Recommended by Richard Bartlett of Inspiral and Loomio, we bring news of an extraordinary book from Australia - Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World, by Deakin University’s Tyson Junkaporta - who is also a member of the Apalech Clan and a carver of traditional tools and weapons.

We have it, we’re reading it, and we’re fascinated by the way that Tyson is translating indigenous knowledge as a natural way of understanding the world as a nest of systems - economic, natural, cultural, even cosmic - which Westerners would do well to observe and respect. Particularly in their moment of meltdown and crisis. Tyson puts it well in the first answer to this blog interview:

[The book] is basically a reversal of the usual business of explaining Aboriginal culture to a global audience – instead, I'm examining global systems from an Aboriginal perspective.

The goal is to start out-of-the-box conversations with everyday people and see what falls out of diverse dialogues that might resolve some of the complex sustainability issues facing the world.

I try to impart a sense of the pattern of creation and how we might begin to live within that pattern again. To sustain my oral culture point of view I play around with language and the very nature of print - each chapter is based on real-life yarns and then carved into traditional objects, with the knowledge then partially translated into text for the book.

I also write in the dual first-person – an Aboriginal language pronoun that doesn't exist in English but which I translate as ‘us-two’, which serves to bring myself into relation with the reader, forming a kinship pair.

Here’s a few more interviews with Yunkaporta, first with Australia’s Booktopia magazine:

Sand Talk is an adventure into a world of thought experiments conducted by marginal people with unconventional points of view. There is gold to be found at the margins of any society, different ways of thinking that can produce innovative solutions to sustainability issues that we might otherwise miss.

The book outlines Indigenous ways of thinking and producing new knowledge through respectful dialogue based on reciprocity rather than competition. It imparts an impression of the pattern of creation and how we might follow that pattern in our lives and systems. It also expands the possibilities of what a book can be…

Sand Talk is described as a guide to how Indigenous thinking can save the world. What are the main differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinking?

The main difference is context. Indigenous thought is highly contextualised and situated in dynamic relationships with people and landscape, considering many variables at once. Non-Indigenous thinking is good at examining things intensively in isolation, but could be enhanced by Indigenous thinking when examining the complex problems the world is facing right now.

If Australia was to take on the principles you describe in Sand Talk, what do you think our society would look like?

Picture of Yunkaporta from interview in Disruptr

For a start there would be a lot less angry people yelling opinions into a void of cyberspace. People would have time to connect and think deeply, grounded in profound relation to the land and adapting to changing environments in cooperative communities.

Children would be embedded in community and work spaces rather than locked up during the daylight hours. There would be no struggle for work/life balance, because these things would not be separate domains.

Economies would be recession-proof and welfare would be unnecessary because families and communities would be structured to support every person as needed.

What do you hope readers will take away with them after reading Sand Talk?

I hope readers will see their sacred role as custodians of creation, and that each will find their unique way of contributing to the diversity and true sustainability of the complex systems they inhabit.

Most of all there is hope for the future to be found in this book, understandings of adaptive ways of thinking and living gleaned over tens of thousands of years of apocalyptic events like rising sea levels and meteor impacts, ways of seeing new beginnings rather than Armageddons and end-times.

How did you approach the writing of this book?

It is an unusual book, because it is a translation of knowledge created by groups of people in oral-culture situations, knowledge that was first carved into traditional objects and then partially transferred into print.

The book is offered as a dialogue between these Indigenous thinkers and the reader, a dialogue in which the knowledge, life and even the body of the reader is incorporated into the journey.

As a result, this book will be different for every person who reads it, and they will take away different ideas and actions. In this way, the knowledge will grow exponentially and create a ripple effect in the world. I don’t see this book as being my intellectual property – it is open-source cognitive technology to be used by anyone who wants to make a change in the world and in their lives.

What is the biggest challenge you faced while writing this book?

TOne big challenge was finding spaces in the city to carve the objects for each chapter without getting arrested. People get twitchy when they see a brown guy with a beard and an axe in civic spaces. I had some very narrow escapes while creating this book!

I guess the biggest challenge though was in questions of authenticity and relevance – people have strong expectations of what an Indigenous person should look like and represent. When you put yourself out there you tend to get challenged on your identity and right to speak at all, by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

I am a very marginal person in both my own community and the wider community, so sometimes people get annoyed about my out-of-the-box ideas taking up space in the public domain. I agree with them too – I worry about the possibility of my work taking focus away from people who are senior to me in my culture and who have to fight hard to get their voices heard.

I struggle with that a lot, but at the same time I need to put food on the table and this is my only marketable skill.

My hope is that my work will direct people’s attention to the work of Indigenous thinkers and activists who are a lot smarter and respected than me, and whose stories need to be heard. Otherwise I’m just out here making a big mess.

What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever received?

TY: The best advice I had was in a very harsh criticism that I found extremely useful. “Too much technique, not enough craft!” It stopped me from trying to show off my mastery of literary devices and allowed me to let my voice come through.

Next interview is with the New York Times:

Why write this book?

The book represents 20 years of yarns, conversations, and then two years of carving those conversations and knowledge on traditional objects. The writing part — that’s the easy part. But the knowledge is hard and takes a long time, because of the complexity.

I constantly have to explain the Indigenous point of view. But what if it was the other way? What if it was turning the Indigenous point of view on the world and describing what we see?

With Indigenous knowledge, it’s always a dialogue. The knowledge changes depending on the relationship of the people who are sharing it. Fifty per cent of what’s in the book is the reader’s knowledge because it’s what they’re bringing and what they’re thinking.

There’s no quantum computer that could do the same thing that 10 people sitting around the same sandy circle drawing with sticks could do.

What are the most important messages you want to send about how Indigenous thinking works in the Western world?

You don’t need to learn about Indigenous knowledge to be in touch with this. You just have to remember your own. In the systems that we’re living in, there’s a very big collective memory loss. People don’t really remember who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing.

A lot of people when I talk about Western this and that — people assert this idea that they don’t have a culture. No, other people have cultures. Everything outside of the West is a culture. But the West itself is neutral.

People say the West isn’t a culture to you?

People really assert it. It’s funny. You’re somebody who’s living in the system and you don’t have a lot of choices in that system. And we need to be looking up rather than sideways and going: Victim — victim — oppressor — evil person — hero, classifying ourselves. What do we need to be able to do to free ourselves from this?

What lessons can we learn from Indigenous custodians of the land?

Take Indigenous astronomy: Did you know that Aboriginal people knew that meteorites form craters before Europeans did? It’s only a few decades ago that they discovered that in modern science. But we’ve got Dreaming stories about that. People record these things and then they write it as a paper. It’s just “Wow. Aboriginal people knew about this. So Aboriginal culture is a lot smarter than we thought.”

And that’s it. O.K., what are we going to do? Astrophysicists need to be sitting down with those old fellas and going into detail in those stories. Tell us the properties of that asteroid. Their knowledge is respected and even put up on a pedestal a little bit. So it’s not that — it’s this uncertainty of how to proceed

In the book’s introduction, you say you don’t want to talk too much about your own story.

You have to tell your whole life story, not just yours but the traumatic story of all your recent ancestors. It’s like re-traumatizing yourself over and over and I just find it really interesting that’s the main Indigenous genre people want to see and it is just the same story over and over again. And it’s like, that’s all that people want to hear.

There’s a scholar called Martin Nakata who’s said, we need to resist the self narrative. He calls it “the ubiquitous Indigenous self narrative.” It’s killing our thought. It’s killing our scholarship.

I used to love it. You can wallow in that forever. I found it depressed me in the end, but it’s also easy. And everybody loves it.You’re always performing Indigeneity. I try and sabotage myself all the time in that. I’ll just destroy it.

You know I’m not building a brand. I’m trying to build a collective base of knowledge and relationships and conversations that might help try to stop the world from dying in the next few decades.

So what keeps you motivated?

It was just the culture and curiosity and just a passion for knowledge and learning. And just relationships mostly, really strong relationships with knowledgeable people. That’s what’s motivated me up to this point. At the moment my motivation is just trying to get enough money together to be able to survive this period. Survival is an issue.

Some audio and video interviews here: Jim Rutt Show, and embedded below:

A startling new book from Australia—“Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World”—gives lessons in complexity