Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
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. There needs to be meaningful schematic links made between the symbols a
... See moreTyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
How do animals know migration routes they have never individually experienced before? How does a woman intuitively recover a weaving technique that disappeared over a century ago? How do ideas and solutions appear to us in our sleep?
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
A person ‘of high degree’ in traditional knowledge may find a song in a dream if they are profoundly connected to land, lore, spirit and community. But that song must then be taken up by the people and modified gradually through many iterations before it becomes part of the culture. Besides, that song can only be found through a ritual process deve
... See moreTyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Only women’s weapons have been linguistically domesticated in this way.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
These women have not been raised in confinement, have not had their movements restricted by shame or cloistered activities or clothes that button at the back like an infant’s, that might burst open or flap up at the first hint of natural movement.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
It’s difficult to find the mental space to question systems of power when we’re working eight hours, then trying to lift heavy weights that don’t need lifting or pedalling bikes that go nowhere for an hour so we don’t die of a heart attack from being stuck for a third of our lives in a physically restrictive workspace. We sleep for another third of
... See moreTyson 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.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Silly thinking is something everybody, myself in particular, is guilty of from time to time. It is forgivable as long as you’re still listening.
Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
It gets worse when Oldman says that this view of the symbol is a flipped image that you can only see properly if you send your mind under the ground to look at it from beneath.