Knowing and Being | Tyson Yunkaporta

How we create knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself.

This is the message of this week’s guest, Aboriginal scholar and author, Tyson Yunkaporta. In his explanation of the importance of learning through living, and living with learning, Tyson points to the how the discourse around decolonisation has granted expertise based on identity rather than experience. He highlights how indigenous thinking is fundamentally consensus building, mirroring the Western scientific method, and warns that neoliberal thinking has infected what should have been a radical transformation, creating individuals who consider themselves fully contained “little corporations”.

In this unflinching and compassionate conversation, Tyson weaves the culture wars, knowledge production, indigenous science, landscapes and the body to reveal the mismatches between how we think and how we live, which have opened wounds in the collective body which act as voids into which our potential solidarity falls. This is a dialogue on truth, kinship and action, in which Tyson gives one of the most honest accounts of where the best of intention has gone wrong in recent years, delivering a call to refuse these narratives of separation between ourselves, our kinfolk and the great Earth upon which we all depend.