Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal Australian scholar, writer and woodcarver, a member of the Apalech clan of Western Cape York, and a senior research fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne. His book Sand Talk (2019) makes the case that Indigenous ways of thinking, built on relationship, pattern and place, are not relics of the past but a living way of knowing that the world now badly needs. Its picture of a world in which nothing exists outside relationship, and its account of how civilisation broke away from the patterns of creation, sit close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s animism and its teaching on the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.
Who is Tyson Yunkaporta? #
An Aboriginal thinker who writes from inside the university whilst challenging much of what it stands for. In Sand Talk he introduces himself as a member of the Apalech clan from Western Cape York in far north Queensland, into which he was adopted under Aboriginal Law some twenty years before he wrote the book; that Law asks him to take on only the names, roles and genealogies of Apalech membership, and he honours it.1 He is a researcher, educator and woodcarver, a senior research fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne, where he founded the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, and formerly a senior lecturer there teaching Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Sand Talk was published in 2019; Right Story, Wrong Story followed in 2024, and Snake Talk, written with Megan Kelleher, in 2025.2
For tens of thousands of years before colonisation, Aboriginal peoples lived by hunting, gathering and fishing, and actively managed their land, not least with fire.3 Today Aboriginal people live in cities and towns as well as in communities on Country, and the book moves between all of them, from remote communities to universities and prisons.
What is Sand Talk? #
A book of yarns. In Aboriginal culture yarning is more than conversation. It is a structured way of sharing knowledge through story, often with images drawn on the ground, or in the air, to make a point or map a place. That drawing is sand talk.4 Each chapter is built around an object Yunkaporta has carved and a yarn with named people: EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this, artists, academics, prisoners, Sami reindeer herders. He thinks by talking with others, not alone, and he deliberately does not hand over a system; the book’s last mnemonic is not a carving but the reader’s own hand, which anyone can carry around.
Its argument is that the ways of thinking that grew up over deep time in land-based cultures are a working technology for knowing the world, not folklore to be preserved. All humans, he points out, evolved within complex, land-based cultures over deep time, developing brains capable of extraordinary complexity, and most people today have been displaced from them, “a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land, but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it”.5
What does it mean that nothing exists outside a relationship? #
That everything has to be understood in its connections. “In Aboriginal worldviews,” Yunkaporta writes, “nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables.” Knowledge is not stored in one person’s head but held between people, places and senior knowledge-keepers; something learnt with another person sits in the relationship between the two of them, and is remembered best together. He calls this kinship-mind.6
From it comes pattern thinking. Walking Country with a group of young people, the Western Australian Elder Noel Nannup could predict rain to the minute and the moment flying ants would burst from the ground. Asked to explain how, he taught them to look beyond things to the connections between them, and then beyond the connections to the patterns they make.7 Behind both lies what Yunkaporta calls First Law. Nothing is created or destroyed, it only moves and changes, so creation is always in motion, and humans have to move with it as the custodial species, or damage the whole system and doom themselves.8
The world in this view is alive. Visiting a great arrangement of carved and balanced stones, he writes that the place is not a monument but inhabited: “Every rock is animate and sentient”, and in his people’s worldview that is true of all rocks.9
What does Yunkaporta say went wrong? #
A demand for simplicity and control. The stories that shape modern thinking describe a battle between good and evil springing from an original sin, but for Yunkaporta these are metaphors for something harder to explain, a relatively recent demand that simplicity and order be imposed on the complexity of creation, which he traces to an ancient seed of narcissism.10 Settlements and the civilisations they spawn are not permanent, and the Elders’ stories teach that if you do not move with the land, the land will move you.10
Holding all this in place is the narrative of progress, which rests on what he calls the myth of primitivism, “the widely held assumption that life before the industrial era was brief, brutish, savage and simple”.11 He is just as wary of the opposite error. He catches himself romanticising a Palaeolithic past, a habit he calls just as prejudiced as the myths he criticises, and he warns readers who would like to treat his people’s teachings as a universal, ancient truth confirming their own ideals that Aboriginal culture has other layers and complexities, today as in the past.12 See Isn’t the Fall just noble savage romanticism?
What does Sand Talk say about taking other peoples’ knowledge? #
Much, and bluntly. In one chapter, in his telling, Sami shamans shared their fly agaric practices with outsiders early in the last century, only to see elements of those rituals taken into European culture in sacrilegious ways, ending up in the figure of Santa Claus and his reindeer: “If the Sami apocalypse had a soundtrack it would be ‘Jingle Bells’.” This origin story for Santa Claus is disputed: the Nordic studies scholar Tim Frandy, from a Sámi descendant community, points to scant evidence that Sámi shamans used fly agaric and calls it a story invented by outsiders.13 The book is careful throughout about what may be shared and by whom, and much of what it describes belongs to particular places, families and Law. See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
How does Sand Talk relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely in worldview. In animism everything is alive and conscious, rocks, rivers, mountains and the wind included, and this is more than a belief, for animists experience the world this way, and experience themselves as part of nature, in one big family of beings with no hierarchy, an interconnected and interdependent web of life.14 Hunter-gatherer peoples acknowledged a kinship with the other Peoples, calling them brothers and sisters, all part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.15 Yunkaporta’s animate rocks and his kinship-mind, in which nothing exists outside relationship, sit very close to this, though they come from his own people’s Law and not from any outside theory of animism.
His account of what went wrong also runs alongside the teaching on the Fall. In Therapeutic Shamanism the Fall is the break that came with the first cities, around four thousand BCE, bringing hierarchy, warfare, the oppression of women, mass slavery and a loss of respect for the other Peoples, justified by the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this.15 Yunkaporta arrives at a rupture from a different direction, as a demand for simplicity and control rooted in narcissism. The two accounts are not the same, but both describe modern people as severed from a way of belonging to the land that humans lived by for most of their history. See What is the Fall?
The difference lies in where the knowledge lives. Yunkaporta’s knowledge is held in Country, kin and Law, inseparable from particular places and people. Therapeutic Shamanism is built on core shamanism, which is not culturally specific but the birthright of all human beings; it does not base itself on any particular indigenous culture, and aims to be as culture-light as possible, flexible and applicable to modern life.16 Nor can rewildingRewilding. Recovering the wild, undomesticated Soul: the practical healing work that follows from the Fall diagnosis. We cannot go back, only forward: ancient wisdom for future solutions. Read the full answer mean a mass return to a hunter-gatherer way of life, since there are far too many people now to live that way; the way is forward, learning from shamanism’s wisdom and adapting it to the times.17 Journeying and the shamanic realms are what Therapeutic Shamanism adds, and Sand Talk neither offers nor needs them. Its warnings against romanticising and against taking what belongs to others apply to anyone drawing on Indigenous teaching, shamanic practitioners included. See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing, and undo domestication?
