Tyson Yunkaporta

Tuesday Oct. 18, 10:00 a.m. ET
Senior Lecturer, Indigenous Knowledges, Deakin University

All humans evolved within complex land based cultures over deep time to develop a brain with a capacity for over 100 trillion neural connections of which we now only use a tiny fraction. Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it.

About

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He is the founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne where he works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges. The author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Tyson focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises. He also hosts a podcast called The Other Others.

How Indigenous Thinking Can Change the World

We’re accustomed to a certain way of thinking. We want the world to be simple, but we talk about it in complicated ways. Indigenous thinking is different. It knows the world is complex and finds deep ways to communicate this knowledge through pictures, carving, stories. What happens if we bring an Indigenous perspective to the big picture – to history, education, money, power? Can we, in fact, have proper concepts of sustainable life without Indigenous knowledge? Watch this thought-provoking session on knowledge, communication, complexity and learning told from the perspective of the world’s oldest living culture.

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