#27 | The Law Is In The Land - Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk)
“Don’t harm the land and don’t harm the children. Start there, recover some kind of masculinity that is real, even a fragment.”
My guest today is Tyson Yunkaporta, an academic, poet, and carver of traditional tools and weapons. He is a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, and the author of the book ‘Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World’.
Since its release, Sand Talk has received many glowing reviews, and offered a crucial indigenous perspective on the areas of history, education, money, power and sustainability - using traditional wisdom for a livable future.
I first learned of Tyson from the Melbourne based men’s group Warrior Within, and with the surprising success of his book, have observed Tyson being ushered into a growing spotlight.
For our conversation, I was excited to explore his take on masculinity - and he offered a raw and personal dive that touched some deep places in us both.
We speak about the importance of relationship as the truth of our being, where the term “toxic masculinity” came from and why it’s a bad story, how a man’s relationship with the land mirrors his intimate relationships to others, and why tracking the mystery of emergence invites us to look to the wisdom of the outliers.
LINKS
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SHOW NOTES
The aftermath of Sand Talk
We are our relationships
There is no self to actualize
The wrong templates for masculinity
Growing up a fighter, then finding culture
Coming into relationship with the patterns of creation
An indigenous method of inquiry
The origin of the term ‘toxic masculinity’
“It eats men like air and enslaves women”
Prehistoric cultures
Woman/man is how we say people
Your relationship with the land mirrors your relationship with others
The split between society and nature
“You can’t make a dog a vegan”
The laws of Bunjil
Avoiding an ideology of emergence
Ceremonies are about increase, not growth
Look for the outliers
“You never outsource your story”
The project of Westernism is one story to rule them all
Aristotle fucked everything
Don’t harm the land and don’t harm the children
