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Sand Talk Book Review by Sydney A (and introduction)

Updated: Sep 12, 2023

I am lucky enough to have a wonderful new student in my lab this year. Sydney A (we have two Sydneys now!) comes to NAU from South Carolina. Her undergraduate studies focused on sustainability and her interests align closely with the work we are doing in the lab. As you can see below, her writing is outstanding and she has great potential as a budding scholar. We read Sand Talk, by Tyson Yunkaporta, for lab earlier this month and Sydney volunteered to write a review for this blog. She is off to a great start. Enjoy the review and welcome Sydney!


Sydney Andersen’s Review of Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta


Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, by Tyson Yunkaporta, is a refreshing perspective on how western academics, policymakers, and thinkers can engage with indigenous Aboriginal thinking. Rather than supporting the spread of token attempts at integrating indigenous thought, such as land acknowledgements, Yunkaporta calls for more inclusive cultural dialogue via an exploration of Aboriginal epistemology and meaning-making. Using methods beyond just the linear written word, he lays out a completely non-western, non-capitalist way of thinking, as well as some ideas as to how we as western people can truly engage with it.

Written, revised words alone cannot convey the full spectrum of Aboriginal thinking. As Yunkaporta puts it, a book is a slice of perspectives, frozen and unchanging, whereas indigenous systems of conversation and oral tradition can evolve and collect new aspects over time. In his process for Sand Talk, Yunkaporta “yarns” with people in his communities, and through that process he formulates the contents of each chapter. He reflects on his yarns, as well as anecdotes from his work, and these experiences mix with his ideas to become inscribed upon, and part of, a traditional object, perhaps a boomerang or a parrying shield, that he makes in order to preserve the perspective of his oral culture. He does not include photos of the items he has made, but rather describes them and includes a drawn image- a section of sand talk- to help the reader understand the general shape of a piece of indigenous knowledge. Even the act of reading the book and learning how it was made opens the reader’s mind to a way of thinking that is well outside of their own. The unfolding of the traditional book format into a multi-dimensional system of conversation, images, objects, and collective memories primes the western mind for grasping the basics of a radically different viewpoint.

To bring together the Aboriginal worldview and summarize it as one zoomed-out piece, Yunkaporta offers readers the image of their own hand. The pinkie finger is the child and represents kinship-mind, the concept that everything exists in relation to other things. No thing is isolated. The ring finger is the mother and represents story-mind, the concept that narrative is extremely important to knowledge production and transmission. Stories and yarns are powerful. The middle finger is the father and represents Dreaming-mind, the concept that the physical and non-physical worlds are connected through feedback loops completed by practical actions. These actions are performed through metaphors like language, ritual, and culture that are based on relationships. The pointer finger is the father’s nephew and represents ancestor-mind, the concept that deep learning and inherited knowledge are passed to a person when they enter a state of complete concentration through cultural activities. Now close your fist with the thumb on the outside. The thumb is pattern-mind, the concept that by seeing the whole system and acknowledging multiple levels of relationships, one can find solutions to complex problems. The mother and child, the father and the nephew, the mother and the father, the pattern and the family- each have complex levels of relationships and form a series of systems. A reader can always look at their hand and remember these concepts, thus remembering the overarching idea that introduced them to indigenous thinking.

This is the broad idea, but how does a fist of indigenous thoughts and relationships save the world? So often, works that focus on systems-thinking, or “sustainability,” or how-to’s on increasing inclusivity stop short of actual recommendations, or they propose “solutions” that fit snuggly within the current system that actively generates the problems they want to solve. However, Sand Talk is not like this. There’s the tidy (and apt) suggestion for truly engaging with indigenous communities- Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct, in that order- but I think the true value of the book is what Yunkaporta calls “looking back through the window.” Western readers are offered a view of their own culture through the lens of indigenous thinking, and what they see is a rigid set of ideals that exist to force productivity, compliance, and a constant state of confusion and upheaval despite the insistence that things are moving in a straight line with a positive slope. To look at your hand and touch child, mother, father, and nephew with your pattern mind is to see that something totally different is possible. No transition needed- a different way of thinking simply exists there, in inherited traditional knowledge and in collective conscience, and it is possible.




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