In this episode, Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, joins Local Futures’ director Helena Norberg-Hodge to explore “right story” – cognitive frameworks that can help us navigate through the neo-colonial, techno-globalist age, and towards more interconnected, land-based futures. Touching on everything from marginal identities to electromagnetic pulses, from the local food movement to civilizational “apocalypse”, they outline the great necessity for all people to experience a “right of return”: to land, to community, to the local.
Related links:
– Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
Intro music by Gillicuddy (CC BY-NC 3.0).
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This talk is really great. #kudos In Norway men have ‘forced’ parental leave. If they don’t take out their leave, it disappears. It was controversial, but has worked really well.
Beautiful, thank you both. I just ordered the book :D.
Erazim Kohak in the 80s, and very recently Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, both make the “Creation Spirituality” case that culture may indeed be the dialogue between us and the land, nature, Earth and Sky, etc, but that this is not a fruitful conversation without mediation by the Divine/Eternal/Unconditioned, or that which was there before Earth and Sky were brought in being.
This is very obvious both in Ladakh and Indigenous Australia compared to modernity: a material universe is one which we become sentient aliens in, can only belong via a kind of Nietzschean struggle for meaning that we cannot hope to maintain forever. Perhaps the reason why Mr Chomsky and Mr Brand are stuck on the abstract system, is because they are also stuck on the “profane”: they have not been exposed to the beating spiritual heart of deep community as the two of you have.
The fact that the main forms of remembering the Eternal in civilisation (East and West) have been so damaging to culture, and have been so often diverted to the service of empire and monoculture, should not make us prejudiced against this fact, if we actually want to succeed. It’s always good to have God’s help in overthrowing the corrupted powerful after all, we will need as much “wu wei” judo power and leverage as we can get… but also reowning the mistakes of our own (cultural and actual) forebears, rather than merely abandoning them for them, is a vital part of any authentic healing and reconciliation, I deeply feel.
PS. The extractive aspects to the modern Anglosphere are within all of us now, even those of us without Anglo ancestry.
I believe it manifests most strongly in words spoken that are powered by our own thirst for vengeance. That’s why it is so powerful, it can spread itself from perpetrator to victim (who becomes perpetrator) ad nauseum. Like a virus. Even an unerring critique of the modern Anglosphere can thus help to increase the influence of the modern Anglosphere.
The pre-modern Anglosphere might be a good solution to this. Etiquette still matters, it should be a way to make truth easier to both express locally and be received locally. The abstract/global so often has terrible manners.