#070 Sand Talk
Indigenous thinking, saving the world & living creation, with Tyson Yunkaporta
Tyson Yunkaporta is the author of award-winning book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, and a Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He’s also a poet and artist carving traditional tools and weapons, processes that were central to writing the book.
Tyson Yunkaporta from Australian publisher Text’s promotional video for the book (see below for more pics). Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PZMGYPqs0Q
“But it was those two. It was their dignity and agency, and just unfathomable intelligence. I mean their eyes were burning with it, they just glowed. It was man and woman, side by side, equally muscled. And they were side by side, walking towards the camera, like, ‘what?’.”
Tyson belongs to the Apalech Clan from Western Cape York in far north Queensland, with community/cultural ties all over Australia. Fellow Indigenous writer, last year’s Miles Franklin Award winner Melissa Lucashenko, called Sand Talk ‘An extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming’. Tommy Orange, best-selling author of ‘There There’, said ‘This book shows how vital and alive and essential Indigenous ways of being and thinking are.’
Tyson’s Australian publisher Text describes the book as looking at global systems from an Indigenous perspective, asking how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, and how we can do things differently. A few months ago, Sand Talk was published internationally by Harper Collins, with this statement: 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.
Well, it’ll be wonderfully new to many, and of course profoundly old to others. Either way, it’s rich and essential terrain to be travelling together. Especially with the spirit of generosity and trust that Tyson embodies here. I’m still feeling deeply moved by this one. And frankly, changed again.
This conversation was recorded Thursday 13 August.
Tyson with his young daughter and Oldman Juma, at the launch of Sand Talk in Darwin (pic supplied).
L-R above: the cover of the Australian release of Sand Talk; Tyson with carving. Click on the photos for full view.
Get more:
You can hear more of my conversation with Tyson in the extra to this episode, This Galactic Executive Function.
Original Australian version of ‘Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World’, published by Text.
International version of the book, published by Harper Collins.
Music:
Stones & Bones, by Owls of the Swamp.