Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

There is more to narrative than simply telling our stories. We have to compare our stories with the stories of others to seek greater understanding about our reality.

In English these are “I”/“me” and “we”/“us.” In Aboriginal languages there are many more, including pronouns that are translated as “I,” “I myself,” “we two,” “we but not others,” and “we altogether.” Repeating the plural ones twice can mean “It’s up to us,” but repeating “I” twice can mean “I go my own way!”

if you can change your “look” into “gaze” and take it in.

For the purposes of the thought experiments on sustainability in this book, 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.

The Roman fasces came to represent a whole modern belief system around social control and national domination—that’s where fascism got its name—and a version of the Roman salute was famously adopted by the Nazis.

It is no accident that the ruins of the world’s oldest civilizations are mostly in deserts now.

Oldman Juma says all this has happened over and over again and will continue to happen as the universe breathes in and out. You can live with it, but you need to adapt and change every aspect of your society and culture when transitioning from one era to the next.

I won’t insult you with endless statistics about extinction rates and topsoil loss and climate change and toxicity levels in every breath of air and every drop of water on the planet, statistics that will be out-of-date a few months after I write them as these disasters continue to multiply.

Early maps of the world were like this too, before Europeans began their empire-building and inverted the charts to place themselves at the top.