Tyson Yunkaporta is an Australian academic, author, and indigenous thinker. He is best known for his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world.
Yunkaporta is a research fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, where he was formerly a senior lecturer, teaching Indigenous Knowledge Systems. He has also worked as a researcher, educator, and woodcarver.
Sand Talk: A New Model for Everyday Life
In 2019, Yunkaporta published Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, a book that gained international recognition for its innovative approach to understanding Indigenous knowledge systems. The book uses storytelling, diagrams, and personal anecdotes to explore complex concepts such as sustainability, relationality, and systems thinking. Rich in ideas and inspiration, it explains how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember.
Sand Talk has been praised for its accessible and thought-provoking style, offering readers a way to engage with Indigenous perspectives on global issues. Yunkaporta calls for fewer token gestures such as land acknowledgements and more meaningful inclusion. The book has been described as a unique contribution to the fields of philosophy, ecology, and education.
Honoring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images.
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In Sand Talk, he provides a new model for our everyday lives. It’s about talking to everyone and listening carefully.
Sand Talk unpacks for us something originally genius about Indigenous thought, which has for too long been dismissed as archaic folk knowledge from old oral cultures of interest only to academics and fetishists. This book shows how vital and alive and essential Indigenous ways of being and thinking are. Yunkaporta is so smart, funny, and accessible.
How Do Indigenous Knowledge Systems Show Surprising Resilience? - We Are Liberal
Right Story, Wrong Story: Navigating a World in Crisis
In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers.
Yunkaporta expands his explorations on how Westerners perceive the world. Welcome back.
Yunkaporta is so smart, funny, and accessible. Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.
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Yunkaporta, Tyson (30 July 2024). Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking, book by Tyson Yunkaporta. Text Publishing Company. Yunkaporta, Tyson (2025). Right story, wrong story: how to have fearless conversations in hell (First HarperOne hardcover ed.). New York: HarperOne.
Time, Place, and Relationship
One of the big themes is, how do we bring ourselves and the world back into right relation before it’s too late? Well, not before it’s too late, after it’s too late.
It’s too late to return to any kind of homeostasis with the systems that we have now, which are on their last legs. It’s too late to reset or stabilize the global systems. And I’m talking climate, the biosphere, everything that people regard as natural. And that’s another thing we don’t have [in Aboriginal culture] is this distinction between natural and unnatural. So nature for us is just everything that is. So that includes economic systems, supply chains-all these things are nature as well.
You talk about time and place and you talk about these different systems of Indigenous knowledge, which can be of use in, I guess, bridging between now and the future. And this relationship to place and time seems to be a central one of those.
Some of us are grappling with this. We’ve started changing the language, you know, and have this sort of different code that tries to make English do what our language does, but more, because there’s a kind of self-consciousness within it.
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So the new English terms-we sort of hyphenate words and jam ‘em together, like “place-time.” We talk about, you know, I’m in this place-time, or in that place-time, and we’re talking about a seasonal moment, but in a particular regional location, et cetera. You know, we cobble these together.
And even the idea of pronouns-because there’re pronouns in our languages that don’t exist in English, so there’s not just us, but there’s us-two, us-only, us-all, et cetera, like that. We put these together, but they’re kind of self-conscious in the way they’re put together; in the fact that they were needed to be put together in this way, you see that they’re trying to describe something that is not understood by the decoder of the word. It’s kind of in it-you can see that self-consciousness.
We messed this up, because we didn’t think about things relationally when we booked this interview. We booked according to time; and time is bullshit, because time doesn’t account for all your relations with human and nonhuman. It doesn’t account for your relationship with seasons.
And it’s not time-space, like Einstein-it’s time-place because place has meaning, you know, place is specific. Place is specific seasonally and regionally and in a million ways; it has story, and it has meaning-all the special places there. It has your maps of meaning on it, your travel roots and what they mean to you and how you store your knowledge in that. Every human being’s got that. Even the worst people in the world still have a remnant of that, you know?
As beings we are in processes, in a landscape that is a process as well, and that there are these cycles of time that are part of these processes, that there are lots of circles running at once. Everything is going.
Technology and Deep Time
One of the things you talk about a lot in the book is technology and how that relates to deep time and many other things. And you spoke about how technology consistently butts up against deep time, whereas traditional ecological knowledge doesn’t, in part because design and innovation often doesn’t emerge from that place of right relationship or right story, which you’re talking about.
So at the same time as there’s this desire to maintain system stability indefinitely, there’s also this insane need to make things better. But in this industrial civilization, that idea is through tech, T-E-C-H, that improvements can be made rapidly, and that it needs to be constantly updated, and constantly improving, because the innovations that you create break down really fast and so they need to be replaced. It’s the same as the economic system: you need constant growth in order for it to even function, otherwise things fall into recessions and depressions and all the rest.
You don’t have that relational accountability of TEK. TEK demands that any new innovations have to be accompanied by an appropriate and effective social or psychological technology that comes with the physical technology, that can ensure that that new tech can never be weaponized and scaled to destroy the entire society and that environment or bioregion or whatever.
Sometimes it’s an affordance that’s built into the tech itself to limit it, which is a really weird thing about Indigenous technology. Like in our culture, we have these massive swords that are made out of sawfish blades. They’re huge and bristling with these teeth sticking out of this massive sword. You could cut a man in half with that, but there’s a tiny little three-inch handle on it, and that’s the affordance that’s built in that can allow you to have a spectacular battle, but you probably couldn’t kill more than one person with it, you know what I mean, so it’s not a massive sort of massacre ever. That’s how we stop imperialisms from happening-it’s all built in affordances into our tech.
So you are not hastening the big phase shifts or deaths of a system, you know? You’re not doing that, because you’re a custodian.
Deep Time Diligence
You talk about the need for deep time diligence in your book, and the question of whether we can innovate from a place that is in relationship to deep time, and what possibilities such innovations would open up-and this seems especially needed as the climate is shifting and everything’s changing.
Deep time diligence is sort of looking at all the systems and the trajectories of these things and doing catastrophic risk analysis, doing all these kinds of things, doing these things collectively.
So as a group, everybody’s out there observing what’s happening in nature and what’s happening in your economic systems and communities, and we keep coming together and everybody’s bringing a different data set, and some of these overlap, some of them are contradictory. But in the aggregate, we get a sense, together, with that one big brain-the computational power of a group of people together, you know, big community together doing all this work-that, that works.
You make sure that you’re moving where it’s going to be, where the authority is going to be, where the livability is going to be, and how it’s going to be. You’re constantly shifting towards that while you’re testing the water, testing the water, testing the water, the whole time, just ahead of you. Like when you’ve got a stick in a stream, and you’ve got that stick ahead of you, and you’re testing the depth-kinda like that.
Psychotechnology and Intergenerational Relationships
Going back to psychotechnology, which is something you talk about-I really loved how you described the way that we have to store data safely in the long term, and how that’s through relationships. And in some ways it’s really simple and essential when you hear that, but it also seems completely revolutionary in our current tech era and how we conceive of data and its role in the future.
You wrote that “the key to keeping track of stable innovation processes across multiple generations is story.” You said-I love this quote-“that it can be more creative than a Cambrian explosion, or more destructive than a nuclear explosion.
We’ve got a couple of different things in place to back up this yarn that we’re having, you know, the digital data that’s created from this yarn. We’ve got a couple of different things in place to back it up. But it’ll be gone. I’d say that like in a few decades this won’t exist anymore. Data is constantly deteriorating.
Data is vulnerable. Data just disappears. All your photos in Photobucket-how long are they gonna be there for? Is someone just gonna maintain that server forever, and maintain the costs for that, and keep losing money? Nah. So the only way to store data long term, like proper long term, is in intergenerational relationships, where data is stored in narratives, intergenerational narratives. That can last for forty, fifty, sixty thousand years. That can last as long as relations are continued-that data will last. It’s the only safe way to store data in the long term.
It’s true though, eh?
Because collectively, if you imagine it, you’ve got all these little story particles banging together in this big collider, so they’re testing each other on each other, but in this big complex kind of mess. And order emerges over time in there. Everybody’s sharing their different ignorances. Your ignorance is only from the fact that you have a valid data set, but it’s only from one standpoint. But you get all the multiple standpoints and you start to form a picture.
You’ve got all these different data points coming back in and it’s computed, like you’ve got dark data processing happening at this big collective level with the best computation mechanism ever-’cause the human brain’s pretty good, but you get like twenty, thirty, a hundred and fifty of those brains together, sharing stories, sharing data sets, and then all of these things just kind of moving and shaping together, something emerges: principles, lores, story, narrative binding all these together. That’s why myth works so well. That’s why myth is so evocative and so enduring; it’s because all these diverse ignorances come together and truth emerges from that, from all those...
Here is a table summarizing some key concepts from Tyson Yunkaporta's work:
| Concept | Description |
|---|---|
| Place-Time | A concept emphasizing the interconnectedness of location and temporal moment, highlighting regional and seasonal specificity. |
| Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) | Knowledge held by Indigenous cultures that emphasizes relational accountability and ensures innovations do not harm society or the environment. |
| Deep Time Diligence | A practice of collectively analyzing systems and trajectories to anticipate and adapt to future changes. |
| Intergenerational Relationships | The most reliable method of long-term data storage, where narratives are passed down through generations, ensuring the preservation of knowledge. |
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