Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

by Tyson Yunkaporta

called post-apocalyptic stress syndrome (PASS): ‘When a culture experiences such a massive shock that it never fully recovers.’ Gross

‘Since the Europeans went through an apocalypse and suffered the exact same symptoms as Indigenous people, this indicates that we are not as different as we might like to think.’

He said that it takes at least a century after the crisis has passed for a culture to recover from post-apocalyptic stress syndrome, but that the emergent culture can never return to what it was before.

His process is all about seeing the overall shape of the connections between things.

Look beyond the things and focus on the connections between them. Then look beyond the connections and see the patterns they make. Find the sites of potential risk and increase, like judging where the ball will go in a football game.

but the real understanding comes in the spaces in between, in the relational forces that connect and move the points.

This is the perspective you need to be a custodian rather than an owner of lands, communities or knowledge. It demands the relinquishing of artificial power and control, immersion in the astounding patterns of creation that only emerge through the free movement of all agents and elements within a system.

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?

Knowledge is therefore a living thing that is patterned within every person and being and object and phenomenon within creation.

We have the same thing in Indigenous cultures—stages of knowledge and no progression without mastery and respect. It just requires a bit of discernment, humility and awareness. It is easy enough to observe, listen and gradually increase your participation as your mastery increases.

More importantly, making yourself an expert in another culture is not always appreciated by the members of that culture.

Understanding your own culture and the way it interacts with others, particularly the power dynamics of it, is far more appreciated.

This kind of cultural humility is a useful exercise in understanding your role as an agent of sustainability in a complex system.

You won’t be swallowed up by a hive mind or lose your individuality—you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected. In fact, 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 difference, particularly from other agents who are similar to you.

There needs to be an interaction between abstract (spirit) and concrete (physical) worlds of knowledge for this kind of complexity to develop fully.

The creative spark is a process that allows us to solve seemingly impossible problems. It involves representing real-life elements with metaphors, which transform tangible things into spirit,

Mathematics is widely dreaded by most people the world over because of the recent tradition of confining its operations to the abstract/theoretical world. Without connecting maths to real-life contexts, people feel damage being done to their neural systems and naturally resist.

I have observed maths classes conducted by my colleague Dr Chris Matthews (an Aboriginal mathematician) in which corroboree dances have been expressed as mathematical equations, and then new equations have been formed and new

it was the Dreaming action of translating a real-life event into metaphor, then manipulating the metaphors to gain understanding, followed by innovation transferred back to the real world.

lies in the processes rather than just the content.

Neural processes occur throughout the body and beyond it in the world around—this is known as haptic cognition or embodied cognition or distributed

Through meaning-making we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places and relationships with others. This is how spirit works.

you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge you are learning, then when you pick up that object or even just visualise it you instantly remember what you learned.

This is why a lot of cultural objects have special significance in Aboriginal societies—knowledge is encoded into them in...

If you learn something with somebody, you might have trouble remembering it on your own but recall it in vivid detail when you are

Using your body consciously and meaningfully can unlock this intelligence.

It is about making connections between things that would otherwise remain unconnected,

Any knowledge passed on as discrete information or skills is doomed to failure through disconnection and simplicity.

If we allow the I-am-greater-than deception to enter this process, all is lost.

Yarning

it is a structured cultural activity that is recognised even in research circles as a valid and rigorous methodology for knowledge production, inquiry and transmission.

The end point of a yarn is a set of understandings, values and directions shared by all members of the group in a loose consensus that is inclusive of diverse points of view.

Sand talk may be incorporated as people sketch images on the ground (or even in the air) to illustrate a point or map out a place.

we also need to be examining the narratives of the occupying culture and challenging them with counter-narratives.

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.

we still endure longer work hours than our roles require today, for reasons of social control rather than productivity.

am not. This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on pre-invasion 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 holidays—fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping and so forth. The

There seems to be collective memory loss even over the short term in some of the adolescent cultures of the world.

Improved literacy scores aren’t going to help you if your community’s role in the marketplace is that of commodity rather than vendor.

Modern neural science has been able to map the way print literacy rewires the human brain. It is a fairly catastrophic process, rearranging neural networks and connections between different areas of the brain in ways that are inefficient at best and highly abnormal at worst.

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships—deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition.

If you learn something with or from another person, this knowledge now sits in the relationship between you.

Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated.

Later, the spread of print literacy throughout the West would allow the individual expression of ideas without dialogue, and even individual words to be examined in isolation, causing reductionism to take off like a bushfire.

In high-context cultures, babies have many carers in extended families, while in low-context cultures there are only one or two primary carers.

They are also restricted by inhibiting clothing and quiet, controlled environments with low sensory motor stimulation and limited adult social interactions, as opposed to the socially dense and unrestricted environments of high-context communities.

She says the process is about using literacy to transform cultural capital into objectified capital (in the form of assessments and tests), which are then transformed into institutional capital (in the form of certifications) that have exchange value in the economy. The problem is that in our Aboriginal communities we have learnt that certifications for us seldom have the same level of exchange value that they have for everybody else, particularly in our home communities.

Domesticated beings are stripped of this reality and become passive recipients of violence—either its benefits or its cruel impacts. They devolve as a result.

biggest problem with contemporary approaches to risk is the illusion of safety as a human right that can be controlled as a variable in advance.