Sifting Grains, Shifting Perspectives
Yunkaporta begins his book with sly humour, telling a story of the echidna, which has a bigger frontal cortex, relative to its size, than human beings – but hasn’t used it as domesticated humans have, to destroy its habitat.
The author argues that the Western way of thinking that has led us into such environmental, social and political troubles is our demand that an artificial simplicity and order be imposed upon the complexity of creation. This is vastly different from Indigenous perspectives, that see larger, longer, interwoven patterns that make up the system of creation. As he noted in a Booktopia interview, “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.”
In his introductory chapter, Yunkaporta acknowledges that one of the problems with understanding Indigenous patterns of thinking, being and doing is that they are usually invisible to outsiders, who may see only exotic-seeming performances and artefacts. As he says, ruefully:
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.
Instead, Yungaporta turns the tables on this approach. “I’m not reporting on Indigenous Knowledge systems for a global audience’s perspective,” he writes. “I’m examining global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective.” Each chapter of the book is built on a series of yarns he has had with various people who offer him diverse angles and understandings. Many of these challenge him to think in a radically different way. “For each chapter, I carved the logic sequences and ideas arising from these yarns into traditional objects before I translated them into print.” Each of the chapters also includes some “sand talk“, which uses the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge.
This is what makes the book so interesting and provocative. Western readers rarely see global sustainability issues addressed using Indigenous perspectives and thought processes. As he notes, “I want to use an Indigenous pattern-thinking process to critique contemporary systems, and to impart an impression of the pattern of creation itself.” For example, after discussing entry-level knowledge about Aboriginal cosmology, he then looks for patterns and their implications for sustainability.
The discussion is a kind of ramble rather than a straight-line, logical lock-step argument. This is a demonstration of a new way of thinking that some readers may find perplexing – until they get into the swing of this new journey towards understanding, where writer and reader are engaged in a dialogue.
As the author said in a blog interview,
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.
See more of this interview at https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2020/7/19/sand-talk.
Written by Wendy Morgan