Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

by Tyson Yunkaporta

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.