Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

deep cycles of expansion and contraction, like breathing, in a pattern shaping everything.

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.

In the Indigenous world, you can’t push people to share knowledge—you just accept what they think you’re ready for.

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

It is a risky endeavour 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? In…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to

We experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat schedules and story-less surfaces. In our spheres of existence, time does not go in a straight line, and it is as tangible as the ground we stand on.

what has been going on at Uluru. There is a shed there full of rocks. For a long time, tourists took stones away from that sacred site as souvenirs, then a few decades ago something strange began to happen. The tourists started mailing the rocks back with panicked reports of weird happenings, disturbed sleep, bad luck, ghostly visitations and terri

A reader might understand the physical gesture as a living text by mimicking this image, with the left hand sideways with closed fingers, representing a page or screen, print-based knowledge in general, and the right hand with fingers spread out like a rock art stencil, representing the oral cultures and knowledge of First Peoples. The gesture invo

There is an undeniable pattern in the sum total of all those old stories from around the world, indicating that 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.