What might an "Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab" do? Teach business and government how to do complexity and collectivity
Tyson Yunkaporta
Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World - profiled here last year - has been a resounding global success.
The academic’s line - “rather than reporting on Indigenous Knowledge for a global audience, I’m looking at global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective” - has been powerfully received, in a moment when the clash of our current extractive systems with natural order has been at its most extreme. And other ways of knowing and acting are being desperately sought.
As Yunkaporta noted in this interview with Deakin University’s Disruptr blog:
By highlighting (and celebrating) the complexity of Indigenous Knowledge, Yunkaporta connects the Indigenous culture with ideas of complexity theory – the rejection of the linear, mechanical way of thinking that looks to “deal with the natural and artificial systems as they are, and not by simplifying them (breaking them down into their constituent parts).”
Throughout the book, he employs an Indigenous pronoun that doesn’t exist in English – the idea of ‘us-two’.
“I’m constantly referring to myself and the reader us ‘us-two’ like a kinship pair. And encouraging [the reader] to form other ‘us-two’ pairings and work with each other and represent knowledge in that way,” says Yunkaporta.
“But there’s also the ‘us-exclusive’ which is just us, not them. You have exclusive groups. But then you also have to have those groups working with other groups, so there’s also an ‘us-all’ pairing,” he says. “A lot of these things align with complexity theory.”
It is here, Yunkaporta says, rather than reducing Indigenous Knowledge down to a series of symbols and codes for ease of understanding, and released from the linear, Newtonian way of thinking (encompassing notions of rationalism, cause and effect, time and, perhaps especially, the western ideas of the natural world) that Indigenous Knowledge can tackle one of the biggest challenges facing our world – climate change and sustainability.
Yunkaporta believes the complexity of Indigenous Knowledge is a fitting challenger for the complexity of the sustainability and climate change issues we face.
“Our knowledge endures because everybody carries a part of it, no matter how fragmentary. If you want to see the pattern of creation, you talk to everybody and listen carefully.
“Authentic knowledge processes are easy to verify if you are familiar with that pattern – each part reflects the design of the whole system,” he says.
More here. But the next development for Yunkaporta is really fascinating. One of Australia’s leading financial consultancies, the Kearney Group, has decided to be the start-up funder of Tyson’s new project (based at his university, Deakin). It’s titled the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab.
Building on the success of “Sand Talk”, the IK Systems Lab aims to attract and support a team of Indigenous researchers, Knowledge Keepers and doctoral candidates whose ambition is to weave First People’s thinking, policy and innovations into solutions for some of the most pressing issues of our time.
“For example, in addressing climate change, should we think beyond limiting emissions and address the biological feedback loops that will continue to escalate global warming even at zero carbon output? Indigenous Knowledge Systems that understand the complexities of these loops may be most effective at proposing the right interventions to disrupt them,” Yunkporta writes.
“Or could we gain an understanding of systems interdependencies – such as fish die-offs in the Murray-Darling Basin leading to bushfires on Kangaroo Island,” he adds.
The IK Systems Lab will be “a place where Indigenous thinking can be applied to the issues that complexity scientists and technologists are currently working on across economics, design, cybernetics, governance, evolutionary dynamics, environment, cognition and consciousness,” Yunkaporta tells us.
“This work is both extremely important and urgent,” says Paul Kearney whose philanthropic support has helped kick-start the Lab’s development.
“In a world overflowing with seemingly intractable problems, Tyson Yunkaporta’s ‘Sand Talk’ and the Indigenous Knowledges he describes gives hope; maybe, just maybe, this thinking and perspective can be a critical circuit-breaker and help interrupt the trajectory on which we humans find ourselves.”
More here. Yunkaporta’s work seems to be building many bridges between the capitalist sectors of the Australian economy and the countries’ indigenous heritage - see this conversation on business leadership.