How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

Raclin Murphy Museum of Art

Available on-demand

Stop examining the world from the outside and start reading its patterns. Join author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World Tyson Yunkaporta, in conversation with Dr. Carolyn T. Brown of the Fetzer Institute, to navigate the complexity of the modern world through Indigenous logic. Shift from the fragmented lens of static text to the “Sacred Web of Life” that can restore balance to our systems. By shifting our perspective, we can reshape our collective future.

Dr. Anantanand Rambachan of St. Olaf College provides an introduction to the event. This event was recorded on October 2, 2022 at the inaugural Nasr Book Prize Symposium hosted by the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion at the University of Notre Dame. For more information on the award, now known as the Book Prize on Religion and the World, please visit the Ansari Institute website.

Indigenous Voices is co-sponsored on ThinkND by the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the College of Arts & Letters Native American Initiatives, and the Native American Alumni of Notre Dame.

The awarding of the Nasser Book Prize to Tyson Yunkaporta for his work, Sand Talk, marks a significant milestone in the global effort to engage Indigenous logic as a diagnostic tool for modern crises. This event was not a mere academic formality but a “keynote yarn” that challenged the very architecture of Western thought. Sand Talk represents a critical paradigm shift: it does not study Indigenous culture as a relic of the past, but utilizes Indigenous “pattern thinking” to analyze the “Global Systems” currently driving our world toward instability.

The Criteria of Excellence

The selection committee evaluated over 30 submissions using four rigorous criteria. First, the work offers an authentic and normative voice; Yunkaporta speaks from the knowledge of his community rather than about it. Second, the work is academically informed yet remains accessible. While Yunkaporta is fluent in the language of “suprarational inter-dimensional ontology,” he chooses to use terms like “dreaming” to honor the vocabulary of his elders. Third, the work engages global affairs, critiquing the superficiality of modern sustainability movements that focus on the “what” rather than the “how.” Finally, the work is timely, offering a visceral response to the colonial legacies that still haunt global structures.

Weaponizing the Indigenous Lens

At the heart of the discussion was the “hand lens” metaphor. Western print-based knowledge is like a closed hand—a solid block that allows the reader to see only the text. In contrast, Yunkaporta invited the audience to splay their fingers like an Aboriginal rock art stencil. By placing this “Indigenous lens” in front of the eyes, one sees the world through the gaps, acknowledging the fragments while perceiving the broader pattern. This “turning of the lens” allows for a scathing critique of Western “narcissism” and the “sin of I am greater,” which Yunkaporta identifies as the root of systemic collapse.

Pattern Thinking and the Fractal of Creation

Yunkaporta grounded the abstract concept of “pattern thinking” in the story of the Echidna and the Turtle. In this creation event, the Echidna smashed the smooth shell of the Turtle, causing it to crack into a fractal pattern—a Fibonacci sequence of hexagons that formed the blueprint for all creation. This is not mere “patternicity” (finding correlations where none exist), but a rigorous “polyangulation” of many data sets. By thinking with the mind of the collective, Indigenous practitioners can read the Thousand Signals of the land to predict weather, locate groundwater, or model complex social systems in real time.

Navigating the Occupier/Occupied Tension

The dialogue between Yunkaporta and Dr. Carolyn T. Brown highlighted a significant tension: the book’s subtitle, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, was not chosen by Yunkaporta but by his publisher to “sell books.” Yunkaporta resists being “exoticized and commodified,” yet he acknowledges the contradiction of using an “alien form”—the book—to transmit oral wisdom. To maintain the integrity of his logic, he “carves” his thoughts into traditional objects before translating them to print. This process was visually realized during the ceremony when Yunkaporta presented Mahan Mirza with a “weird-looking” edited shield, a physical manifestation of the chapters he had carved, refined, and cut.

Dismantling the Colonial Mind

Dr. Anantanand Rambachan synthesized the event’s significance by framing Sand Talk as a tool for decolonization. He contrasted colonial cosmologies—which are “radically dualistic” and instrumentalize nature for profit—with the “Sacred Web of Life.” This Indigenous worldview is based on reverence and reciprocity, recognizing that human beings are not the “intelligent center of the universe” but younger siblings within a vast, interrelated pattern. By sitting with these contradictions and returning to the “fire in the belly,” we move beyond the fragmented “void of print” and back into the rhythm of the Earth.