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This April, as the weather cooled and the days grew shorter, the Watarrka Foundation settled in with the critically acclaimed book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta, published in 2019 by Text Publishing in Melbourne. 

There are a wealth of First Nations’ writers who are publishing books that span fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and everything in between. Reading the work of these authors and engaging with their ideas is one of the ways that we can listen to and support First Nations’ voices and communities. 

Yunkaporta is a member of the Apalech Clan from Aurukun land, Far North Queensland. He is a researcher, arts critic, poet, traditional wood carver, senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges and the founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University.

In Sand Talk, Yunkaporta looks at the underlying patterns, value systems and thought structures which Indigenous Knowledge operates on and invites us to reconsider how we think about and approach global problems.

I’m not reporting on Indigenous Knowledge systems for a global audience’s perspective. I’m examining global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective. — Tyson Yunkaporta

Reading Sand Talk feels a bit like you’re having a chat with an old friend. Yunkaporta’s language is approachable and good-humoured, and he strikes an easeful balance between joyful ‘yarns’ and hard-hitting truths about the failures of our contemporary world.

Yunkaporta is interested in the power of narrative and metaphor as tools which promote deep learning. Through storytelling, he spotlights a span of issues from an Indigenous perspective — from health care to food to education — and goes beyond the surface of the climate crisis to consider the degraded relationship many of us have to land, inviting us to look deeper and to learn from the reciprocal systems and cycles of the natural world.

Sand Talk is one of those books that is quietly transformative. Its title makes a bold statement: “How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World”, but Yunkaporta’s ideas are practical and can be applied to our day to day lives at an individual and local scale. It is both a deeply thought-provoking and playful book, and we at the Watarrka Foundation think that Sand Talk is well worth a read if you’re interested in learning more about Indigenous Knowledge systems and the power of storytelling.

Buy Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World at your local independent book shop or click here to go to Text Publishing’s website: 

https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/sand-talk

To listen to Tyson Yunkaporta’s podcast The Other Others: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tyson-yunkaporta

To learn more about Yunkaporta’s Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3Bhm99xCM

To support the Foundation and our projects within the Northern Territory, make a donation at www.givenow.com.au/watarrkafoundation