[Full Length] The Indigenous View: with 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.”

- Tyson Yunkaporta

SYNOPSIS:

A delightful yarn with Tyson Yunkporta, Aboriginal scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and author of Sand Talk. Tyson is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland, Australia. On this episode we discuss:

• How their systems lab aggregates data and knowledge through indigenous sense-making protocols;

• “Avatar Depression” syndrome and how the West may begin to remember its own aboriginal knowledge;

• How giving names to nature can either kill, or create kinship;

• The role of ceremony in maintaining energy flows.. And why ceremony isn’t always such an enjoyable matter!

• Why baramundi is not the correct name for a saltwater fish, and why biomimicry doesn’t work quite as well as we may think;

• How land seen as capital becomes a dying land;

• And finally, what happens when the dress rehearsal for an epic ceremony actually becomes the real thing!

LISTEN:

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST

GUEST BIO:

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, author, educator, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises. He carves traditional tools and weapons and is founder of the Deakin University Indigenous Knowledges Systems Lab in Melbourne. He is the author of Sand Talk, a paradigm-shifting book 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.

QUOTES:

• 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.

SHOW NOTES

• Deakin University Indigenous Knowledges Systems Lab

• Sand Talk book

• Indigenous AI Lab

• The Other Others podcast

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE