Sand Talk

This is foundational work for anyone building, creating, or designing on the planet today.

If you care about the Earth, about other humans, or about other species, you need to read it. This book is about Indigenous thinking. We love that it is grounded in story, connection, and symbiosis with the natural world.

I've long puzzled over the alien and elusive Australian Aboriginal peoples. I've been moved by their landscapes and art, and read much about them. But this book pulled it together.

It explains with wit and clarity the meaning of ancient patterns that can be sketched in sand, and how they apply to us now. They flow from the troublemaking Emu and wise Echidna to the five human minds: kinship, story, dreaming, ancestor, and pattern. These are how we relate to each other and to nature, the deep past, the continuous act of creation in which we live, and the future.… show more.

It’s easy to get caught up in the immediate issues around food, farming, and the need to transition to localism.

Yunkaporta’s book weaves them into a far larger tapestry concerning the need for renewable long-term culture. I like the way he sharpens indigenous knowledge unsentimentally into a practical tool with a purpose that’s potentially available to everyone, not a mystical cosmology available only to a few.

Endlessly thought-provoking ruminations on how to live from a local ecological base, and how modern culture disrupts us from doing so.

I benefited immensely from this book by Tyson Yunkaporta, an Indigenous Australian academic and storyteller—or, to use his words, a “yarner,” someone who actively listens and weaves various conversations together. Yunkaporta critiques settler colonial culture while providing tools for reflecting on the patterns within nature and how attending to these might lead us to behave differently. Peppered with a fair amount of the author’s own journey in reclaiming his ancestral knowledge, the book takes its name from mnemonic symbols that were traditionally drawn in sand. Yunkaporta expresses a compelling cosmovision as well as techniques for countering individual and cultural narcissism,… show more.