Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

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 c

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.

Perhaps the desire to create closed systems and keep time going in a straight line is the reason for Second Peoples’ obsession with creating fences and walls, borders, great divides and great barriers. In reality we do not inhabit closed systems, so why choose the second law of thermodynamics to create your model of time?

Meanwhile, in France and Germany, some aspects of the economy relating to extended families also remain stable, just as they have managed to do through two world wars and the collapse of European empires. This is due to communal property ownership laws that do not exist in the globalising system of the Anglosphere. French and German extended famili

The third world’s remittance economy—which is basically the money sent home by people who have migrated to first-world nations, and which rivals international aid in scope—did not crash during the last financial crisis. In fact in many instances it grew, baffling economists.

changes, and this is the First Law. Creation is in a constant state of motion, and we must move with it as the custodial species or we will damage the system and doom ourselves. Nothing can be held, accumulated, stored. Every unit requires velocity and exchange in a stable system or it will stagnate—this applies to economic and social systems as we

Sometimes it is hard to write in English when you’ve been talking to your great-grandmother on the phone but she is also your niece, and in her language there are no separate words for time and space. In her kinship system every three generations there is a reset in which your grandparents’ parents are classified as your children, an eternal cycle

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

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