5. The Indigenous View: Protocols, Ceremony and Totem Poles — with Tyson Yunkaporta & Joe Martin (Tutakwisnapšiƛ)
SYNOPSIS:
Today we’re joined by two master indigenous scholars and artists, who will be laying down clues from their ancestral cultures on how to interpret and read the laws of the land. Our first conversation is what he likes to call a yarn, with Tyson Yunkporta, Aboriginal scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland, Australia. Tyson is the author of the book Sand Talk which was wildly successful, and I reckon part of its popularity is the way that Tyson is able to pack in such punchy wisdom along with his sharp-witted, trickster humor. We discuss how their lab collects data and knowledge through a very special indigenous sense-making protocol, and then applies it to issues like economic reform, broken landscapes, cyber safety and neuroscience. We delve into the importance of engaging with place, why a real ceremony is not all fun and games, and how the west can quit longing and start acting in rediscovering its own indigeneity.
We’ll then visit wisdom holder and elder Joe Martin, who will be speaking to us from British Columbia. Joe is a member of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation and is a master canoe and totem pole carver, with over seventy canoes having been whittled and chiseled away by his hands. Just earlier this July, he and his community raised a new totem pole in ceremony at the ancient village of Opitsaht which depicts his family’s teachings of natural law. I’ve uploaded videos of the totem poles in the show notes, where you can see how each pole carries millennia old myths, stories and teachings about the human relationship with forces like the bear, wolf, raven, sun, moon and stars.
I hope that both of these conversations will entice you to uncover and excavate your own family lineage, all the brimming folk tales and myths and lifeworlds held by your people and the land where your blood and cosmologies sprouted from.
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The Indigenous Perspective
QUOTES:
Tyson Yunkaporta
People need to return to the land. That doesn't mean you need go to booga-wooga and take off all your clothes and walk into the prairie, and smear mud all over your face, but we do need to re-imbed ourselves in landscape and place.
Take baby steps and go slow, because we’re all profoundly damaged, and you don’t want to go too fast.
The idea of species being a fixed thing is a hangover from pre-enlightenment times.
If land is capital then there can be no lasting value.
The surveying and cutting of the land, the terra-forming, prevents the flow of system. The land can’t move, and the land can’t breathe.
Ceremony doesn’t just drop out of a tarot deck.
People want the ecstatic moment, and yet ceremony is seldom that. It’s where you give back a part of yourself, to what’s been extracted and what needs to be renewed.
Joe Martin
The most important teachings that we can learn from these creatures, is that they take only what they need from nature, and never more.
Trees are only harvested in fall or wintertime because there may be a bird nesting up there somewhere. You cannot see it. It may be up there. And so we're careful not to disrupt those creatures.
Indigenous peoples always stay home, and so we're the ones left to suffer the consequences of over-harvesting and the destruction of resources.