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.

collection of pages filled with marks representing speech sounds is a complicated way of communicating, particularly when you want to convey a practical sense of the pattern of creation that might shed light on current crises the world is facing.

coming from an intensely interdependent and interpersonal oral culture, writing speech-sound symbols for strangers to read makes things even more complicated.

was not even a real person—just a bundle of extreme reactions and rage.

In my travels I saw that it was our ways, not our things, that grounded us and sustained us.

I’m examining global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective.

We don’t see econometrics models being designed using Indigenous pattern-thinking.

It is always about the what, and never about the how.

Words may be capitalised that are not usually capitalised, and this changes in different contexts when they have different shades of meaning.

One man tried going in a straight line many thousands of years ago and was called wamba (crazy) and punished by being thrown up into the sky. This is a very old story, one of many stories that tell us how we must travel and think in free-ranging patterns, warning us against charging ahead in crazy ways.

with meaning being made in the meandering paths between the words, not the isolated words themselves.

but because I’m not speaking for any single language group, I use many of the inadequate English terms when I need to refer to us collectively.

dual first person. It is a common pronoun in Indigenous languages but not present in English; that’s why I translate it as ‘us-two’, my fingers typing those letters while my mouth is saying ngal.

Emu is a troublemaker who brings into being the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you; you are less than me. This is the source of all human misery. Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem.

In our traditional systems of Law we remember, however, that everyone is an idiot from time to time. Punishment is harsh and swift, but afterwards there is no criminal record, no grudge against the transgressor.

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.

Stone represents earth, tools and spirit; it conveys meaning through its use and through its resilience to the elements.

Our stories show our ancient understanding of the way asteroids form craters, a realisation that only entered scientific knowledge a few short decades ago.

as the ancient names for constellations are often the same as ours throughout the world—the seven sisters, the two brothers, the eagle, the hunter. These are global stories and systems of knowledge that must have once been common to all people.

I think the Emu deception got out of hand somewhere and spread, causing more and more people to think themselves greater than the land, greater than others, greater than the women who hold our lives in their hands and bellies.

I might say to the growing numbers 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.

the understanding that we are no greater or lesser than a rock would certainly change things if a critical mass of people all came to it at once.

In our Law we know that rocks are sentient and contain spirit. You can’t just pick one up and carry it home, as you will disturb its spirit and it will disturb you in turn.

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.

I breathe the breaths of the Ancestors, and everybody else’s too. Always was, always is, always will be.

Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space.

Nothing can be held, accumulated, stored.

The granny’s mother goes back to the centre 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

Usually knowledge-keepers will withdraw if they sense narcissism in you,

Indigenous Knowledge is not wanted at the level of how, only at the level of what, a resource to be plundered rather than a source of knowledge processes.

This is due to communal property ownership laws that do not exist in the globalising system of the Anglosphere. French and German extended families are able to hold capital collectively and run mid-sized family businesses without any individual nominally owning and controlling it all.

These form permanent intergenerational estates. They work together with diverse portfolios and pool multiple incomes to ensure their eggs are never all in one basket. They provide an internal welfare safety net for each other as protection against random incidences of austerity and upheaval.

No matter what field you are in, everything is nature and therefore follows the same natural laws, the same physics.

First Peoples’ Law says that nothing is created or destroyed because of the infinite and regenerative connections between systems. Therefore time is non-linear and regenerates creation in endless cycles. Second Peoples’ law says that systems must be isolated and exist in a vacuum of individual creation, beginning in complexity but simplifying and breaking down until they meet their end.

Indigenous Knowledge is kept in such songlines, so that’s where I stored that data, which I also carved into the club as a mnemonic to help me remember it. Around

My impairment also allows me to see the camouflaged snake in the grass in front of us as we walk and yarn, so it’s a useful disability. Every viewpoint is useful and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it.

In the real world, the ancient peoples of Zimbabwe who once made cities of stone lived within a civilisation, until it inevitably collapsed. This was not an indigenous culture just because its inhabitants had dark skin. Civilisations 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

The exponential destruction caused by cities feeds the exponential growth of infrastructure and population. For this they misapply laws like supply and demand: in order for economic growth to occur, there must be more demand than supply.

In a lifeworld where your great-grandchildren become your parents, you have a vested interest in making sure you’re co-creating a stable system for them to operate in and also ensuring a bit of intergenerational equity.

In my community we use the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ every day as a convenient shorthand to describe relationships between the occupiers and the occupied,

black and white is a limiting paradigm for understanding the Indigenous experience.

Time and place are usually the same word in Aboriginal languages—the two are indivisible.

physical apocalypse of invasion came with a bang, but our cultural armageddon is more of a whimper, a gradual contamination and unravelling of communal knowledge by exceptional individuals.

Cultural innovations occur in deep relationships between land, spirit and groups of people.

if you listen to many voices and stories, and discern a deep and complex pattern emerging, you can usually determine what is real and what has been airbrushed for questionable agendas or corrupted by flash mobs of narcissists.

This is because the Aboriginal flag represents a social system in direct opposition to the global order that requires the existence of flags in the first place. The

Move with the land. Maintain diverse languages, cultures and systems that reflect the ecosystems of the shifting landscapes you inhabit over time. That is the blueprint and we are not the only people who know it—you might recall a similar biblical story in Genesis about the Tower of Babel.

sedentary lifestyles and cultures that do not move with the land or mimic land-based networks in their social systems do not transition well through apocalyptic moments.