Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

 "Sand Talk How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World" By Tyson Yunkaporta

What happens when global systems are viewed from an Indigenous perspective? How does it affect the way we see history, money, power and learning? Could it change the world?

This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger's cat.

Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

Sand Talk provides a template for living. It's about 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 everybody and listening carefully. It's about finding different ways to look at things.

Most of all it's about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.  

• ISBN: 9781922790514
• ISBN-10: 1922790516
• Published: 29th August 2023
• INTERVIEW 

• Sometimes it is hard to write in English when you’ve been talking to your great-grandmother on the phone but she is also your niece, and in her language there are no separate words for time and space.  In her kinship system every three generations there is a reset in which your grandparents’ parents are classified as your children, an eternal cycle of renewal.  In her traditional language she asks you something that
  translates directly into English as ‘what place’ but actually means  ‘what time’, and you reluctantly shift yourself into that paradigm, because you know it will be hard as hell to shift back out of it again when you go back to work. Kinship moves in cycles, the 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.  We
  experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat schedules and story-less surfaces.  In our spheres of existence, time does not go in a straight line, and it is as tangible as the ground we stand on. -  Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

  Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World is a 2019 book by Tyson Yunkaporta that sets out to look at the world, especially sustainability, through Aboriginal perspectives.^[1] Yunkaporta calls for fewer token gestures such as land acknowledgements and more meaningful inclusion.^[2] The book engages with other Indigenous people to draw from their lived knowledge, which creates paradoxes for the reader.^[3]