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hollyd19 's review for:
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
by Tyson Yunkaporta
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
Written by an Aboriginal scholar, this book is about how indigenous thinking can be applied to large-scale world issues in order to achieve a sustainable society. Yunkaporta makes a point of expanding beyond the truncated view of sustainability as related solely to environmental topics. He emphasizes the importance of holistic worldview that is based in understanding systems and listening to the land.
I learned so much from this book. He tackles complex issues by using metaphor and visualization — one example of the application of indigenous approaches to storytelling and knowledge-sharing. His writing is unflinching and at times self-deprecating. He is a scholar in the western, credential-happy sense of the word, but he makes a point of being humble and amplifying voices of traditional knowledge keepers. It’s very clear that Yunkaporta put a ton of thoughtful effort into the compilation of this work.
My one criticism is one that Yunkaporta himself acknowledges. At the start, he mentions that he was hesitant to write the book at all, as written words are antithetical to indigenous knowledge-sharing and become outdated the moment they are written. His hesitance comes through at points with harder-to-follow logic that seems a little under-developed. That said, there were plenty of sections when I was convinced he was making a brilliant point and I simply couldn’t wrap my head around it. You definitely get the sense that you are learning from someone who has figured out a way to unlock some next-level brainpower!
I learned so much from this book. He tackles complex issues by using metaphor and visualization — one example of the application of indigenous approaches to storytelling and knowledge-sharing. His writing is unflinching and at times self-deprecating. He is a scholar in the western, credential-happy sense of the word, but he makes a point of being humble and amplifying voices of traditional knowledge keepers. It’s very clear that Yunkaporta put a ton of thoughtful effort into the compilation of this work.
My one criticism is one that Yunkaporta himself acknowledges. At the start, he mentions that he was hesitant to write the book at all, as written words are antithetical to indigenous knowledge-sharing and become outdated the moment they are written. His hesitance comes through at points with harder-to-follow logic that seems a little under-developed. That said, there were plenty of sections when I was convinced he was making a brilliant point and I simply couldn’t wrap my head around it. You definitely get the sense that you are learning from someone who has figured out a way to unlock some next-level brainpower!