[Full Length] The Indigenous View: with 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!
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The Indigenous View
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