IKSL (Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab)
Resulting from the strong interest in Tyson Yunkaporta’s best-selling Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2019), the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab (IKSL) was established at Deakin University in 2021 as an activist, public-facing think-tank. Engaging with the world-wide movement of post-colonial thinkers, IKSL has sought to use Indigenous knowledges as a prompt and provocation for seeing, thinking and doing things differently—in contrast with the dominant western knowledge framework with which we are so familiar. In fact, we are so familiar with this normative lens that we do not even recognise that it is a particular way of thinking and seeing.
Yunkaporta is asking whether we can turn to the relationist ethos of First Nations knowledge systems as a new framing for social activism and economic thinking. But he warns, the hard truth is that ‘ancient wisdom is not your one-stop shop for salvation through regenerative design’.
When we examine the meta-crisis engulfing our world (an inability to progress actions to address climate change, continuing environmental degradation, algorithmic distortions to the information ecosystem, including data mining of human psychological vulnerabilities, the intensive militarisation of conflict and the rise of ethno-nationalism), many of us have concluded that the underlying cause of the crisis is epistemic. The way we think about and value things in our individualistic, hyper-consumerist society, along with the fundamental dualism that pitches human needs and wants over those of the non-human natural world. An extractivist logic that economists call productivity, driven by ‘private’ profit maximisation, whether that be by individuals, corporations, cities or the nation state in the name of global competitiveness.
This realisation lies behind the widespread interest in insights from Indigenous knowledge systems, which have operated with a very different logic—one much more highly attuned to a fundamental relationship with nature, not over it. This difference of approach is reflected in languages. For example, the Wiradjuri language can be described as free word order language responsive to relationship logic, which have a different foundational principle from that of English, a fixed word language, where everything is based on one framework or another of continuum (linear) logic. Indigenous languages reveal how the identity of all things (and people) is defined by their relationships with, or to, all ‘identities’ in the social, spiritual and physical environment (Stan Grant. and John Rudder, A Grammar of Wiradjuri Language, 2014). The English language is ‘thing’ oriented rather than ‘process’ oriented. The world is made up of ‘things’ as subjects or objects, connected by verbs in an intellectual framework of universalist abstractions, divorced from their particularities.
Yarning Through Thought Experiments
In this book, Right Story/Wrong Story (2023, Tyson Yunkaporta draws on the IKSL thought experiments to explore the traps we can fall into, as we seek this alternative framing to reshape our society and its economy around a relationist ethic. It is not an easy read as it adopts a meandering yarning logic filled with lots of self-deprecating asides, intellectual jokes and historic references. He warns his book is not an exercise in doing anthropology or auto-ethnography.
It’s about inquiring through the glitchy lens of Indigenous knowledge, not about it.
The biggest challenge for we children of the Western Enlightenment, who have enjoyed the fruits of empire and the individual freedoms and material prosperity of the post war years, is that the switch from extractivist to relationist logic requires a structurally radical rather than a reformist agenda.
Yunkaporta warns that for Indigenous thinkers like himself, the challenge is how to not just become culturally anti-colonial but remain fiscally colonial. It is tempting to be structurally compliant middle class professionals, who seek to engage with the normative extractivist system to carve out more sustainable economic opportunities for Indigenous people, such as proposed in the ANU Murra waaruu (On Track) Economic Development Seminar Series Report.
We meet many of his thought experiment yarning mates as we travel along in the canoe as us-two (reader and writer) into the ‘suite of pathologies that are burning the world’, because they violate the fundamental LAW of Indigenous logic—that the world is a fractal system of relational interconnectivity at multiple levels. They are all grappling with the dilemma of co-option, the same dilemma that Vanessa de Oliveira warns about—that in the search for a new cultural synthesis, what Margo Neale calls a Third Archive, relationist logic is merely a mask over the deep extractivist logic of capitalism—just ‘lipstick on the pig’.
Yunkaporta takes us-two on a canoe journey with his interlocutors through the perils of entrapments in this dilemma. Along the way we meet Nicholas Gruen, ‘the white Kant philosopher-progressive liberal economist’ exploring individualism versus collectivism; Pete McCurley and Rune Rasmussen, Douglas Rushkoff and Jim Rutt; Maya Ward, and Aunty Anne Poelina and Aunty Mary Graham – leading women thinkers in this space and who advise him to read Paulo Freire on theories of cultural synthesis.
We also meet Woriimi man, brother Deen Sanders in many of the conversations, who as Yunkaports says is either from the Black Illuminati or ‘to dance a regulatory feedback loop into my cyclone of cynical rage and try to keep me alive a little longer’. Deen warns him about this rage with the Tiddalik story, which says you don’t change a destructive system by attacking those who have too much ego, power and greed, but by bringing people together and having a good laugh.
We also meet John Davis, a Cobble Cobble/Wakka Wakka man and Chels Marshall a Gumbaynggirr marine biologist who describes the Indigenous knowledge gestalt using the metaphor of distributed digital networks, of information held and shared between individual nodes, then between clans and tribes syndicated across thousands of miles, aggregates of data and metadata held in living social systems and ancestral memory inscribed in the landscape like a permanent ledger through the songlines. Yunkaporta yarns with Bundjalung man, Jack Manning Bancroft and Gamilaroi man, Josh Waters about the intrinsic challenge of sharing knowledge with people following the wrong story. We meet Katherine Collins, Celtic woman of the US who writes about investing and sits on the Board of the Santa Fe Institute which focuses on complexity theory grappling with growth versus degrowth economic stories instead of a historic phase shift to non binaries. Other thinkers who enter into the yarning include artist Danie Mellor, Arlo Davis from Alaska, Arpad Maksay in the tech bros world and Kate Sylvester who like Arpad is a kendo master.
In the Mirror of Dante’s Inferno
Right Story/Wrong Story is a winding yarn that deliberately avoids an obvious architecture of logic, in keeping with Yunkaporta’s claim that this is the style of Indigenous sense-making. But midway in the book we discover there is a sort of architecture taken from Inferno in Dante’s 14th century narrative poem, The Divine Comedy, which takes Dante on a journey through the nine realms of hell that lead us away from the ‘right way’ guided by spiritual values, through succumbing to indolence, violence, fraud and malice. Yunkaporta tells us he sat on Dante’s Inferno, like an egg, for over three decades, which hatched for him in this book.
Right Story
Dante’s Right Way becomes ‘Right Story’, which Yunkaporta declares is based on the core idea of relational complexity. This story is not about objective truth but the metaphors and narratives (Lore) of interconnected communities, living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patterns of land and creation—the fundamental LAW of the fractal nature of the ecological interconnected systems that inscribe life on planet Earth.
In the Indigenous pattern of irreducible relational complexity, unlike in Dante’s vision of the journey to heaven (right story) where one must cross the river, the Indigenous perspective says we must join the flow of the river. We must live with ambiguity and uncertainty, with a lifeforce that is unfolding, that cannot be pinned down and definitively trapped in any universalised abstraction of perfect knowledge. Yunkaporta concludes that Indigenous pattern thinking is never about the what, but the how, about how meaning is revealed in the meandering paths between words, not in isolated words themselves, that the intent is to maintain balance in order to keep the human temptation for narcissism in check.
Wrong Story
Wrong Story is where our story (lore) has become disconnected from the fundamental LAW of interconnected creation, distorted and reframed to suit the various forms of narcissism that entrap us. Using an array of thought experiments anchored in tool-making and conversations, Yunkaporta invites us as the reader to join him as the writer on a canoe journey through the pathologies of our dysfunction arising from the perverse incentive structures and self-terminating algorithms in the current global capitalist system that are destroying the world.
For example, the Art of the Deal epitomises wrong story because there is always a winner and loser, and the winner is the one who tells the most lies and does most of the damage, while the losers are trapped in a self-defeating helplessness—the epigenetic story of internalised coloniality.
In today’s information society, these hells are the territory of the Dark Web, the home of outcaste desires. In the world of psychotherapy, they are the monsters of the dark that may live in our unconscious, epigenetic fault lines in culture and family. But they are also the world of public relations, political spin, and marketing built on the algorithmic logic of the triggers of human behaviour and desires captured in clickbait and amplified in endless feedback loops.
Dante suggests the nine hell realms are elaborations of the three major sins: lack of self-control/willpower, violence and fraud or malice. In the Buddhist tradition, which has shaped my own thinking, these three are considered to be the mind poisons of ignorance, desire and aggression, which in turn lead to the negative emotions (kleshas) which entrap us.
Yunkaporta places narcissism at the centre of the problem, which in Buddhist thinking is called self-grasping (dak dzin), which in common parlance is often reduced to egoism.
Enlightenment 2.0
Yunkaporta warns us that we need to beware the narratives of Enlightenment 2.0, which gobbles up minority narratives and ancient wisdoms like chocolate covered strawberries and macadamias, as it claims to address some of the externalities (dark side) of Enlightenment 1.0 arising out of empire and coloniality. But he warns that the twin projects afoot right now in Enlightenment 2.0 are rebooting the Enlightenment and rebooting capitalism, by rebranding Reason as inclusive and free markets as fair and distributed, while the world keeps burning. In this potpourri of ideas we find a mixed bag of neo-cons, libertarians, centrists, classical liberals, crypto-fascists and greenies – all seeking palaeolithic precedents to support their claim as being derived from ‘the natural order’ (p.35).
But, he warns, you are not going to find your way through this mess in drum circles and sweat lodges or any other weird co-opted bits and pieces of native culture that enable spiritual bypass—chanting and vision questing, tripping balls to avoid the hard feelings that come with being authentically grounded in your shitty context. We have to look past the sexy and inspiring stuff and step up to our fear and uncertainty before we panic and turn into a seething mosh pit of fast zombies (p.153).
Yunkaporta also warns us that we are running disinformation stories on a loop in our heads and on our screens every day – where disinformation wizards use it to hijack our cognition, divert the frustrations of oppression into support for the very systems and overlords who oppress us in the first place. He notes the mirage of ‘integral theory’ that operates right across the intellectual dark web, the meta-modernists movement, the booming coaching industry, along with every other corporate self-help program and sense-making community in the ecosystem of Enlightenment 2.0.
But rage leads us nowhere. Instead calm down, slow down and tune into mother Earth because each solution, each hack, each fix is killing us all. Rage is a force multiplier and often it’s where fear and narcissism take the wheel.
Yunkaporta asserts that Enlightenment 2.0 goes with Decolonisation 2.0, the exotic handmaiden of the great rebranding of insatiable capitalism and the Enlightenment. A new zeitgeist that is bespoke, individualised, factional and corporatised. Where we (Indigenous) are encouraged to lend our native eye to redecoration efforts everywhere as long as it’s in front of the curtain—nothing structural is allowed.
We can see this scenario playing out in the forthcoming Bhutan Innovation Forum, promoted as a global initiative dedicated to sustainable development and mindful entrepreneurship, uniting international leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs to support Bhutan’s vision of a Mindfulness City.
Whither with Industry 4.0
As organisations like IKSL grapple with how to translate Indigenous relational thinking into new ways of being, thinking and doing, and the world continues to slide further and further into its meta crisis of climate change, population displacement and violence, we are already moving into the so-called fourth industrial revolution. From artificial intelligence and robotics to big data and the Internet of Things, technological advancements are reshaping industries and creating entirely new opportunities, along with major employment disruptions and losses.
As Richard Hames in his Hames Report suggests: Once upon a time work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, and self-reliance – in a word, character. It was also the source of your income. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. But if you worked hard, you could pay your way and make something of yourself. In this regard, a market in labour both produced character and distributed income. It developed an individual’s moral capacities and allocated economic resources, imperfectly but transparently. The work in which you engaged created most of what you called your self or, nowadays, your identity. But when the children of socialist confucianism – rebranded as capitalism with Chinese characteristics are now ‘lying flat’ and refusing the vision of relentless hard work for dubious lifestyle gain, given rising unemployment, we know something is afoot.
Most of Australia’s Indigenous people didn’t get the benefit of the so-called Protestant work ethic, as they were consigned to marginalisation and poverty through racist exclusion from participation in the workforce to become welfare cases. Although Closing the Gap is in search of catchup solutions via educational advancement and growing Indigenous businesses in the private sector, the machinations of Industry 4.0 might require a complete rethink of how, as a society, we disentangle character formation and income distribution from the idea of full employment as wage/salary work.
If we are not our ‘job’, who are we? Indigenous people always have their fallback – their Country – what mob/language group they belong to. What about the rest of us in today’s multicultural society? When we meet strangers, how do we ‘define’ ourselves as we look for points of connection and difference, if it is not through our ‘job/profession’ that signifies all sorts of associations in terms of society’s pecking order? Can we have a vocation that speaks to our role in society that is disconnected from questions of income and wealth creation? That speaks to a new set of values attuned to a relationist ethos?
This question raises a whole other story that buys into universal basic income and the role of the arts and community-nature relationship engagement, at a time when, as Yunkaporta says, ‘the new masters are the super-wealthy refugees from the great nations they have gutted and rendered irrelevant, building leaky life-rafts from decentralised autonomous organisations, making a crossing to digital realms without Westphalian boundaries in a bid to keep all their shit, while the world floods and burns’ (p.102).
When grappling with the world of the tech bros and their love affair with martial arts and the muscular masculinity of the manosphere, Yunkaporta notes that since the first sword emerged from the first forge, humans have been struggling to find the right social technology to balance the needs of flesh, land and overpowered tech. He concludes the only thing that can meet this challenge is right story. But this cannot be authorised by individuals (auteur tradition) but by collectives of people over time in communicative relationship with the natural world. And this is a process mediated by thought experiments, riddles, and yarns (p.189).
Here Yunkaporta draws a distinction between Tech and TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge). He asserts that TEK ensures innovations work over deep time, while Tech ensures innovations work today, and need competitive upgrades tomorrow. That TEK only allows you to scale up your power, wealth and freedom to the limits of your relationship obligations—the responsibilities you carry not only to your living relations, both human and non-human, but to your ancestors and descendants as well. Tech, anchored in wrong story makes us fight battles to save the world by promoting renewable energy to continue hyper-consumption ‘with the very devices and reckless innovation that are killing everything.’
His concluding advice on this canoe journey through the hell realms of wrong story, which brother Deen warns him is becoming a ‘addictive feedback loop of despair and ghoulish voyeurism’, is that it doesn’t end in binaries of A or B. Instead, we find right story looping back around again and again in a journey of inquiry which doesn’t end in a final truth or failure. All our ancestors, gods, our prophets, our country, our spirit, our cosmos can do is nudge us all towards the pattern of creation to find our symbiotic roles within it, in annoyingly vague and non-linear ways that can only be perceived through constant connection with the land and the collective processing of that relation (p.290).
Because nature won’t survive modernity until it ceases to be an abstract, separate entity and becomes land again, with all of us embedded within it. Yunkaporta says, ‘the cautionary tale I leave is about the calamities that arise from wrong story and the perils of narcissism. There is no ancient knowledge woo-woo that can withstand the scrutiny of place.’
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