Sand Talk – Tyson Yunkaporta – 2019

How indigenous thinking can save the world.

I still have the cultural knowledge and status of a 14 year old boy. A swimming pool was built on the initiation ground back home, so those rites of passage don’t happen anymore.

I can’t share a lot of the symbolic knowledge because it is either restricted (by age, birth, order, gender, and mastery level) or appropriate only for a specific place or group.

A Star Dreamin that Juma Fejo (1902-1949) wants to share with all peoples. It goes everywhere that turtles go – and there are turtles all over the world, so it connects everybody.

Any discussion of Indigenous Knowledge systems is always a polite acknowledgment of connection to the land rather than true engagement. It is always about the what, never about the how. We don’t use indigenous pattern-thinking, instead we show a dot painting and include indigenous employment in our plans.

English inevitably places settler worldviews at the Centre of every concept.

One man tried going in straight line many thousands of years ago and was called “crazy” and punished by being thrown up into the sky. This tells us we must travel in free ranging patterns. They are signs of marsupials (<) and birds (>) as different totemic categories of meat, based on the direction their legs bend at the knee (a dreaming image of Emu and Kangaroo, also the Australia’s coat of arms). Together (<>) they represent the 2 placental mammals native of this continent, human and dingoes. A symbol also of a point of impact, a creation event associated to Orion constellation, a big bang caused by Echidna fighting with Turtle. The trauma of this event caused earth and sky to separate and the universe to begin cycles of expansion and contraction, a breathing. Point of impact in creation stories is often represented by a stone and Uluru is the stone at the center of the continent stories. There is no difference between you, a stone, a tree or a traffic light, all contain knowledge, stories, and patterns. To discern patterns, we need to begin examining rocks.

Emu (>) is a trouble maker who brings into being the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you, you are less than you. This is the source of all human misery. Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem. All law-breaking comes from that first evil thought, that original sin of placing yourself above the land and other people. In our traditional systems of Law we remember that everyone is an idiot from time to time. Punishment is hard and swift, but afterward there is no criminal record, no grudge against the transgressor.

Sparring in a traditional style with knives: the rules of engagement are that you can only cut your opponent on the arms, shoulder or back. And at the end of the fight the winner must get cut up the same as the loser, so that nobody can walk away with a grudge.

Stones are objects that parallel all life, more than tree or mortal things because stones are almost immortal. The know things learned over deep time. Greek mistake of identifying ’dead matter’ as opposed to living matter, limiting western thought when attempting to define consciousness or self -organizing systems such as galaxies.  They view space as lifeless, we see those dark areas as Living country, based on observed effect of attraction.

There is always value in marginal viewpoints.

Uluru, tourist started mailing the rocks back with panicked reports of weird happenings, disturbed sleep, bad luck etc. In our law, we know rocks are sentient and contain spirit. A lot of rock are benevolent and enjoy being used and traded, but you have to follow the guidance of old people to know which ones you can use.  

In her kinship system every three generation there is a reset in which your grandparents’ parents are classified as you children, an eternal cycle of renewal. Kinship moves in cycle, 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.

In a lifeworld where your great grandchildren become your parents, you have a vested interest in making sure you’re co-creating a stable system for them to operate in and also ensuring a bit of intergenerational equity.

The arrow of time is a real observable phenomenon in closed system. It is a true law. It’s just the wrong law to apply to beings living in open interconnected systems. It is a bit like touting the theory that an economy is thriving when the stock markets are doing well; stock prices are spiking but we’re still hungry.

Civilizations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves. The city places itself at the center 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.

The most remarkable thing about western civilization is its ability to absorb any object or idea, alter it, sanitize it, rebrand it and market it.

The aboriginal flag represents more than just black for the people, red for the land and yellow for the Dreaming. It shows how the relationship between people and land is balanced by the Laws, values of the Dreaming at the center of two equal halves.

When it comes to global environmental catastrophe, the apocalypse is real. On the upside, apocalypses have proven to be survivable in the past, although on the downside, it means that your culture and society will never be the same again. All this has happened over and over again and will continue to happen as the universe breathes in and out.

The Baakindji people faced extinction when the experimented with nation-building long ago. People assimilated into one uniform language and culture, forgetting their previous diversity. A massive meteor crashed nearby killing most people, scorching goannas with different marks to make diverse varieties as a reminder to the survivor …to maintain diverse language, cultures and systems.

Nyoongars people in Perth tell the stories of a group of three totemic entities that work together in miraculous way. Certain butterflies lay their eggs on a particular bush above the nest of particular ants. The ants collect the eggs and take them down into the nest. When the larvae hatch, the ants take them up to eat the leaves of the bush above. When they grow too big, ants bring the leaves down to them. The larvae grow a jelly on sides that is food for the queen ant. There is no way to reverse engineer the process by which the system came to be. This is precisely the kind of process we need to understand to create sustainable responses to the catastrophes we are facing.

What seems like chaos has patterns and shapes that you can only discern with a holistic view.  Similarly effective AI system is not created simply through programming – it is more efficient to let it loose on a complex system of data. These kind of digital innovations are built on complex, self-organizing systems rather than the illusion of centralized control. Astounding patterns of creation can emerge through free movement of all agents and elements within a system. Healthy interventions can only be made by free agents within a complex system – agents referred to in chaos theory as ‘strange attractor’.

While senior people ensure the processes and stages of coming to higher levels of knowledge are maintained with safety and cohesion, there is no centralized control in Aboriginal society.

Why are we here? It is the role of human as custodial species.

Creation is not an event in the distant past but something that is continually unfolding and need custodians to keep co-creating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphors in cultural practice.

Neural processes occur throughout the body and beyond in the world around – known as distributed cognition in western science (a tool becomes an embodied extension of our neural process – a student using a calculator). If you use a familiar object to help encode new knowledge, then when you pick up that object you instantly remember what you learn.  This is why a lot of objects have special significance in aboriginal societies – knowledge is encoded in them. This is how traditional message sticks work. Kinship systems are central too; if you learn something with somebody you will recall it in vivid detail when you are with them.

Metaphor are used to make connections, transferring knowledge from one domain to another. It is about making connection between things that otherwise will remain unconnected, using metaphors that are non-literal and often seemingly irrational.

Skull models representing human evolution. The skulls are colored in a sequence from most primitive to most advanced. From black, to brown, to beige to white, the pinnacle of progress!

Wooden clubs or Law sticks. They communicate custodial claims to places and stories. They can be stuck into the ground to show a claim to a place. The stories of a person may be painted on the business end of the club. Smaller ones can be message sticks to carry stories to different groups. But if you dug them up in the ancient dirt of a cave, it would be hard to imagine any utility for them beyond bludgeoning.

When it was found that Neanderthal women carried much the same suite of bone injuries as men, there was a brief silence before the ‘men were hunters and women gatherers’ narrative continued unchallenged.

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships – deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition.

In our world nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in a relation to other thing. Those things that are connected are less important than the connection between them. We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together.

Interestingly, Aboriginal communities have been found to retain their customary pattern of cognition whether living in remote areas or in urban environments. Limited inclusion in the economic system to date might account for this. Thank you, racism!

Two boomerangs, they both come from the same branch that was split down the middle to make twinned objects connected by the life force of that tree no matter how far apart they are.

It is never productive to criticize the thinking of people dealing with stresses of surviving on the margins of society. First Peoples in Australia experience considerable disruptions and threats to our cultures and ways of life daily, resulting in a lot of dysfunctional reasoning that is not rigorous by any standard.

In our culture we avoid the unsustainable practice of concentrating violence into the hands of one privileged group. Men, women and children have access to weapons (sticks for killing or fighting). The traditional Aboriginal relationship with violence is very different.  While most daily life culture and ceremonies are shared experiences, many things are kept separate (fiber craft for women, woodwork for men; gendered ceremonies that the opposite sex is not even allowed to see, on pain of death. It is because male energy is different from female energy. Men energy is ‘sour’ and can make a women belly-sick. In many place, a man is required to prepare food while twisted sideways if a women is going to eat it, to not make here sick.

Our kinship systems are based on pairs – uncle-nephew, grandmother-granddaughter, and so on. Knowledge is kept and passed along within these pairs.

Abusive practices in Aboriginal society were reported by early settlers. But most first contact encounters were with fragmented societies whose governance structures had been severely disrupted.

Indigenous women are 5 times more likely to victim of homicide and 35 times more likely to be hospitalized due to family violence. But over 50% of Aboriginal women today have non Aboriginal partners. Domestic violence stats are high because we are forced to live within a system that perpetuates violence.  Uncontrolled private violence is a recent development in our communities and the reason for the high stats. Violent actions carried out in secret are prohibited; behind closed doors it can turn nasty. Our governance systems are distributed and policed collectively. If there is a dispute, everybody is involved and violence often ritualized and witnessed by all. In public fight the crowd gather for entertainment but also to adjudicate.  

Recent military intervention in the NT – Rape is everybody’s business! There seem to be a push to simplify Aboriginal culture, free from the troubling elements of Men’s Law. There was a consensus in Parliament to send the military into Aboriginal communities to protect children by putting in place 99 year land leases for resource extraction.

Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug; violence is part of the pattern. The damage of violence is minimized when it is distributed throughout a system rather than centralized into the hand of a few powerful people.

They are people today fighting to transform our Law into a hybrid entity that may be recognized by Australian law, and there are the old fellas who keep the original Law for us, holding it against the day of resurgence that will come.