@book{yunkaporta2020sand,
title={Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World},
author={Yunkaporta, T.},
isbn={9780062975638},
lccn={2019050677},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=-7moDwAAQBAJ},
year={2020},
publisher={HarperCollins}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
Beings of higher intelligence are already here, always have been. They just haven’t used their intelligence to destroy anything yet. Maybe they will, if they tire of the incompetence of domesticated humans.
Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land, but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it. If you don’t move with the land, the land will move you.
There are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. It was our ways, not our things, that grounded us and sustained us. I know who I am, where I belong and what I call myself, and it is enough.
Simplistic categories that rank occupied Peoples by degree of domestication do not reflect the complex realities of contemporary Indigenous communities, identities and knowledge.
Biological genocide was attempted through large-scale efforts to ‘breed out’ dark skin. For many women, marrying or submitting to settler males so that their children might pass for white was the only way to survive this Apocalypse, while waiting for a safer time to return home.
We are affiliated with multiple groups and also have disrupted affiliations. For many people, these traumatic relations are unsafe to talk about, while for others there are reclaimed connections that are too precarious to declare.
Most of the knowledge that gets through this process is reduced to basic content, artefacts, resources and data, divided into foreign categories, to be stored and plundered as needed. Our knowledge is only valued if it is fossilised, while our evolving customs and thought patterns are viewed with distaste and scepticism.
I can speak from the knowledge, but not for it or about all the details. However, I can talk about the processes and patterns I know from my cultural practice, developed within my affiliations with my home community and other Aboriginal communities across this continent, including Nyoongar, Mardi, Nungar and Koori Peoples. Our knowledge endures because everybody carries a part of it, no matter how fragmentary. If you want to see the pattern of creation you 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 have been to many conferences and talks about Indigenous Knowledge and sustainability, and have read numerous papers on the topic. Most carry the same simplistic message: First Peoples have been here for x-thousand years, they know how to live in balance with this place and we should learn from them to find solutions to sustainability issues today. They then offer some isolated examples of sustainable practices pre-colonisation, and that’s it. The audience is left wondering, ‘Yes, but how? What insight does this offer today, for the problems we are experiencing now?’
We rarely see global sustainability issues addressed using Indigenous perspectives and thought processes. We don’t see econometrics models being designed using Indigenous pattern-thinking. I want to use an Indigenous pattern-thinking process to critique contemporary systems, and to impart an impression of the pattern of creation itself. I need to pass these concepts on so I can leave them behind and grow into the next stage of knowledge.
We don’t have a word for non-linear in our languages because nobody would consider travelling, 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.
I place my hand on one of the rocks and there is a deep duum that rises through it from the ground, reverberating up through my shoulder and down into my gut, and I think I just got the answer to my question.
The way each person knows those stories is subjective—how they are known in that time and place by that person is a unique viewpoint that is sacred, a communication between earth camp and sky camp, between people and a sentient cosmos.
Juma Fejo tells me everything in creation has Dreaming, even windscreen wipers and mobile phones, so why must our knowledge of creation be frozen in time as an artefact? They can tell us about how to deal with the complexities and frailties of human societies, how to limit destructive excesses in these systems, and most importantly how to deal with idiots.
It’s no monument. The place is alive. Every rock is animate and sentient—but in our worldview this is true of all rocks.
Uluru is the stone at the centre of this continent’s story, a pattern repeated in the interconnected and diverse stories of many smaller regions, reflected in our own bodies at the navel and then down into smaller and smaller parts at the quantum level of our cosmology. There is no difference between you, a stone, a tree or a traffic light. All contain knowledge, story, pattern.
You have to show patience and respect, come in from the side, sit awhile and wait to be invited in.
Emu is a troublemaker who brings into being the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you.
Victims and transgressors transformed into rock following epic struggles to stand for all time as cautionary tales.
In our traditional systems of Law we remember, however, that everyone is an idiot from time to time. Punishment is harsh and swift, but afterwards there is no criminal record, no grudge against the transgressor. They can look forward to a clean slate and therefore be willing and equal participants in their own punishment and transformation, which is a learning process more than anything else. Those old criminals in stone all over this country are not despised figures, but respected entities who received their punishment and are now revered in their roles of keeping the Law. If we respect them and hear their stories, they can tell us how to live together better.
In our Law we know that rocks are sentient and contain spirit. You can’t just pick one up and carry it home, as you will disturb its spirit and it will disturb you in turn. Lot of rocks are benevolent and enjoy being used and traded, but you have to follow the guidance of the old people to know which ones you can use. Rocks are to be respected.
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.
Creation time isn’t a ‘long, long ago’ event, because creation is still unfolding now, and will continue to if we know how to know it. It all comes out from that central point of impact, that big bang expanding and contracting, breathing out and in, no start and finish but a constant state where past, present and future are all one thing, one time, one place. In her kinship system every three generations there is a reset in which your grandparents’ parents are classified as your children, an eternal cycle of renewal.
Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space. 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.
[In] the Indigenous world, you can’t push people to share knowledge—you just accept what they think you’re ready for.
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. These masses of desperately poor people working away from home continue to send billions of dollars back to their extended families and communities, and this economic process turns out to be resistant to contraction.
The selective application of different laws and theories is the reason for the crisis of civilisation that will be experienced on this planet until we reach Aristotle’s telos, the inevitable end. It is a metaphor based on deception, and in an Aboriginal worldview this is how curses work. You take part of a system (e.g. a person’s hair) and observe the pattern of the whole system (e.g. their body, mind and spirit) in that fragment, then you sing a false pattern (e.g. you are dying) into the whole from the part, powering it with another system in constant motion (e.g. running water). The curse is a deception made real—either an outright lie or a true law or pattern applied where it doesn’t belong.
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. A city is a community on the arrow of time, an upward-trending arrow demanding perpetual growth. Growth is the engine of the city—if the increase stops, the city falls. [It] 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. The city places itself at the centre of these systems and strips them to feed its growth, disrupting cycles of time and land and weather and water and ecological exchange between the systems.
We are the custodians of this reality, and the arrow of time is not an appropriate model for a custodial species to operate from.
I find that ‘whiteness’ is no longer a useful term in my vocabulary. In my community we use the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ every day as a convenient shorthand to describe relationships between the occupiers and the occupied, but those terms are horribly inadequate for describing our reality today, particularly in multicultural and international contexts.
The Indigenous experience itself is hard to define as a distinct reality when the non-Indigenous communities of the world have only (relatively) recently been displaced from their own ancestral territories of origin, moved into large cities and towns to provide the labour that progress demands. ‘People of colour’ in their struggle for economic equality join the rush to exploit Aboriginal land and resources, and are welcome at the boardroom table as long as they embrace settler values and identities. We name victims and perpetrators by a colour code that masks the actual forces and patterns that are vexing us.
Cultural innovations occur in deep relationships between land, spirit and groups of people. [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 developed over millennia by that community. The song itself is not as important as the communal knowledge process that produces it. Most lasting cultural innovations occur through the demotic—the practices and forms that evolve through the daily lives and interactions of people and place in an organic sequence of adaptation.
The most remarkable thing about western civilisation is its ability to absorb any object or idea, alter it, sanitise it, rebrand it and market it. Even ideas that are a threat can be co-opted and put to work. Liberty becomes the right of land-owning white males to vote, then changes form again to include males of every class, then again to include females, and so forth. It constantly shape-shifts, eventually enshrining the freedom of corporations to make messes they cannot be held accountable for, to bribe governments to change laws allowing them to damage people and land at will, no matter who the people vote into government. It is an illusion that currently dominates the globe. This illusion has a pattern. Everybody follows the pattern, even if they openly oppose the tenets of liberalism or the system of nationhood in general. If you chance upon a place that doesn’t have those elements, you’ll find that the people there have lost or are in the process of losing their right to exist.
The political spectrum itself is an illusion, suggesting that the only possible forms of social organisation are liberalism, fascism or socialism. These new paradigms ignore the fact that it really is not possible to maintain massive nations and cities in any sustainable form.
Move with the land. Maintain diverse languages, cultures and systems that reflect the ecosystems of the shifting landscapes you inhabit over time.
If you can see the relational forces connecting and moving the elements of a system, rather than focusing on the elements themselves, you are able to see a pattern outside of linear time. If you bring that pattern back into linear time, this can be called a prediction in today’s world. what seems like chaos has patterns and shapes that you can only discern with a holistic view. Contemporary science is beginning to understand this way of knowing through chaos theory, complexity theory, network theory and fractal geometry. t is a complexity that cannot function through external design and control. These patterns cannot be programmed, but must emerge within the system organically—a process that is called ‘random’ in western worldviews but is in fact following the patterns of creation. This is the perspective you need to be a custodian rather than an owner of lands, communities or knowledge.
Indigenous models of governance are based on respect for social, ecological and knowledge systems and all their components or members. Complex kinship structures reflect the dynamic design of natural systems through totemic relationships with plants and animals. The whole is intelligent, and each part carries the inherent intelligence of the entire system. Knowledge is therefore a living thing that is patterned within every person and being and object and phenomenon within creation. Respectful observation and interaction within the system, with the parts and the connections between them, is the only way to see the pattern. You cannot know any part, let alone the whole, without respect. Senior people ensure the processes and stages of coming to higher levels of knowledge are maintained with safety and cohesion. It just requires a bit of discernment, humility and awareness. It is easy enough to observe, listen and gradually increase your participation as your mastery increases.
First, check your ego and your motives. Second, you don’t need to be an expert to understand the knowledge processes of people from other cultures and enter into dialogues with them. Making yourself an expert in another culture is not always appreciated by the members of that culture. Understanding your own culture and the way it interacts with others, particularly the power dynamics of it, is far more appreciated. It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realise your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. There is honour to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency. You won’t be swallowed up by a hive mind or lose your individuality—you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected.
Sustainable systems cannot function without the full autonomy and unique expression of each independent part of the interdependent whole. Connect, diversify, interact and adapt. Maintain your individual difference, particularly from other agents who are similar to you. Seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents who are completely dissimilar to you. Interact with other systems beyond your own. Connectedness balances the excesses of individualism. Forming pairs with multiple other agents who also pair with others. Creating or expanding networks of these connections. Making sure these networks are interacting with the networks of other agents, both within your system and in others. Interaction is the principle that provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. This principle facilitates the flow of living knowledge. Transferring knowledge (and energy and resources) rather than trying to store it individually, with as many other agents as possible. You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. You must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked.
[When] you are following the four protocols of working within the pattern, little systems of vibrant complexity will spring up around you, and other strange attractors will draw you into their amazing webs.
Narcissism isn’t incurable though. Survivors of this plague emerge without any memory of who they really are, needing support to begin again and relearn the nature of their existence, their purpose for being here. They grow up eventually, but it takes a long time if they have no assistance. There are so many adolescent cultures in the world right now, reaching for the stars without really knowing what they are.
Through meaning-making we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places and relationships with others. This is how spirit works. This is why a lot of cultural objects have special significance in Aboriginal societies—knowledge is encoded into them in a creation process that is sacred. Also encoded in relationships, which is why kinship systems are so central to our cultures. If you learn something with somebody, you might have trouble remembering it on your own but recall it in vivid detail when you are with them again, or if you think of them or call out their name.
There is knowledge and intelligence in your hands, feet and even hair. Using your body consciously and meaningfully can unlock this intelligence. Your gut has its own independent nervous system that is still a mystery to modern science. This is the seat of your big spirit, your higher intelligence. In all cultures it grounds a person in the living world and connects us to all things.
Story-mind is a way of thinking that encourages dialogue about history from different perspectives, as well as the raw learning power of narrative itself. Narrative is the most powerful mechanism for memory. While isolated facts go only to short-term memory, or to mid-term memory with repetition story goes immediately to long-term memory.
yarning: the process by which stories come together and begin to have meaning. There has to be an exchange of stories if you want to be awake and grown. It is a ritual that incorporates elements such as story, humour, gesture and mimicry for consensus-building, meaning-making and innovation. It references places and relationships and is highly contextualised in the local worldviews of those yarning. It has protocols of active listening, mutual respect and building on what others have said rather than openly contradicting them or debating their ideas. It is non-linear. The end point of a yarn is a set of understandings, values and directions shared by all members of the group in a loose consensus that is inclusive of diverse points of view.
‘Strong Indigenous voices’ need to be doing more than recounting our subjective experiences—we also need to be examining the narratives of the occupying culture and challenging them with counter-narratives.
Deep engagement encompassing mind, body, heart and spirit has been replaced by a dogged ethic of commitment to labour, enthusiastic compliance with discipline imposed by authority. While it may be proven that internal motivation is more productive than external pressure, the uncertain and unsettling sources of this inner power are threatening to hierarchies, so intrinsic control methods of organisation are generally ignored in both education and the workplace. Or they are co-opted into ‘self-management’ protocols that involve internalising our administrators and doing the job of monitoring or managing for them.
We want shelter, food, strong relationships, a livable habitat, stimulating learning activity and time to perform valued tasks in which we excel… I am often told that I should be grateful for the progress that western civilisation has brought to these shores. I am not.
The assistance people need is not in learning about Aboriginal Knowledge but in remembering their own.
There can be no exchange or dialogue until the protocols of establishing relationships have taken place. Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going? What is your true purpose here? Where does the knowledge you carry come from and who shared it with you? What are the applications and potential impacts of this knowledge on this place? What impacts has it had on other places? What other knowledge is it related to? Who are you to be saying these things? In our world nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things.
There are no isolated variables—every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. It facilitates shared memory and sustainable knowledge systems. An observer does not try to be objective, but is integrated within a sentient system that is observing itself.
Reasoning is hierarchical, solitary and disconnected, making it possible for communication to be one-way in the form of rants, instruction and, most importantly, orders.
Being in profound relation to place changes everything about you—your voice, your smell, your walk, your morality.
What we can know is determined by our obligations and relationships to people, Ancestors, land, law and creation.
What we know is that the role of custodial species is to sustain creation, which is formed from complexity and connectedness.
The way we know this is through our cultural metaphors.
The way we work with this knowledge is by positioning, sharing and adapting our cultural metaphors.
I referred to it as spirit, heart, head and hands. Mumma Doris knew it as Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct. The first step of Respect is aligned with values and protocols of introduction, setting rules and boundaries. This is the work of your spirit, your gut. The second step, Connect, is about establishing strong relationships and routines of exchange that are equal for all involved. Your way of being is your way of relating, because all things only exist in relationship to other things. This is the work of your heart. The third step, Reflect, is about thinking as part of the group and collectively establishing a shared body of knowledge to inform what you will do. This is the work of the head. The final step, Direct, is about acting on that shared knowledge in ways that are negotiated by all. This is the work of the hands.
Stop asking the question, ‘Are we alone?’ Of course we’re not! Everything in the universe is alive and full of knowledge.
More highlights: https://archive.org/download/elopio-highlights/2024-07-01-09-55-08-Sand%20Talk.md