Review of Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk

The book I’d love to share with you today is Sand Talk, by Tyson Yunkaporta. The subtitle is “How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.” To those who care about the future of our planet, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

As with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Sherri Mitchell’s Sacred Instructions, I also recommend you listen to Sand Talk on audiobook, in order to hear Yunkaporta’s transmission in his own voice. To me the richness and beauty of hearing these books in the author’s own voices is essential – both experientially and to honor the fact this shared wisdom is coming from Oral Cultures (or what Yunkaporta clarifies is a non-print-based or high-context culture).

Sand Talk was recommended to me Melanie Goodchild at Turtle Island Institute as their upcoming book club pick. From my perspective, Yunkaporta is like Robin Wall Kimmerer - Indigenous (in this case Aboriginal) by heritage, and also an academic, with a similar specific mission to lift up Tribal wisdom and Tribal ways of knowing as what is needed right now to help us confront climate disruption and arrive at more integral and whole ways of being as the earth.

Yunkaporta shared his motivation for writing Sand Talk: "I’m trying to build a collective base of knowledge and relationships and conversations that might help try to stop the world from dying in the next few decades." The number of absolutely mind-shifting insights and new ways of being in the world per chapter is also similar to the richness offered in Braiding Sweetgrass. And Yunkaporta’s delivery is refreshingly raw -- a taste in this brief NYT interview.

The book is organized around the shape and form of a turtle shell – the figure of which can be seen on page 12 of this excerpt. Within each hexagon of the turtle shell is a sand-drawing figure representing the main concept and theme of the chapter. Each chapter is constructed as a dialogue between what Yunkaporta has coined as “us-two” – a hybrid pronoun he offers to evoke the feeling of a teaching-and-learning dyad.

Yunkaporta shared in an interview that it took him twenty years to have the conversations with Elders that enabled him to gather and embody the knowledge he seeks to share, two years to carve ritual objects that helped him feel through the main topic and theme of each chapter, and two weeks to write the book. And he said the most time-consuming aspect of writing the book was deciding what he was allowed to share based on permissions from his Elders. I’m deeply thankful to him for the meticulous craft with which he has assembled this set of offerings.

What Yunkaporta outlines is not a prescription for a specific leap forward, nor backwards, but as Bayo Akomolafe would say: a prescription to move awkwards – to become uncomfortable enough where we are so that, instead of seeking answers, we seek to sit in not-knowing. And to sit in that not-knowing long enough and in deep enough community to envision and co-create transitionary cultures that can move us ever closer to our true purpose, which Yunkaporta asserts is simply to care for the land.

One of the most powerful and moving passages of Sand Talk comes in the second to last chapter, where Yunkaporta provides a guided visualization, helping us to recapture our own connection to the land, and enables us to feel our place in it re-established firmly. As someone who has practiced Buddhism for most of my adult life, I’ve experienced many such guided meditations, including the excellent Earth meditations by Reginald Rey. What Yunkaporta provides here is singularly effective at accomplishing the somatic reconnection he intends, and the experience is deeply moving.

To extend the work of Sand Talk, Yunkaporta has also just founded the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin's NIKERI (National Indigenous Knowledges Education and Research Institute).

Here is the primary lesson of Sand Talk for those of us who did not grow up within intact cultures: as with Braiding Sweetgrass, Yunkaporta provides a set of ways-of-seeing-and-being, or lenses through which to look. Kind of like going to an optometrist when they flip the lenses back and forth and ask: “which is better, this way [click] or this way [click]?” As we reflect on the alternating perspectives back and forth from the Western scarcity-based worldview to that of an Indigenous, radically reciprocal abundance view, it quickly becomes clear that our culture has become needlessly impoverished. And that other, more viable options are available.

My hope is that we are wise enough to listen, to take in what is so generously offered, as inspiration and fuel for the work we must dive into next, wholeheartedly.

For more on the themes from Sand Talk, you can treat yourself to this interview with Tyson and Sherri Mitchell.