 1878, Belgium in 1879, Britain in 1880, and France in 1882. From there it quickly expanded further to European colonies, including Australia.

In Italy, for example, it used to be common knowledge but is now all but forgotten that Hitler’s fascist partner in crime, Mussolini, exterminated the Cavernicoli, a cave-dwelling people who were still maintaining a Paleolithic culture. But the structural racism installed through Prussian-style schooling and the eugenics movement would not be discarded, merely rebranded. Later, following long civil-rights struggles and campaigns for social justice, racial inferiority was renamed “cultural difference.” Racial integration was called “reconciliation.” In the colonies, assimilation was relaunched as “Closing the Gap.” The language became more politically correct, but the globalizing goals of cultural uniformity, economic compliance, and homogenized identities remained the same.

Anybody who has small children, or works with them, will be familiar with the qualities of an undomesticated mind. It is wild and unschooled, teeming with innate knowledge processes. Children perform tasks they have not encountered before and you wonder, “Where the hell did they learn that?” They play with absolute dedication and fierce concentration. They learn languages perfectly, to the limits of their adult role models, without explicit instruction and at a phenomenal rate. Most of what we learn in our lifetimes today is during the first few years of childhood. This explosive period of learning ends, in industrialized communities, around the age of eight, when the highly focused attention of play and learning is schooled out of the child and redirected into less stimulating educational activity. After three or four years of schooling, the nucleus basalis, which forms sharp memories in the brain, falls into disuse and decays. This is the part of the brain that makes learning so effortless for small children, and it is always activated in undomesticated humans. But neuroplasticity research has shown that damage to the nucleus basalis can be reversed by reintroducing activities involving highly focused attention, which results in a massive increase in production of acetylcholine and dopamine. Using new skills under conditions of intense focus rewires billions of neural connections and reactivates the nucleus basalis. Loss of function in this part of the brain is not a nat...

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Us-two, we still endure longer work hours than our roles require today, for reasons of social control rather than productivity. It’s difficult to find the mental space to question systems of power when we’re working eight hours, then trying to lift heavy weights that don’t need lifting or pedaling bikes that go nowhere for an hour so we don’t die of a heart attack from being stuck for a third of our lives in a physically restrictive workspace.

I am often told that I should be grateful for the progress that Western civilization has brought to these shores. I am not. This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on preinvasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people do now for leisure activities on their yearly vacations: fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping, and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits, and the expert crafting of exceptional objects. I know this is true because I have lived like this, even in this era when the land is only a pale shadow of the abundance that once was. We have been lied to about the “harsh survival” lifestyles of the past. There was nothing harsh about it. If it was so harsh—such a brutish, menial struggle for existence—then we would not have evolved to become the delicate, intelligent creatures that we are.