Tyson Yunkaporta

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability--and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta's writing process begins with images. Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He yarns with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It's about how we learn and how we remember. It's about talking to everyone and listening carefully. It's about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it's about a very special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Sand Talk include 22 black-and-white illustrations that add depth to the text.

How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

Sand Talk

Beatrix

All humans evolved within complex, land-based cultures over deep time to developa brain with the capacity for over 100 trillion neural connections, of which we now only use a tiny fraction. Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from the land, but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it.

I know who I am, where I belong and what I call myself, and it is enough.

..A swimming pool was built in the initiation ground back home, so those rites of passage don’t happen anymore.

One of the exciting things about the English language is that it is a trade creole, so it changes shape wherever it goes. I will be honouring this quality by taking her for a spin to see how she goes around some tight bends.

I write to provoke thought rather than represent fact, in a kind of dialogical and reflective process with the reader. For this I often use the dual first person. It is a common pronoun in Indigenous languages but not present in English; that's why I translate it as 'us-two', 

my fingers typing those letters while my mouth is saying 

This isn't an archaeological site, to be excavated and observed. It is still inhabited. The boy is still here and he probably doesn't want uninvited visitors. It's no monument. The place is alive. Every rock is animate and sentient

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. 

Every breath ever taken is still in the air to breathe. I breathe the breaths of the Ancestors, and everybody else's too. Always was, always is, always will be. And there are flowers here and they make me smile.

Look beyond the things and focus on the connections between them. Then look beyond the connections and see the patterns they make.

..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.

Sand Talk quotes

Join the club