Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Any real move towards sustainability will require us to cease limiting our understanding with simplistic language around group and individual identities, villain and victim branding, so that we can see what our actual diversity looks like and what it can do for us.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
He does not need to have an Elder’s level of knowledge to do this. He needs only to perceive the pattern in what he does know.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
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?
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Adaptation is the most important protocol of an agent in a sustainable system. You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops and you must be prepared to change so that those
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Great Dividing Range, which is the body of the Rainbow Serpent. It divides nothing, by the way, but connects systems along a massive songline. Parallel is the Great Barrier Reef, another serpent in carpet snake form, which is a barrier to nothing, by the way, but another infinitely connective story.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
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
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tangible reality only exists in defiance of linear time.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
There are a thousand interconnected threads like this in the oral culture text I made in the creation of those boomerangs and I can access them any time I want to pick them up, sit for a bit and start downloading.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
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.