Social Justice Advocacy and Indigenous Worldview – with Tyson Yunkaporta

Editor’s Note: Join Kindred’s Mighty Network’s platform now to receive early notice of Kindred’s forthcoming interview with Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. You’re also welcome to subscribe to Kindred’s newsletter to receive notice of the forthcoming interview, which will be a critical contribution to Kindred’s framing of its mission, vision, and path forward into trance-breaking, new cycle making, and way finding.

We’re sharing the For the Wild interview with Tyson with gratitude for their deep dive and patience in exploring the emerging wisdom of Indigenous Worldview and Tyson’s work.

Quote from the Interview:

What happens when non-Indigenous people, especially social justice advocates, skip over connecting with the land and instead focus on accumulating social identity capital? (Mark 17:28)

“Basically, if you’re a millennial or Gen X, if you’re mid-30s or under, you’re not ever going to have any financial capital, chances are, wherever you are in the world. But the capital that is available to you is around your identity: cultural capital, social capital, all those kinds of things. And some of these things can be leveraged for a little bit of value or a little bit of position, so you can move around in a pecking order. There’s a kind of biological capital that is associated with that now. Kim Tallbear has written quite extensively about this fetishization of genealogy, inheritance, and bloodline, and the idea of this being some kind of capital that someone owns intrinsically inside themselves that they can curate and narrativize as a marker of their identities, intersectionality and the rest. So rather than living in that struggle and working to change conditions it becomes about branding one’s self. Very tricky.” – Tyson Yunkaporta

About Tyson Yunkaporta

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne. His new book is Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World. He is also a contributor to the new book by Darcia Narvaez (Kindred’s president) and Four Arrows, Restoring the Kinship Worldview.

About this Interview with For the Wild:

Struggling to change actual conditions, many have settled for changing the perceptions of the world around us. On this week’s episode, guest Tyson Yunkaporta begins by sharing the connections between perception, the branding of our identities, and the many forms of capital that become available and valuable in a perception-obsessed society. As we welcome the call to change our conditions and participate in the great “thousand-year clean-up”, we explore hybridized insight, the ramifications of clinging to dichotomous identities, and how genuine diversity is tangible preparedness and emotional resilience in motion. With this in mind, it becomes our task to figure out how we can sustain genuine diversity in our lives so we may work alongside folks with different capacities, worldviews, solutions, and thought processes in devotion to dismantling a system that necessitates abuse. Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.

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