A review by sebswann
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta

informative medium-paced

4.5

"Solutions to complex problems take many dissimilar minds and points of view to design, so we have to do that together, linking up with as many other us-tows as we can to form networks of dynamic interaction. I'm not offering expert answers, only different questions and ways of looking at things."

"If you live a life without violence you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spaces of your existence. The poor zoned into the ghettoes of your city are taking those blows for you, as are the economically marginalised who fill your prisons. The invisible privilege of your technocratic, one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence. Your peace-medallion bling is sparkling with blood diamonds. You carry pillaged metals in your phone from devastated African lands and communities. Your notions of peaceful settlement and development are delusions peppered with bullet holes and spears.
Violence exists and it must be carefully structured within ritual governed by the patterns of creation and the laws of sustainable cultures derived from those patterns. Violence employed in these highly interdependent and controlled frameworks serves to bring spirit into balance and hold in check the shadow of the I-am-greater-than deception Every organism in existence does violence, and benefits from it in reciprocal relationships."

Read this if you like learning more about Indigenous thinking; insightful, informative, and thoroughly thought-provoking, Yunkaporta's perspective and shared yarns are vital and critical to solving problems in society.