Sand Talk - Tyson Yunkaporta

The Porcupine, the Paleo-mind, and the Grand Design

• Complex history of Australian First Peoples “does not align with most criteria demanded for authentication and recognition by colonists. The Indigenous “self” that has been designed by outsiders to render programs of self-determination safe does not reflect our reality.”
• Can speak from knowledge, but not for it or about all details
  • Knowledge endures bc everyone carries part of it, no matter how fragmentary
  • To see pattern of creation, talk to everybody and listen carefully— “Authentic knowledge processes are easy to verify if you are familiar with that pattern—each part reflects the design of the whole system.”

I’m not reporting on Indigenous Knowledge systems for a global audience’s perspective. I’m examining global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective.

• Goal = “to use an Indigenous pattern-thinking process to critique contemporary systems,” “impart an impression of the pattern of creation itself”
• Each chapter includes “sand talk,” reflecting Aboriginal custom of drawing on ground to convey knowledge

We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.

Albino Boy

• Ancient paths of Dreaming “etched into the landscape in song and story and mapped into our minds and bodies and relationships with everything around us: knowledge stored in every waterway and every rock.”
  • All rocks = sentient & animate
  • Stones in earth and sky, stories & cx → tell us how to deal with complexities, frailties of human societies, how to limit excesses… how to deal with idiots
• Uluru = at center of Australia’s story: repeated pattern in interconnected stories across smaller regions, down to quantum level
  • “In this way of knowing, there is no difference between you, a stone, a tree, or a traffic light. All contain knowledge, story, pattern.”
• Mindset of “I am greater than you; you are less than me” = source of all human misery, and Aboriginal society designed over millennia to deal with this
  • Law and knowledge in stone → Law-breaking comes from the sin of placing yourself above the land or other people
• Criminal justice approach: perpetrators only criminals until they are punished, and then they are again respected, make + contributions to group → people don’t try to avoid punishment/lie/shift blame; can look forward to clean slate
  • Seen as a learning process
• Unlike Western thinkers, see dark areas between celestial bodies as living country based on effects of attraction
• Who is Indigenous? “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.”

First Law

• Nothing is created or destroyed; just moves and changes → “Creation is a constant state of motion, and we must move with it as the custodial species or we will damage the system and doom ourselves.”
• Relativity: system is diff according to relational context of who is see it at any given moment
  • No way to be an outside observer of the system— must move around and connect within it to see other dimensions
  • Cannot control the system from a fixed outside viewpoint— any such attempts will fail
  • Suggests approaches to supporting economies by extending family property ownership laws and incentives → inside-out approach
• Second law of thermodynamics (entropy always increases) only applies to closed systems, which don’t actually exist!
  • Desire for closed system may be behind our obsession with fences, walls, borders
  • Similarly: arrow of time proposed by physics is real, works in closed systems… but doesn’t apply to people who live in open, interconnected ones

Forever Limited

• “We name victims and perpetrators by a color code that masks the actual forces and patterns that are vexing us. We see ethnic groups with our left eye and individuals with our right eye, and we are blind to anything else.”
• Most lasting cultural innovations evolve through daily lives, intx of people and place in organic sequence of adaptation (vs top-down)
• “Move with the land. Maintain diverse languages, cultures, and systems that reflect the ecosystems of the shifting landscapes you inhabit over time. That is the blueprint, and we are not the only people who know it.”

Lines in the Sand

• Community members (birds, fish, nodes) need to operate under four basic rules to form complex learning communities → cannot be designed or maintained by a single agent or external authority
  • Self-org systems (like neural nets today) used by preindustrial cultures for thousands of years— systems = heterarchical vs hierarchical (composed of equal parts intx together)
  • Healthy interventions can only be made by free agents within the system— strange attractors
• Complex kinship structures reflect dynamic design of natural systems through totemic relationships with plants and animals
  • Totems can include wind, lightning, body parts, substances
  • Each part carries inherent intelligence of entire system → knowledge is living thing patterned within every person, being, object, phenomenon within creation
• “…you don’t need to be an expert to understand the knowledge processes of people from other cultures and enter into dialogues with them. More important, making yourself an expert in another culture is not always appreciated by the members of that culture”
  • Cultural humility → useful to understand your role as agent of sustainability in complex system, gives you a sense of honor, dignity
• Principles of sustainability agents: diversify, connect, interact, adapt
  • Embedded in Aboriginal culture in diversity/range of first-person pronouns

Of Spirit and Spirits

• New cultures → three questions…
  • Why are we here? “It’s easy. This is why we’re here. We look after things on the earth and in the sky and the places in between.”
  • How should we live?
  • What will happen when we die?
• Metaphors = lines of communication between concrete and abstract worlds
  • Images, dance, song, language, culture, etc., even writing (though usually only a one way metaphor, where as others are two-way); full circuit needed for learning to occur
  • Use of familiar objects → encode knowledge = tangible metaphor, why there are many cultural objects with significance in Aboriginal cultures
  • Haptic knowledge also commonly encoded in relationships

If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation.

• Two kinds of joy: one lighthearted, another from fierce engagement & concentration

Advanced and Fair

• Narratives = most powerful mechanism of memory
• Must compare our stories with others to seek greater understanding of reality; test of validity and rigor for new knowledge
• Yarning: more than just story/conversation— structured cultural activity, rigorous method for inquiry & transmission
  • Ritual incorporating story, humor, gesture, mimicry for consensus-building, meaning-making, innovation; esp. narrative
  • Highly contextualized to place, relationships
  • End point = set of shared understandings inclusive of diverse POVs
• Schools = main vehicle for establishing narratives of progress → sites of political struggle in civilization

Romancing the Stone Age

• Nucleus basalis = part of brain forming sharp memories
  • Very active in small children → learning seems effortless, always activated in “undomesticated” humans
  • Begins to decay after 3-4 yrs of schooling
• Current system of “work-or-die” isn’t much better than pre-invasion living (only a few hours of work per day for shelter/sustenance, often activities we do now for leisure like fishing, camping, with the rest of te day for creation, relationships, and ceremony)
  • John Zerzan → Running on Emptiness, Elements of Refusal: civilization oppresses people through scarcity paradigms, while Indigenous communities have free societies based on abundance paradigms
  • Concept of work is modern one that only recently came to exist as a separate activity
• Ancestor-mind = sort of Paleo thought-path to help you tap into unconscious knowledge system that we all carry from history— don’t need to learn Aboriginal Knowledge, but remember our own

Displaced Apostrophes

• Relationships = only sustainable way to store data, long-term: connections between generations of people in custodial relation to sentient landscape, oral tradition
  • Not in place of print, but supplemented by
  • Oral tradition → kinship-mind: backs up knowledge in peer-to-peer networks
  • Oral cultures → high-context, field-dependent-reasoning cultures, vs print-based ones; babies have more caregivers
• Five ways of thinking
  1. Kinship-mind = relationships and connectedness, areas of knowledge are integrated; relationship between knower and other knowers, places, senior knowledge keepers = most important
  2. Story-mind = role of narrative in memory and knowledge transmission
  3. Dreaming-mind = use of metaphors to work with knowledge, communication between physical & nonphysical worlds (through dance, image, song, language, culture, objects, etc.)
  4. Ancestor-mind = deep engagement, connecting with timeless state of mind, “flow state” of complete concentration, losing track of linear time
  5. Pattern-mind = seeing entire systems and trends → make accurate predictions, find solutions to complex problems

Lemonade for Headaches

• Example of applying Indigenous ways of thinking to medicine = shifting metaphor of immune system as an army → dynamic framework of ants on a riverbank, many connected species dealing with dead animals

Duck Hunting is Everybody’s Business

• Violence is part of creation
  • In sustainable system, distributed evenly among agents → minimizes damage vs when its centralized into hands of a few powerful people
• In many civilizations, women excluded from active participation in violence → forced into passive roles → at the mercy of men around them

Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug: violence is part of the pattern.

• Living a life without violence = living a life of illusion— we outsource our conflict beyond our living space… blood diamonds, pillaged metals from mining operations that devestate land and communities, etc.

Immovable Meets Irresistible

• Ganma (from Yolngu): phenomenon of dynamic interaction when opposite forces meet in act of new creation, like fresh water of a river meeting salt water of a coast
  • Guides intx of different groups & interests, reflects natural processes of self-organizing systems
• Hybridization → influences patterns of creation → when occurs organically through agents of a sustainable system, can create productive emergent entities
  • When forced by an outside agent, abominations can occur
• No such thing as safety in Aboriginal worldview— implies an invisible hierarchy that doesn’t exist in their way of being, removes any sense of agency → places people in a passive role
  • Rather, emphasis on protection, with two goals: 1) Look out for yourself, 2) Look out for the people around you → gives you the power to defend yourself and loved ones

Which Way

Your culture is not what your hands touch or make—it’s what moves your hands.

• Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct → description of Indigenous ways of valuing