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This third Yarn brings together Indigenous thinkers from Canada, Australia and Wales. Across the globe, our yarners share tea in many forms as a setting for the yarn. Melanie shares stories of tea, medicine wheel teachings and her family’s Indigenous heritage across the generations as Tyson nudges yarners towards finding ‘what we actually have to offer as Indigenous peoples to the world in terms of solutions for the design of these sort of systems that are needed’. We offer here a full transcript with time stamps for different sections to follow up with additional materials (our last web page) so you can learn more. Get the sense of the territory our yarners explore by following the quotations or diving into the text.
So we having our third webinar of Indigenous peoples from around the world talking up about complexity. We got Beth Smith, we got Melanie Goodchild this time. And we have Dave Snowden as always. And he’s wearing a sweater tonight that is-
It’s a cardigan, Tyson.
Cardigan, sorry, cardigan. Are you from Cardigan?
No, no, this is Irish.
They named half of Britain after just things that were lying around the house. Sandwich, cardigan, all these things. Now, yeah, so in we jump pretty much straight in and we’ve got a lot to get through today. So I think we’re going to start out with a cup of tea. Now, Melanie Goodchild, who’s joining us today, she’s from the Turtle Island Institute (Editor notes that Melanie is now at the Wolf Willow Insitute for Systems Learning). She’s actually just about to move back to her homeland, so she can tell us all about that. Yeah. So her notes have been lost in the move, her notes for today, so she’s going to be riffing off the top of her head and she might talk a bit about tea because she’s actually a tea sommelier or was at least married to one. And most of the cups of tea that I’ve had this year have been with Melanie over Zooms between here and Turtle Island. Yeah. So it’s interesting how there’s that idea that the British empire was built on tea.
… it's interesting that you mentioned, Tyson, cup of tea as a methodology, because I'm really exploring relational methodologies like yarning…
I keep hearing this phrase and it’s something you think of as essentially British, but then somehow Indigenous people everywhere always seem to pick up tea as where we end up. So we even have a… It’s such a really essential part of Indigenous life in Australia, a cup of tea that we even have a research methodology that’s called the Cup of Tea Research Methodology. I’m not kidding. My partner uses it, and she’s actually has especially made cups for it, with cup of tea written on that she uses for that. So it’s a very particular data collection method and analysis method, weirdly enough. I wondered if everybody would like to introduce themselves by saying who they are and what their cultural connection to tea is. Would that be weird?
No, that’s a good idea.
Let’s do it.
You can go for it, Beth.
Yeah. Hello, I’m Beth. I’m from Wales, but currently living in Denmark, so left my roots behind a little bit there. So my cultural connection to tea, Glengettie, milk, one sugar, nothing too dramatic for me. I’m not a huge tea drinker, so I’ll let somebody more exciting tell us their details.
Tyson after that good glug, you’ve got to have something good to say.
Oh, man. I was hoping that would be in the lull. No, I already did. I said it’s a research methodology, and that finished… Dave, I guess first.
Yeah. Okay. When I was growing up, tea was part of the family. There was always a teapot on the hearth by the fire, and people would just keep putting more tea and more water in it throughout the day. So by the end of the day, you could literally stand a teaspoon up in it, and in Lancashire that’s called a Grayley cup of tea, right? And since then, I worked in Singapore for a long time, so I got into tea ceremonies. So now I’ve got white tea and green and roibus tea and four different types of oolong tea and a tea maker, which does it all for me and calculates temperatures, so I’ve become a tea obsessive, but that’s another matter.
And yeah, so I think, it came from India and… It came from China first to the UK and then from India. If I remember the sequence. And there’s some lovely stories about tea and I’ve got one which is called dragon something or other, because an emperor hid it in his pocket and it got flattened on the way home and things like that, so there’s all sorts of fascinating stories about it.
We have cedar tea, which is a medicinal tea that we drink for purification. It's one of our four sacred medicines.
Nice.
But yeah, it’s an English dish, all right? The Welsh inherited it and just be careful when you use British and when you use English Tyson, because it has major significance where we…
It does, doesn’t it? Yeah.
We were the first and probably will be the last colony. Right.
Yep. Anglos do like to airbrush with that term British don’t they? But anyway, we’ll get to that as well, and pardon me sir. Now, Melanie that’s your runway of familiarity to bring you in and-
Oh, thank you.
Yeah. Welcome you here, and of course we all acknowledge the lands where we are. And you’re quite familiar with my place here, both where I’m from, which we’ve gone into very deep with our stories together that we’ve shared, and yeah, where this particular screen is facing our wall on Boon Wurrung Country. Now I’m in Melbourne and respects from my elders and to your elders and your old people going back through all time back and forth. It’s good to see you again, sis.
And so when we feast and we eat and we drink together, we ingest the spirit of what's being said.
It’s good to see you and really nice to meet everyone, so I’m going to introduce myself according to our Anishinaabeg protocols, and so [Indigenous language] Anishinaabeg, which in English here in Turtle Island, in the English languages also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa or Saulteaux, so [language] which is early morning for some of you in Australia. So good morning. I said, greetings to you, all of my relatives, [Indigenous language] thank you for listening. [Indigenous language] I’m Moose Clan. [Indigenous language] Those are the two First Nations I’m from in Northern Ontario. [Indigenous language] those are my two spirit names, how I’m known in the spirit world. And I’m here at my home right now, as Tyson mentioned. We are excited, we’re in the process of moving about eight hours north of here into Northern Ontario to Bawating the Place of the Rapids were kind of right in between where both my mom and my dad’s First Nations are.
But today I’m here in Crystal Beach, which is right near Niagara Falls, Ontario. So this is Traditional Confederacy territory, and Three Fires Confederacy territory. And the Three Fires here are the Potawatomi, the Odawa and the Anishinaabe.
And so I've been picking up our language as I can from ceremony and with elders. And it's just so important because it really does encode or codify your values, your beliefs, how you say things, the words that you have…
And my relationship to tea, it’s interesting that you mentioned, Tyson, cup of tea as a methodology, because I’m really exploring relational methodologies like yarning. I’ve been able to yarn with our relatives in Australia and start to understand what the protocols are. And so one of the things that we’ve done as well is my partner Sly, who’s Algonquin and French, he has become a tea specialist, a certified tea specialist, and he’s spent time in both Japanese and Chinese tea ceremonies. And so we practice something called Gong Fu Cha.
And my uncle Dan Longboat who’s Haudenosaunee, he talks about cultural fluency. And it’s been an interesting experience for us because we live in a time of prophecy.
And in this time the seventh fire, it was said that there would be the new people, the new people are the Oshkimaadiziig and these new people would, you could say decolonise, that’s how we might say it contemporary, but really reconnect to mother earth to each other. And it would be people from all four directions. And so it’s interesting that the medicine we say mashkiki. Mashkiki really translates as the strength of mother earth, mashkiki or she is strong. Aki is land or mother earth. And so mashkiki means the strength from mother earth and Camillea Sinensis which is the herb, the tea, it’s the plant that comes from, discovered actually by the Indigenous peoples of China a long time ago and made its way around the world. So it did come to us on ships and it was very expensive back in the day, but we have a really deep tea culture here as well.
It’s not Camillea Sinensis though, it’s other types of natural plants. And so we have something called Labrador tea, which is we call swamp tea. We have cedar tea, which is a medicinal tea that we drink for purification. It’s one of our four sacred medicines. But I grew up with my grandma putting bags of tea on the fire and keeping it going, and it never got too strong. It was like a magical tea pot. You could just go in there and pour yourself a cup of tea. And so we do have a deep tea culture out west. Other nations, like the Blackfoot nation pick mint, and so they have mint tea. And so we do have that association here of tea and yarn, of sitting down, sharing knowledge, sharing teachings, always having a cup of tea. And I remember the last time I visited one of the elders up north and he had his sauce pan on the stove and he had a couple of bags of tea and he just poured it into cups for us.
And so in Anishinaabemowin and a lot of Indigenous languages are like that. We don't have, it's not very noun based, it's verb based. And so there's a lot of animacy.
And that’s really how I grew up is having cups of tea. Doesn’t mean I don’t drink coffee, but the methodology of relationality and what I think the tea service does or tea service, so we’ve had many bowls of tea together, my family and Tyson’s family, I think what it does is it allows us to shift our consciousness, but it also picks up on our tradition of feasting. And so when we feast and we eat and we drink together, we ingest the spirit of what’s being said. And so now when I have conversations on Zoom, I encourage people and ask people to make themselves a cup of tea so that they can slurp and drink along with us. So that was a nice runway. Thanks, Tyson.
Melanie, I don’t know if you noticed, you wouldn’t have noticed because you talking, I can never read the comments at the same time, but all the comments is kind of, there’s this emergent protocol happening where everybody’s saying who they are and what lands they’re on and what kind of tea they’re drinking.
Melanie Goodchild:
Oh, nice.
Yeah. It’s really cool. Yeah. I can’t quite describe it, but there’s something lovely about it. Yeah. It’s very, very groovy. So yeah. Did you want to jump into a general, I don’t know, a general kind of impression of what you recall from because you’ve had to view the previous two webinars and just give us a quick sense of your overall feeling about that and maybe riff on that and then let us know where you’d like to go today with everything and what’s coming from your feeling for today.
I think from what I remember because this is actually memory as opposed to the notes that I had. I remember when you were first together speaking about identity and some of the similarities and differences in the Welsh experience and the experience with you Tyson in Australia. And I remember feeling myself actually more aware and sensitive of the binaries that we create when we talk about things like that, which is that the white people and the black people and the yellow people and the red people and that’s part of our medicine wheel teaching. And it did refer to the four great nations. And I tend to think of have mental models in for myself of who was colonised and who they were colonised by and in that first yarn I remember hearing Dave and Beth talking about their stories, their identity, their language and how powerful language is.
…the spirits are a really huge part of our identity and our language. But the disenchantment of the world, I've found that is meta pattern. That people are almost ashamed, I think, and sometimes to say what they believe in because we're told that's not rational.
And I’ve had that teaching. I don’t speak my language fluently – Anishinaabemowin. And so my dad went to Indian residential school, my mom went to Indian day school. And so they were part of the last generation that may have had the opportunity to be educated at home before they went to residential school and their language. Whereas when I was born, they knew that send me to school and I learned English, and I’ve been fascinated by language and identity in terms of the words that don’t exist in English. There’s a pattern there. I’m a systems and complexity scholar, like all of you.
And I hear from folks in Japanese, they’ll have a word for a certain type of energy or a certain type of time. And so these really big concepts of time and space are so different when you have words for it or you have a different way of explaining something. And so in Anishinaabemowin and a lot of Indigenous languages are like that. We don’t have, it’s not very noun based, it’s verb based. And so there’s a lot of animacy. So when you’re in relationship with the world, the natural world, for example, you are not thinking of a tree as a noun, as a thing, as an it. So that relationality is really important, even in the teachings of tea, we drink something called Pu-erh and it is a fermented tea and it’s old. And sometimes it comes from old growth teas.
And I hear from folks in Japanese, they'll have a word for a certain type of energy or a certain type of time.
And we’ve done an experiment with colleagues of ours, friends of ours that are tea enthusiasts as well, who are Chinese and we’ll drink the same cup of Pu-erh. So we’ll drink the very same tea or we’ll send that to them. And then internal Gong Fu Cha is connecting to the chi of the tea. And that for us is resonant with our culture.
It’s about connecting with the spirit. And so we have the manidoog, the spirits and the spirits are a really huge part of our identity and our language. But the disenchantment of the world, I’ve found that is meta pattern. That people are almost ashamed, I think, and sometimes to say what they believe in because we’re told that’s not rational. And in our culture, it’s kind of irrational to not understand that you have invisible helpers, let’s call them invisible helpers. That’s what an elder from back home used to call them.
And so the teaching of the tea, for example, that old growth tea, we’ve done this experiment where we drink the same tea, and then we close our eyes and we really tap into the chi. And then we write down the images and the feelings, the tastes that come to mind. And then we compare notes. And it’s time after time, those notes are very similar if you really connect to the tea and the medicine and the mashkiki of the tea.
the space between is really fascinating for me. So in those yarns, there was this space between each of you that was fascinating. What were you saying? What were you not saying? And how did language influence that?
And so when I was listening to the yarns, I was fascinated by how complexity maybe from a conventional Western mindset, that’s what we study, but then also our Anishinaabe, or Indigenous complexity mindsets, how those can help us navigate these spaces. And I’ll talk maybe a little bit more about this later, but the space between is really fascinating for me. So in those yarns, there was this space between each of you that was fascinating. What were you saying? What were you not saying? And how did language influence that? So that’s all what resonated with me. And I was looking forward to being able to yarn because as I watched the first couple, I wanted to jump in there with some of the things I had in mind. So yeah, maybe I’ll turn it over to you if there’s any reflections.
Very interesting there which is the question, it’s a spiritual question. It’s this question of connectivity with things, right? I remember when I first went through drum ceremony up in Saskatoon, which was fascinating, right? And I grew up in a Catholic tradition anyway, so that kind of ritual and ceremony and connectedness was a part of that. Right? But religion almost in the modern world has become absconded into two particular pernicious things. One is everybody now thinks Christianity is a form of extreme right wing Southern United States, Bible believing quite something quite perverted. So if you don’t believe in that you’re meant to be an atheist or you’ve got the sort of faux Buddhism of Westerners adopting Eastern religion without really understanding it because they like the concept of being a guru.
It doesn't necessarily have to be believe in God, but it has to be a belief in this is the numinous idea, something that is more other than you, that you have to have a relationship with.
So I think one of the things I’m concerned about with looking at this in terms of the idea of the the numinous, is you need to make spirituality or religion authentic. It doesn’t necessarily have to be believe in God, but it has to be a belief in this is the numinous idea, something that is more other than you, that you have to have a relationship with. And it’s almost like we’ve lost the ability for people to actually work in that way. Religion has stopped becoming a naturalistic part of the way we live our lives. It’s become something which is an ideological belief system you have to assume or reject, which is never what it was historically.
For me, there's something there about particularly reflecting on a Welsh pagan tradition and the shift from having multiple gods to that one God
For me, there’s something there about particularly reflecting on a Welsh pagan tradition and the shift from having multiple gods to that one God, to that idea of, if you’ve read any of the philosophy, God is a lobster, the twist, the double bind, like the single bifurcation at the top of a pyramid. And we just all fall into some kind of fractal arrangement underneath that. And it’s all shoe horned into this single entity. And that as a belief system, when it starts to come out in religion, it becomes very easy to start applying it to governance, to social order that we all default to this pyramid system, with the single, usually male entity at the top. And particularly interested to hear from other perspectives the way you have this idea of multiple gods, different totems that represent different aspects of God in whatever God might be in its plural sense.
Well, it’s there to make the enforcement of contracts impossible, I reckon. The kind of spiritual plurality we have all those entities in the landscape around you, I think. Or more specifically monotheism I think was invented to enforce contract. It was like a smart contract kind of thing. Originally, in the earliest civilizations and the fertile crescent and everything, those first laws and everything, our contracts always had built into them. You had to swear an oath on this God that they’d just invented or they’d elevated one of the local deities or whatever. This big universal one God who would definitely kill you if you didn’t meet the requirements of your contract. So I think it’s purely because of that, and that’s about seeking to control the future.
And it’s all part of the same thing. What civilization does, particularly what empire does as it seizes control of the narrative of the past, to make sure that everybody knows how terrible the past was and that things are getting better. So no matter how miserable you are now, I tell you’re lucky though, because things were heaps worse. Ah, I tell you Welsh, you’re lucky we came. You’re lucky we came because you were just groveling around in your own shate before. And I don’t know why that [inaudible 00:22:11].
This big universal one God who would definitely kill you if you didn't meet the requirements of your contract. So I think it's purely because of that, and that's about seeking to control the future.
They keep telling us [crosstalk 00:22:14] but it’s interesting.
If you go back to the laws of Hywel Dda in the eighth century, women were allowed to divorce their husbands for cruelty and take half their land. And the English said that was us being uncivilised. So we have to get it right?
But I think there’s another interesting thing, there’s a famous… The Celtic Christianity was very different from Roman Christianity. It was based on abbots and chiefs. So it was monasteries and local chiefs in a multi distributed environment. And the community of saints was actually multiple gods. The whole Catholic church just absorbed native religions and multiple gods and called them saints instead. And then what happened with the Synod de Whitby, everything got concentrated into the king and the pope. So everything got centralised from that point onwards. And that was when the Celtic church was destroyed. And it was actually quite close to the Orthodox. So I think there should…
So I think there are traditions all over the world, which are much more collectivists, much more integrative, much more localised, which we can fall back on.
It was actually quite close to the Orthodox. So I think there are traditions all over the world, which are much more collectivists, much more integrative, much more localised, which we can fall back on. I spent a lot of time with the Haida folk. And some of the symbiotic symbols of the Haida are just wonderful. In terms of the way they encapsulate meaning in simple form. And that’s something we’ve lost is that ability to see things in semiotics in symbols.
Absolutely. I don’t know if you guys have come across that book yet, that’s come out recently. Graeber before he passed away, he co-wrote The Dawn of Everything. Anyway, somebody’s drawn my attention to the second chapter of that. You might want to have a look at it at some stage, it sounds like it’s a great book. That’ll reinforce everything that you already think, and I enjoyed reading the small part that I did, I just went, oh yes, me, me, me, me. Anyway, I try not to read things that reinforce my opinions too much.
I mean, if it’d been a third of the length, it would have been a lot easier. But I think the key thing is in chapter two, where he talks about authority structures change in between summer and winter. And I think that’s fascinating is the evidence that people could move into distributed or centralised models based on the season. So there wasn’t a single model and that’s where the monuments come from. I think it’s one of those books everybody needs to read and think about because it changes the way you see history.
You especially need that in cold places. If you're going to move everybody inside for half the year, then, you're going to need someone else in charge.
Yeah, you especially need that in cold places. If you’re going to move everybody inside for half the year, then, you’re going to need someone else in charge.
Yeah, there’s a really interesting ethnography of Inuit people in that as well, which he talked about. Right, and the ability to accept conflict at certain times of the year in certain context, but not at other times. Well, I think it’s that philosophy of diversity, which is what complexity is about as well, is different context, different approaches.
I think that’s where I’d like us to finish up today of what we actually have to offer as Indigenous peoples to the world in terms of solutions for the design of these sort of systems that are needed, in a time when none of the institutions are working particularly well, and all the systems are failing, that we perhaps have some governance models that are worth having a look at. And we have some, certain aspects of, for example, what Melanie was mentioning before that, the verb based languages, et cetera.
There's a really interesting ethnography of Inuit people in that as well, which he talked about. Right, and the ability to accept conflict at certain times of the year in certain context, but not at other times.
But there’s one thing I think a lot of our scholarship and a lot of our commentary, and I know that a lot of the events and interviews and things that I have to do, people are directing you towards a particular kind of speech and a particular, I don’t know, a standpoint that is quite, it’s weak tea, If you know what I mean. It’s about the fact of having an Indigenous person there and that we are centering an Indigenous voice. And can you get up for a minute please? And talk about how important it is that we’re centering your voice? Do you know what I mean? Like that’s it. Everything’s about the representation…
You’re there to speak about how important it is that you’re there speaking about that. That’s what you’re…
And can you get up for a minute please? And talk about how important it is that we're centering your voice?
It’s worse, because, you’re Welsh, would you please sing us a song? I mean, as a tone deaf Welshman, this is a constant embarrassment, but the assumption is, that’s our stereotype roles that we’re expected to perform.
I think, I did that the first time I met you didn’t I?
You did. I’ve forgiven you for it, but I think that it is quite fascinating. One thing you said last week, which I’ve talked about a lot over the previous week over the week since, is that you were taught the Union Jack represented all four nations of the UK, but it specifically doesn’t include the Welsh, yeah.
That’s what they teach us here though. It’s, a children’s game, there’s a rhyme and everything that goes with it, England, Ireland, Scotland Wales.
They’ve always been embarrassed by, in Australia and lesser extent in, New Zealand. Maori, I think are a little bit different, partly because they fought the British empire to a standstill and the British Empire cheated on the Peace Treaty but they had to accept they’d met a superior force. But, it’s just the tokenism of, you are expected to perform. It’s like, there’s a Welsh national costume, which we’re all meant to wear, but it was invented by the Victorian English because they wanted us to be a tourist trap.
I think that's the feeling of it. We tolerate you because you are a tourist attraction. You're entertaining. You have beautiful land. You say different things, which we don't have to deal with.
And, I’ve seen that you go up to Ayers Rock or places like Ayers Rock, or you go up to the Blue Mountains and you’ve got these token performances going on in which you’re being put into a little box because you be belong to something quaint, which we tolerate. I think that’s the feeling of it. We tolerate you because you are a tourist attraction. You’re entertaining. You have beautiful land. You say different things, which we don’t have to deal with. We can listen to you. We can be entertained. And we go back to our ordinary day to day lives afterwards. I mean one of the films, which we all grew up on was Walkabout.
Oh my god, yeah.
…yeah, which had all sorts of problems in it. Right, I mean, it was a film of its time. But the moment when she sat in that flat at the end, I think that’s actually Jenny Agutter at her best because it basically shows that where she is, has no authenticity to anything. She’s been displaced as an object. So aside from the other problems in that film, it goes through. I think that’s actually quite a significant.
That wasn’t the very end, the very end was the closing credits, which is like 15 minutes of Jenny Agutter naked because it’s Jenny Agutter and she always has to take her clothes off in every single movie, no matter what it’s about.
Indian railway children, Tyson, it was only in that one.
Unbelievable. Well, I’ve got to get back to that before I throw it back to Melanie again. I just got to get back to that, the Maori fought, fought the British to a standstill kind of thing. Look, that’s nothing to be proud of. It’s just that they remembered a few structures from centuries before, when they were, experimenting with Imperialism. And so they were like, how did we do that standing army, bro? What are the techniques for forcing everybody into a big, massive standing army? Oh, that’s right. And then they did it like that.
I'm certainly not ashamed of the fact that we haven't won this war yet. We're just using different tactics. We're actually breeding the invaders out, very gradually.
I don’t think that’s anything particularly to be proud of. If you have such an amazing governance and social structure that it prevents people from forming into massive groups that are able to conscript people into a permanent standing army, in order to face off an equally psychotic foe, I don’t think that’s anything to be ashamed of. I’m certainly not ashamed of the fact that we haven’t won this war yet. We’re just using different tactics. We’re actually breeding the invaders out, very gradually. We’ve got about another 50 years, just the current sort of, birth rates and death rates and everything else we’ve got about another 50 years before everybody in Australia is Aboriginal again. So they’ve won a few battles, the British, but we’re going to win the war. We’re going to love them to death.
It’s a unique feature. It’s not necessarily special, but it is unique. And I think it’s allowed some of the issues like some of the Maori concepts of justice and the like to actually have a bigger influence than the otherwise would. So, I mean the Maori Pakeha thing in New Zealand is very different from Whitey Aboriginal in Australia or the whole First Nation issue within Canada. So I think there are differences on that. And I think the issue is what can we learn from them, I think.
So they've won a few battles, the British, but we're going to win the war.
Might ask Melanie about that? What’s that iron fist in a velvet glove like there in Canada? Because everybody’s impression of Canada is that it’s so awesome and left in peace that everybody’s really gentle and loving and awesome. And, they’re always doing sort of land acknowledgements and stuff like this. So things there must be great?
I think, when you talked about narrative and who controls the narrative and how empire building erases the history that we don’t want to hear about. So we had something called the truth and reconciliation commission here in Canada. And that brought out the stories that the survivors had kept inside for so many years. But really when you ask, I do workshops and speak all over, I used to feel guilty about saying no at speaking events until a mentor of mine said; well from a systems lens, they think they’re doing something by getting you to speak. So you’re letting them off the hook instead of them doing something more like shifting their governance and their business model and things like that. So now I feel a little bit better when I pick and choose, where I’m going to talk.
So you're letting them off the hook instead of them doing something more like shifting their governance and their business model and things like that.
And so in Canada, the empire building that history includes something called the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius, and a lot of Canadians in our education system, they don’t know what that is. I wasn’t taught that in education, in mainstream education and the history of this country starts at contact, it starts with the formation of the Nation State. It ignores thousands of years of history here, migration stories. We have an oral history, but we also have pictographs, sacred scrolls and songs. And that history is so rich and diverse across Turtle Island. And so, the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius was that if you found a land and it was a Papal Decree, which have been challenged in the courts, both in Canada and the US, but it was the justification for the genocide that happened here. It was that if you are not Christian, you are not human. Therefore, when we were discovered, my ancestors and others here, we were not humans because we were not Christians. And so the foundation of Canada and the United States is the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. And certainly the slaughter of our relatives, like the Buffalo and the beaver, for fur and the fur trades.
So you don’t really learn a lot of that history and I’m just thinking about narratives. And the oddest thing that came to me was in a previous life, I worked in film and television and I worked on a movie called Grey Owl. And it was directed by a Lord Richard Attenborough, who’s passed, to those of us on set he was Dicky. And his brother makes these documentaries about the world, the climate crisis, David Attenborough.
But this, but I remember this because Richard Attenborough did these sort of sweeping biopic pictures, like Chaplin and Gandhi and he won Oscars for these different works. And so I saw the script for Grey Owl and I was just a young, struggling filmmaker. I had written a couple of screenplays, which are still on my shelf that I’m supposed to rewrite. But I arrived on set and I was in the AD department, so I wasn’t in the hierarchy, I was not in a place to question script, believe me. So the actors arrived and it was Pierce Brosnan who was famous for being James Bond and others. And there were Indigenous actors. And it really told the Grey Owl narrative from the perspective of him. And if you haven’t heard of him sort of around the world, Grey Owl, in his time, he was like the Beatles. That’s how Richard Attenborough talked about him. He was the most famous Red Indian in the world, but he was actually Archie Bellamy a British kind of imposter, I guess you might say. I mean he shaved his chest and his body hair and he dyed his skin dark and he had long hair, but he was a Conservationist. And in fact who he kind of spoke about were our relatives and Nick, which are the beavers. And so when I was on that film, he was kind of showing his Indigenous female counterpart in the film, her culture. That’s the line they just, instead of actually all of the people who taught him, what he learned. And I think it’s so powerful and that those different entry points into shifting the narrative can be so powerful, because we can all remember films that taught us things and made us think about things.
we can all remember films that taught us things and made us think about things.
I did a webinar earlier this week with Andri Magnason who’s from Iceland, Reykjavik. And he wrote a book called On Time and Water. And he talked about Blade Runner and how Blade Runner took place in 2019. Remember with the fake animals and the hover craft and people living off world. And I’m thinking about narrative, that’s what I wanted to kind of yarn about was if people don’t know these histories and are uncomfortable with it. And I think a complexity mindset helps you be able to cope with the fact that your ancestors could have been on a slave ship or could have been slave owners in America. And I heard a lady earlier this week say that there are scuba divers, they are black scuba divers that are looking for all of the voyages of slave ships and how many thousands. I think it was like tens of thousands of slave ships that brought the enslaved black people to Turtle Island. And how many of those went down and have never been found and nobody knows that story. So I’m thinking that’s a really important aspect of our complexity work is how to interpret those stories and share them with people.
So I'm thinking that's a really important aspect of our complexity work is how to interpret those stories and share them with people.
Well, and to ensure there’s… sorry, go Beth.
There’s certainly something about the weight that we give to stories and almost a gradient at which they’re accepted. So the more you’re exposed to the story, the more likely you are to accept it. And so that’s where it kind of connects back to that thing you said about me about having the token Indigenous person at a conference. That as much as it might feel a bit crappy and tokenistic that, at the same time, it’s almost a double bind in that you’re giving platform to your voice and you’re so much more than that. But that case of, you’ve got to see it to be it, that at that point, you’re an ambassador and an inspirer.
But as to how much weight and credibility an audience gives you when you're coming from a different set of ways of knowing or kind of epistemic resources, in that sense. And I think that, for me, I'd be really keen to dig in deeper amongst us about this idea of the invisible helpers…
But as to how much weight and credibility an audience gives you when you’re coming from a different set of ways of knowing or kind of epistemic resources, in that sense. And I think that, for me, I’d be really keen to dig in deeper amongst us about this idea of the invisible helpers or, or from, from Tyson’s culture at the moment I’m a bit more sleep talk than I am Sand Talk. So how dream time and some of the less rational knowledge sources and how they play out and the credibility and the value, the knowledge they’re actually given. I’d love to hear more about that from, from your cultures.
Well, yes. Only if you tell me about your Goblins
Tyson Yunkaporta:
We just got the same little people’s stories as everybody in the world. It’s very strange, there must have been something kind of small. There must have been Homo Floresiensis kind of everywhere at some stage, because we basically just have those same stories that everybody has and sometimes they’re good people, but they’re always tricky and clever people and you’ve got to watch out for them.
So how dream time and some of the less rational knowledge sources and how they play out and the credibility and the value, the knowledge they're actually given.
So there’s a bit of a double story happening here because I know Beth, you’d like for us to delve into the spirituality side of things. But we also wanted to have a look at decolonisation and the kind of branding of decolonisation 2.0, that’s kind of going on in the world right now, and where that’s taking us. I’d like us to try and weave those two things together in the last half here, in the same way that we wove tea into our opening acknowledgements.
So as much as possible, let’s reference spirit. And let’s weave a bit of a narrative that’s sort of tying together the past and the present and potentially the future with what decolonisation was, what it is, what it will be, but we’ll try and fuse that together.
So I do have a bit of a provocation I can read out to you for that one, which should get us all debating pretty viciously. I imagine it’ll take me about two minutes to read it before I do Dave is there anything else you needed to throw into the pot? So the spoon will stand up in it.
We platform and amplify thinkers who are culturally anticolonial, but fiscally colonial.
It’s interesting that the little people aren’t part of the Welsh legends, they’re part of Irish and Scottish, but they’re not in Welsh legends. So that is an interesting difference.
But I think the narrative thing is when you’re brought up in Britain, you’re brought up with this, it’s almost like an excuse. We had an empire, but it was better for people to be under the English empire than the French or the Spanish. And that’s still a dominant story. And it’s a story which doesn’t challenge the whole concept of empire. It says empire was inevitable and you lucky to be under the English one. Yeah. And I think that there’s a problem on that because people don’t challenge those sort of stories. They’re so dominant in the sort of underlying substrate of sort of films and books and everything else that are difficult to escape from.
We copped that as well, you’re lucky it wasn’t the Dutch, just lucky.
All right, I’m going to read you this bit. This is a draft from the Sand Talk sequel that I’m trying to write, right now. It’ll take about two minutes, but it’s something that’s really been troubling me. And, like I said, it’s a draft it probably won’t even it into the final thing. But it’s something that’s been troubling me a lot and I’m just trying to get my head around it. I think we can weave some story around this. Get those tricky little people running around the edges. All right. So here we go:
The last time Indigenous people worldwide were conscripted to decolonise the globe, it was post world war and the new leaders of the world needed our help in divesting Europe of its empires. Although Britain somehow kept Australia as a consolation prize. The goal was to facilitate the scaling of a Global Imperial Conglomerate under North America. This process of liberation seldom went well for the decolonisers, who usually found themselves shot or exiled after the heavy lifting was done, replaced with extremist despots and corporate puppets installed by the new sheriff in town. I’m kind of glad Australian Indigenous people weren’t invited to the party at that time, but we are the belle of the ball, in this latest revolutionary reboot, which is nothing like decolonisation classic at all. This fabulous new zeitgeist is bespoke individualised, factional, and corporatised we’re decolonised through radical inclusion in the machine by demanding representation in the colony itself, becoming the colony, while we renovate our lives in a postcolonial style. It’s an aesthetic we apply to our minds, our disciplines, our organizations, and media. Extracted from a few tragic, but trivialised data points in our exotic demographic profiles and histories. We’re encouraged to lend our native eye to redecoration efforts everywhere, as long as it’s in front of the curtain. Nothing structural is allowed. We platform and amplify thinkers who are culturally anticolonial, but fiscally colonial.
No, these new masters have no home, no Country. They are super wealthy refugees from the great nations they've gutted and rendered irrelevant…
We can have more Indigenous leaders in real estate, commerce and politics, but just as long as we focus on representation and never notice the machinery of property, finance and governance. With old school decolonisation, at least the Cui Bono was clear and we could all see who the new masters would be. I’m not sure who the new engineers of this revolution are, unless China and Russia are really half as clever as many liberal pundits claim them to be. I suspect it’s a lot more banal than that. We’ve finally arrived to dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools; but he doesn’t live there anymore. He’s buying up water rights and spearheading land grabs elsewhere. He hopes we’ll tear his house down because it’s insured for more than he could get from selling the place. His nephew, who’s into social justice and deep ecology is using the house now, holding a frat party, spiritual retreat there. And he invites us all in for vodka shots and ayahuasca. No, these new masters have no home, no Country. They are super wealthy refugees from the great nations they’ve gutted and rendered irrelevant, building leaky life rafts from decentralised autonomous organizations, making a crossing to digital realms without Westphalian borders in a bid to keep all their shit while the world floods and boils.”
Anyway, it goes on, but basically, yeah, that’s my rant. And these are the things that are concerning me. I was kind of… What’s the opposite of inspired? Anyway, that. I was that by COP26. And just how basically the theme of COP26, it should have been a subtitle, was Centering Native Voices, while we essentially just go, “Yeah, we’re prepared to do anything as long as it’s only pricing carbon.” Anyway, let’s just open things up. Old story, new story, decolonisation, moving right through with the little people running alongside and plenty of folklore. Jump in beautiful people.
Who’s first?
Given there’s a silence, at the risk of being told off in the chat again, all right. We did a fascinating project for the US government on the collapse of empires. And we looked at the Chinese, the Roman, the English, the American Empire. Yeah? And we had to exclude the Chinese because they don’t conquer. They let the barbarians conquer them, then they make them Chinese. And that’s what they’ve been doing with capitalism. So if you look at the Chinese expansion strategy, it’s to own natural resources for their internal purposes. They’re not trying to impose their ideology. And I would argue one of the reasons China didn’t turn up in Glasgow is they can’t be bothered. They’ve already got their own strategy on global warming. It’s probably more effective than anything in the West anyway, because they’re planning long-term. And why would they bother playing those sort of games? Right?
Whereas, the American and English Empires collapse at the point where, it’s quite fascinating, where they suddenly realise people don’t want to be Roman, or don’t want to be English, or don’t want to be American, because they’ve built on the assumption that everybody wants to be like them. And, yeah, the Indian mutiny destroyed that for the English, they couldn’t sustain it thereafter. And I think at the moment you’ve now got the sort of… And I think you’re completely right, I love that passage. Fundamentally, you’ve now got six or seven high net worth individuals who basically run the world. And the danger is, and this is one of the big nasty scenarios, they might decide to take geoengineering into their own hands. And they’re all techno folk, they’re all techno fetishists. They believe the solution to the world and everything rests, as you said, in digital technology. So I think that’s the problem. We’ve lost an empire to challenge. There’s nobody to rebel against. Yeah? And therefore, there’s no means of gaining governance back because there isn’t anything to fight against.
And that's what they've been doing with capitalism. So if you look at the Chinese expansion strategy, it's to own natural resources for their internal purposes.
Oh, Melanie, Beth, jump in there.
Well, I was reading about the concept of social media and this idea of a lot of us grew up with an enemy through the nuclear threat, and before that the world wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, I mean, and there was always something that motivated us in terms of trying to do the right thing and take on the evil somewhere. And this author I was reading, a sociologist, I think he was from Europe, he talked about the evil on the keyboard, like how it’s dispersed now. And so we can be so cruel to each other, the trolls and the things, and it’s affecting mental health and it’s doing all of these things.
And so you can kind of think of an enemy, but the nation state enemy. And now we have the corporate, the corporate gods who are manipulating us in ways that even when we become aware of it, you go, “Yeah, I guess I’m contributing.”
So when you become aware of self and system and the role that you’re playing, your carbon footprint, for example, even in the north here, the privilege that we have, that all of that becomes something that it’s very difficult to cope with. I mean, it adds to the anxiety, and I’m just thinking about the mental health and the anxiety levels of folks, to sort of say, “Okay, well, then what do I do about the billionaires that are getting in spaceships and are going up and touristing in space, and the colonisation of space?”. I’ve been on a couple of webinars listening to people talk about that, the colonisation of space and the idea of, we’ve destroyed our Earth Mother, and so now we’re going to go find somewhere else that we can destroy.
We've lost an empire to challenge. There's nobody to rebel against…there's no means of gaining governance back because there isn't anything to fight against.
And I think in that passage, I mean, I love this idea of the bespoke and the decolonisation. In that sense, the de was always the binary of reacting to something. And that binary, you felt like you got somewhere when you were getting buy-in. And then the buy-in was, “Oh, okay. So I’m,” for example, “a white person and I’m privileged and I’m wealthy.” But that in itself is not the end point. Now what do we do with that? And I think that’s really a key kind of intervention point in the systems is how we relate to each other with a certain maturity, I guess. And that’s part of that Seventh Fire prophecy, and that involves the spirit. And I think when the Elders talk about spirituality and spirit, for example… So I am moving home and I’m leaving something called Turtle Island Institute. It’s going to continue in the world. But what one of the Elders had said to me was, “But you have to make sure that you tell the turtle spirit, who’s been helping you,” which is I have a opwaagan, a pipe, but for my work, I also have a turtle rattle shaker. And the turtle spirit gifted those to me through ceremonies. Through six years of building that institute, I was in ceremony. And she said to me, Eleanor Skead from Wauzhushk Onigum, she said, “You need to make sure that the turtle spirit knows that you’re not giving anything away. You’re not giving away your teaching lodge.”
And so for me, the teaching lodge is with me, it’s sort of within me. And she said, “And your home is not just home up north. It’s in that zhiishiigwan, It’s in that rattle.” And maybe I’ll just share quickly what she said one time we were watching a video that we had filmed. And the video featured that rattle, that mikinaak zhiishiigwan, but it also featured an Anishinaabe spirit horse. And so as a decision in the editing suite, the director had put a picture of the horse, because it was a beautiful shot to open, the horse walking through a forest. And we all watched it, a group of us. And I thought, “That’s a beautiful five minute kind of film.” And then Eleanor watched it, and she comes from a place of spirit, and she said, “Out of respect, maybe you should show the rattle first and then the horse, because the horse medicine is not the main medicine. It’s the turtle medicine. It’s the mikinaak zhiishiigwan that you are showcasing in that piece.”
I've been on a couple of webinars listening to people talk about that, the colonisation of space and the idea of, we've destroyed our Earth Mother, and so now we're going to go find somewhere else that we can destroy.
And so to me, that’s when we think about these things, when we think about this whole idea of decolonisation, when it comes from a place of spirit, what does it mean? Because it’s very different than the intellectual. It comes from a place of both, I think, heart and mind. And that’s what that rattle is, that teaching. And I won’t get into it here because it’ll take a long time, but there’s an [Indigenous language], a legend of that rattle. And I’ll just say, when we were told in a sweat lodge ceremony to make that rattle, it was to be red on the left and white on the right, because the left and the red represented heart and the white represented mind. And it was to help me understand that spirit does come through the heart and the mind. Because I had dismissed the mind. I had dismissed intellectualism as not a gift. And I didn’t realise that the spirits talk both through my heart but also through my mind. And so when I write a paper, that’s spiritual work, even though we spend a lot of time decolonising that writing and saying, “I’m going to write, but this is a decolonised version of what I’m writing.” And I’m writing a dissertation right now and that’s what I’m doing. And then part of me is also just saying, “You know what? I am writing from a place of spirit. And so whatever I write is going to be my story because it’s my birthright to write that story, to teach from my spiritual perspective what I have to offer into the world.”
Although I have seen you write in one paper that’s two, in a two row of them, which is pretty cool structurally. And I think that’s the key is with decolonisation, if you’re not somehow coming into the structure of things, then it’s useless. It’s just window dressing. It’s just poetry. It’ll just make you feel better, but it’s not really doing anything at all. Beth, what are your thoughts?
And your home is not just home up north. It's in that zhiishiigwan. It's in that rattle.
For me, to reflect on Tyson’s provocation. I think that the saying that captures it the best is the idea of selling security for free, oh, sorry, sowing the seeds of insecurity for free in order to be able to sell security. And this is something that it is a privilege in our sense in that we have experienced this at least once before, so that we do have some idea as to what to expect and some of the kind of carried forward knowledge from that, where it’s not been completely destroyed or we’ve completely sided with the oppressor.
And so actually thinking about how some of that, that precolonial or precolonised knowledge still does exist in its small pockets and how that can be not shared in the commodifying it sense but certainly drawn upon and reinvigorated in a more modern sense. And for me, the spiritual aspect of that is, again, really, really prevalent there in that people devalue the invisible or irrational forms of knowledge. And I think to decolonise, it depends upon what level of privilege you’re giving that back knowledge as opposed to stuff that fits the kind of current mold or the colonialist mold.
Well, it’s a bit like, people will focus on all their entities of L-O-R-E, lore, of your folklore, and all the lovely characters that are populating that folklore. They’ll focus on everything but the landscape, everything but the topography of the place. So if you have this sort of really Western imperial kind of cosmology that you’re using to try and view, you’re trying to populate that with all these exotic bits and pieces you find, then nothing quite works. It’s that lovely phrase that I keep hearing in these circles with people who are doing all the first principles thinking and all the new atheists and all these amazing minds that are occupying the complexity space.
Because if your cosmology, if that's the way you're conceptualising space as something that, it's infinite but at the same time must be filled otherwise nothing may be tethered, nothing may be located, nothing may Be unless it is hitched in some way to the center.
I keep hearing this phrase, “Turtles all the way down.” You guys heard that a fair bit? And it brings it back to this turtle magic here, Melanie. Yeah. That’s that idea that somebody, a woman who believed that the world rested on a turtle’s back, and somebody asked her, “Well, what’s the turtle standing on?” And she thought about it and said, “Well, it’s turtles all the way down.” And so they refer to that as, whenever there’s that kind of logic going on, they’ll say, “Turtles all the way down.” I don’t know. I think it’s what they would also call a thought terminating cliche, that one. Because if your cosmology, if that’s the way you’re conceptualising space as something that, it’s infinite but at the same time must be filled otherwise nothing may be tethered, nothing may be located, nothing may Be unless it is hitched in some way to the center, and that somehow the center, which is the human, which is the world, which is the city or whatever else, the center is the only thing that is hitched, anyway, yeah, that doesn’t work with…
So anybody’s interested in finding out more about the rattle and about the turtle business and about Melanie and I with our stories overlapping with those things, that there is a three hour yarn that we had that’s up on my podcast, The Other Others, from way back. I think it’s called Indigenous Knowledge Systems Thinking or something. And we did talk a lot about that. But for me, that hexagonal business of spirit, that sort of strongest shape in existence and most efficient shape for fitting everything together and keeping everything in the right place, that hexagonal kind of pattern, lore, dreaming that comes out of honeybee, that comes out of turtle, that that is a fractal pattern of spirit and relation and creation, that just, yeah, that is everything and that goes everywhere as far as everything goes. So, yes, it’s turtles all the way down, my brothers. It’s turtles all the way down and all the way up and all the way everywhere. Yeah. That’s how I feel about that.
Those fairies and gremlins exist in a landscape, in a spirit, in a topography of spirit that is patterned differently. And you have to have the ground first before you can put the figure in our way and in our logic.
But, yeah, you can’t just decolonise one small patch of space that is anchored to this weird imperial cosmology just by populating it with a few gremlins and fairies from our cultures. Those fairies and gremlins exist in a landscape, in a spirit, in a topography of spirit that is patterned differently. And you have to have the ground first before you can put the figure in our way and in our logic. So, that’s the way that has to go. Hey, Beth, I felt like you actually had a B, a part B to where you were going there, and that you just finished A.
I completely lost whatever that one was.
Oh man, I’m sorry. I saw you looking down, so I thought you had a note. So I thought that would be-
No, I was reading the chat.
God. Hey, can you keep us across the chat? Because I actually can’t read it, because, as you know, I lost my glasses yesterday, so I can’t read anything that’s going on in the chat. If anybody wants to swear at me, now’s the time because I can’t even see it.
You’ve escaped it so far, Tyson. Terry Pratchett, who’s a fantasy author, actually is relevant there because he satirised turtles all the way down with the idea that the world is a disc on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a turtle. And I mean, if you go into Pratchett, I’ve had privilege of knowing him through Jack Cohen, his final heroine, Tiffany, it’s worth people reading the Tiffany books because Tiffany is a shepherdess who is linked in with her land and with her people. Yeah? And she’s actually his inheritor in his final book about his death, where he’s basically passing on to Tiffany. That’s actually worth looking at. There are things within modern literature which pull back on some of these things.
There’s also an interesting fact, one of things the Chinese are doing, which I think we should copy in the West, is they’re limiting access to the internet for young people. They’re basically saying, “You’ve got to spend some time in the outdoors and doing things.” And I mean, the libertarians in the States, who are driven by the needs of the big tech companies, are saying, “This is appalling infringement on liberty.” It seems to me like an appalling infringement on liberty to prevent young people spending time with other people and with the land in terms of the way it works. Yeah?
I was hunting down a poem, so I wasn’t just reading for the sake of it. This is, if you don’t know, R.S. Thomas, who’s an Anglo-Welsh poet. He’s probably one of the greatest in modern poets. And I won’t read it because I couldn’t do it justice, but it’s worth looking up his poem Reservoirs, because in the Welsh tradition, acts of parliament were taken to destroy whole valleys with their communities, to drown them, to provide water to the big cities in Liverpool and Birmingham. Yeah?
…people are creating this veneer across human reality which actually prevents us connecting with the land, with people, with other people. But it looks serene, right?
And as I say, just to take one phrase out of that, I’m just trying to think, “Reservoirs, they are the subconscious of a people, troubled far down with gravestones, chapels, villages even. The serenity of their expression revolts me. It’s a pose.” And I love that because the reservoir has now become a place of pilgrimage and beauty and water sports, but underneath it is a whole culture, yeah, which has actually been drowned and destroyed. And I think that’s what we’re also seeing with the internet, I’m jumping around a little bit, is people are creating this veneer across human reality which actually prevents us connecting with the land, with people, with other people. But it looks serene, right? And for me, that’s deeply problematic.
False serenity. Yeah. Beth, I was actually really keen to hear more too on your thoughts of the decolonisation 2.0 pluses and minuses. The Centering Native Voices, et cetera. I know you feel torn around that because there’s that, “Yes, it’s good. Finally, we can speak,” but can we? Because if you say the wrong thing at COP26, they’ll take away your invitation for the following year, by the way. Which did happen to quite a few native peoples there who actually wanted to talk about something real rather than, yeah, this idea that, “80%, right, 80% of the remaining biodiversity on the planet, right, is on lands managed by Indigenous people. So the best thing we can do is send native voices. If we do that, we’re protecting the biodiversity, which is stopping climate change.” So, that’s how they kind of jujitsu their way around, like going, “Hey, we’re sequestering carbon by centering these voices.”
But I was interviewed for that and I started talking about the reality of these lands that apparently are under our control. Because I keep hearing all this stuff like, “Oh yeah, two thirds of Australia is under native title kind of thing and is managed by Indigenous people.” So I was talking about the realities of that on the ground, that there’s almost no exclusive native title and there’s almost nowhere that’s just looked after by us in our old way. So this rubbish about 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity being managed by us, that’s just not true.
Yeah. It would be great if you could let us do that. That would be awesome, but it’s not true. Anyway, I started saying that. And you know when they grab their ear like that and you know someone’s shouting from another room in their ear hole through their earpiece? That happened and that got shut down real quick. And I imagine there was a fair bit of that at COP, from the reports that I’ve heard. COP, what were they? Anyway, Beth, what are your thoughts on decolonisation 2.0, on the window dressing, on the greenwashing, on the, Melanie, redwashing, everything going on in the world?
people are being empowered and under the guise of economic development, sustainable economic development, to conform to non, I would say, certainly nontraditional exploitation of land and natural resources
I think that particularly from a Welsh kind of policy and cultural point of view right now that to me, it seems like almost a self-imposed sense of commodification. That people are being empowered and under the guise of economic development, sustainable economic development, to conform to non, I would say, certainly nontraditional exploitation of land and natural resources, but on the basis that that’s better than coal mining. So because it’s better than what we’ve had, is somehow good, but not necessarily something that… Anything’s better than, as you’d mentioned earlier… And I’m getting very, very tired because it’s getting quite late here, so that the depth of my intellectual output might be a bit limited right now.
But yeah, this idea of a step change that so long as whatever you’re doing now is better than what was there before, then is given the gold star and is probably by no means as good as it could be, or as good as it possibly has been at different points in time. It might be better than the immediate past, but what preceded that? And are there things that could be drawn upon or reinvigorated from there with this idea of without being fully path dependent?
Just because at a point in history things changed, doesn’t mean that we still don’t have access to the knowledge that preceded that or the ways of doing things that have preceded that. So questions about linearity of time in that sense.
And are there things that could be drawn upon or reinvigorated from there with this idea of without being fully path dependent?
Yeah, it was Douglas Rushkoff. He was telling me he has this really great phrase for that. And he calls it, “Retrieving forward.” So it’s not about this idea of that you’re returning to this great and glorious past, because that’s always folly. You look at all the worst movements in history, there were people who were trying to return to some kind of golden age. But he talks about yeah, retrieving forward these things, as a way of uniting, unifying past and future into a kind of a different model of time, that works a bit better than that.
And I could see that structure yeah, in what you were just saying. That controlling of the past through seizing the narrative and letting everybody know how awful the past was, so they can appreciate the present. They’ll say, “Oh, look at…Mining was awful, wasn’t it? This is heaps better than mining.” And then it’s contracts to control the future.
And so, of course, we’re told that we’re getting this self-determination all the time. But it’s not self-determination. It’s self-administration, like you do in death camps with prisoners. You get other prisoners to do the head count at the start of the day and the end of the day, while people are dropping like flies. You get them to do all the worst parts of the administration.
And I find that with all this self-determination, this bogus self-determination that we supposedly have, that it’s more self-administration than anything. And it is about controlling that narrative of the past and seizing control of the present by then also locking people into contracts about the future. Yeah.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
Melanie and Dave, can we try and bundle up this time? Have you got a time bundle for us, Melanie, somehow?
Go ahead, Dave
…how do you break path dependency? It's one of the key complexity concepts. The concept that what's happened in the past determines what will happen in the future.
Okay, I’ll go first. Then you can finish up, Melanie, because we’re coming to the end. Getting towards the end, anyway.
I think there was a big subject which came up in a webinar that myself and Nora Bateson did, which was last week, which was absolutely fascinating. But one of the things we were looking at and which is a major area of my work at the moment, is how do you break path dependency?
It’s one of the key complexity concepts. The concept that what’s happened in the past determines what will happen in the future. And the trouble is the number of bifurcations available to us is going down. So one of the big things I’m interested in is how… I mean, this is taking this concept of entanglement. And I don’t want to take time in a linear sense here. I want to take time in a sense of meaning.
How do we entangle people’s timelines so that they can see different micro-connections and effectively jump out of path dependencies? And I think that’s actually where we need to go with narrative. Somebody was asking in the line about how do we create a new narrative? If you asked a question that way, you’re actually playing into the hands of power because you will never create a new narrative. You have to nurture micro narratives.
You have to nurture micro narratives. And they have to be the micro narratives of empathy with other people and with the land.
And they have to be the micro narratives of empathy with other people and with the land. And that’s what we need to start to do. And it’s only once we do that, that things like COP will work. Because until the dispositional stage is such that people will accept sacrifice, no politician will make the sacrifices that we need.
So for me, this concept of entanglement around points of coherence, breaking path dependency, is one of the big things we’ve got to work on. And it’s going to be micro level work, not macro level work.
That was beautiful. By the way, that hit the spot.
Nora helped enormously with that. It’s a lot of fun to… Well, you know that, Tyson. Nora’s just fun to talk with.
When I first heard about path dependencies, it was the story of the recipe where you cut part of the roast off and put it in the oven. And then someone three generations ahead says, “Why do we cut part of the roast off?” “Well, because great, great grandma had a really small stove and a very small pot, and so she always had to cut part of the roast off.” And then we continue to do that. And to me, that brings up the idea of storytelling and those micro narratives.
And I remember with some Haida Elders, we had been talking about food sovereignty and our foods, which are a big part of our culture, have been drowned. Our wild rice, for example, they’ve been destroyed. And so getting access to these foods, someone had said, “Well, maybe we should write a recipe book. A recipe.”
And the Haida people are on the coast. And these Elders said, “When the tide is out, the table is set,” is one of their sayings. And they had an ancestor plate and we did this beautiful ceremony. But when someone brought up the idea of doing a recipe book, they said, “Well, that doesn’t…That’s kind of…” Formulaic, I guess, is not the word they used, but I think that’s what they were trying to say. It doesn’t really teach you to be on the land, to understand how to be in relationship with those beings, with that food. And I think about the stories and the narratives when I mention that movie. Who’s got the power to shift that? But it’s also those conversations that we have with each other. And telling cultural stories or… I’m going to, because we don’t have a lot of time left, but I’ll just share a really short version of the story that I’ve shared many times with people.
I was offered a gift when I was on the East Coast of Canada, and it included a little mishomis, a stone, a rock, like you would see a pebble at the beach, and some tobacco. And I went home to our sweat lodge with my Auntie, Lynn Skeed, and I gifted her that tobacco because this group on the East Coast had a question.
And when we were in the ceremony, she came out and she said, “Oh, that little rock that manitou, that spirit, wants to go home. He’s from the other coast. He’s from the West Coast of Canada,” which is 2,000, whatever. 2,500 miles long. And she said, “He’s wearing a volcano hat, this little manitou, this spirit.” And I thought, “Oh, volcano hat.” And she’s blind, my auntie. And so I thought about it and I realised that’s the West Coast people in their Cedar hats that look like this.
And I said, “He must have a Cedar hat on.” And she gave the stone back to me, this little manitou, this little person. And it was a little man. And she said, “He wants you to take him home.” And I was going to the West Coast about a month later, and I had this little being with me. And I asked some Elders in [Language] First Nation. I said, “Can you meet me tomorrow? I have something to ask you.” And the next morning, they called me in my room very early. And Talackten, he said to me, “Are you asking us for a ceremony?” And I said, “Yes, I am, because I woke up singing a new song.” And I said, “Well, I have a little manitou here. And he’s from here, and he’s coming home.” “We’ll pick you up. We have to start our preparations before the sun comes up.”
And so they picked me up and we went out to the water, to the ocean, and they put medicines on me and their culture. And they sang songs, and we had picked up a big Cedar bow and we put it on the water. And then we put that little manitou there, and he went into the water. And the Elder came back and she said to me, “Look, he gave you his hat.” And she held up a little seashell that was this shaped. And I still have that, this little hat.
And then we walked up to the beach and there were four eagles circling above. And we were all crying because it was so moving, because she said, “His ancestors came here to welcome him home.” And it was so moving, and I grieved. I had such beautiful company with this little manitou, and then I brought him home.
And I think those are the micro relationships each individual needs to have with the landscape, with the spirit beings, with the language, that that is how we're going to get to some collective resonance.
And I share that story with so many people, because with the disenchantment and the irrational nature of the enlightenment coming out of all of that scientific, chronically overdeveloped reason, my uncle Ben has called it, people are ashamed of those relationships. And I think those are the micro relationships each individual needs to have with the landscape, with the spirit beings, with the language, that that is how we’re going to get to some collective resonance. If you want to call it decolonisation. But really, it’s a reconnection to each other, and to the world and all of our relatives. Yeah.
Collective connective resonance, I think yeah, is a really good takeaway. And is probably a really good way to rethink what decolonisation may be. I would love to see things just arise organically that don’t need to have a name. I always say that, “Once you give it a name, it’s finished.”
I would love to see things just arise organically that don't need to have a name. I always say that once you give it a name, it's finished.
And I like the idea when I hear about the relations that Dave is talking about, and how this emergence occurs. It’s like that thing that can’t be measured. It’s that leap that goes across from the tangible world of cells, and neurons, and brain chemistry to consciousness.
Western science is happy to say that, “Consciousness is simply something arising from your biology and your chemistry,” but they’re not quite sure how it makes that leap across from one world to the other. And in our cosmologies, there’s several ways of describing that. It’s that those worlds aren’t as separate as you think, in one way. But then in the other way, a lot of the metaphors we use for that are around spirit and magic.
And I think when Dave talks about building those new narratives, that you can’t have them be built. That they do have to arise. But you know what? There are some laws of attraction going on there, because the most attractive narratives and the ones that tend to aggregate into the big stories and the most successful memes and narratives, these are the ones that include spirit, that include magic.
… the most attractive narratives and the ones that tend to aggregate into the big stories and the most successful memes and narratives, these are the ones that include spirit, that include magic.
And it’s probably the reason for the success, the overwhelming success of the extremely unpopular ultra right neo conservative ideologies on the planet that almost nobody agrees with. But these are doing very, very well. It’s because they have a good story. And it’s because their story includes spirit, their story includes magic, and nobody else’s does.
They tend to kill a lot of followers. Even in the Aboriginal community right now, we have a lot of QANON and sovereign citizen kind of movements coming up in the Aboriginal community in Australia. And I know in the Maori community, these are very attractive narratives. And they’re attractive because they have magic, they have spirit.
And Dave, you can see my daughter… You can hear her banging on the door here. She’s coming back for that cell key. She’s coming back for that mermaid again, bro’s. See, she’s calling out for mermaid, banging on the door. That was from a previous webinar. All right.
I think the thing that religion did is… I mean, if you go back before the religious war, so you go back say, before the reformation in Europe, priests were mediators, not enforcers of doctrine, because religion was just part of the way that people lived their lives. And then it became an ideological matter.
And I mentioned that. I can’t remember the name of the Italian philosophy. He basically railed against the enlightenment because he said, “You’ve got all these wonderful discoveries, but you’re throwing out everything else.” Yeah. It’s why I never liked sociology, because they thought they could replace philosophy with Newtonian physics for people. And that quasi determinism, I think is a real problem.
And I think, I mean, Braiding Sweetgrass we’ve mentioned a few times. The concept of braiding, intertwine and entanglement. And I think we’ve got to find ways to disconnect from time-based dependency on change. And I’m still not quite sure what I mean by that or what’s needed, but we’ve got to find ways to do that. Right?
I think it's about engagement. It's about going and doing things together in small ways. And I think we've lost that capacity to walk together and talk.
And it’s not a meditative thing. It’s not a sort of faux Buddhist thing. I think it’s about engagement. It’s about going and doing things together in small ways. And I think we’ve lost that capacity to walk together and talk. All we want to do now is talk to a screen. And the simpler narratives of walking and talking, we need to rediscover.
Final words on phase shift, decolonisation 3.0, et cetera, from the ladies to close?
Come on, Beth. You introduced it. And you have deep expertise in this, right? I’ve heard you be quite profound, so please trot it out. Right?
It’s half past 10 at night here, and I’ve been up since six. The creative juices aren’t quite flowing.
Oh, half past 10. That must be terrible. You don’t even have children, do you? You have babies?
No.
Tyson Yunkaporta:
You don’t even know. “Oh, it’s half past 10.” That’s when you start work. That’s when you start to work.
There’s a new book advertised and I’m going to send it to you. It’s, “How to teach your dog North Welsh.” I feel you need it. Right? I’m going to get that sent to you. It came out this week. It’s a brilliant book.
I prefer my bad one. It’s funnier. Okay, Beth. Beth, come on. Rouse yourself, girl. It’s only 10:30. You’re starting work.
Yeah. We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Final points on decolonisation for me. I’m going to give that back.
Cognitive sovereignty to Beth.
Pardon?
Cognitive sovereignty. Build on that. Go on. Because that’s the link to it.
Yeah. Dave prompting for cognitive sovereignty, and that’s people’s right to self determine their own ways of making sense of the world, and to, I suppose, to not default to societal expectations on privileging certain narratives or ways of knowing.
But again, I think I want to reflect back to the previous yarn on what we ended with here and this idea of enabling us. That’s not to say that ultimately the hegemon is wrong within its own confines. But the spilling out to other people’s back gardens is the… If you want to keep your garden the way you keep yours, at least respect our choice to keep ours the way we do, even if we don’t choose to mow the lawn in that sense.
Comes back to that thing you arose in a previous one about good and bad neighbours. Yeah. With that poem you read to us. That’s the thing that sticks out in my mind more than anything else in all of these so far, which had been amazing.
Melanie, as you flee back to your homelands, as you race away from the Turtle Island Institute and head back to your homelands, parting words from amidst all your boxes as you’re packed?
And so I've been exploring decolonisation from the perspective of who's going to let me go home, but still work with me?
Mm-hmm. From amidst all of the boxes. I think I will just share what an Elder shared with me about home. And on a webinar earlier this week with a group of storytellers, everybody was asked to talk about home, and it was such a divisive conversation for the people living in the diaspora and the those who couldn’t go home.
And what the Elder had said to me about that zhiishiigwan, that rattle is, she said, “That’s your home.” And so I am home here, but heading home to the Homelands, it’s special for me because in this country, and I think it might be the same in Australia, to get educated, you have to go to the city. And then you get offered a good job and to teach at a university.
And so I’ve been exploring decolonisation from the perspective of who’s going to let me go home, but still work with me? And I think that’s been really a part of me, and maybe that’s what I’ll share, is that I am heading home and it’s been tough to get back there for all kinds of reasons.
And we call it, “The brain drain,” our young people when they get educated. And so I’m really thrilled to be doing that and happy to be part of this yarn. And I leave you with that, the rattle, the zhiishiigwan. There’s 13 moons on the turtle’s back, and there’s 13 manitou. There’s 13 stones that are inside that rattle. And when you shake it side to side, it’s healing.
And I think healing self and systems, that’s how we are going to get to where we’re trying to go. And I think there’s a tremendous amount of healing that needs to happen. And all of these helpers, that’s who we ask. It’s not only the human beings. There’s so many other helpers that are on this journey with us. Thank you for having .
So we’re happy to do the work, but let us go home.
That maybe that’s the message to the empire from this last webinar, hey?
Let us go home. We’ll do a bit of work for you. No worries.
And all of these helpers, that's who we ask. It's not only the human beings. There's so many other helpers that are on this journey with us.
It’s a good compromise.
It was lovely to talk to you again. And that’s a wrap, beautiful people. I believe it’s half past. Is that our time done?
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