Tyson Yunkaporta: Shifting from ‘health & wellness’ to communities of care (Ep453)

Written By kamea chayne
“We need to replace the words health and wellness with care. How are we caring for each other? How are we accessing care?”
— Tyson Yunkaporta

What does it mean to nurture systems that honor context and the brilliance of neurodiversity? What is the relationship between altered states of mind from ceremonies and our shared senses of “reality”? And how do we shift our focuses away from “health and wellness” — towards informal, “black market” economies of care?

In Green Dreamer’s round two interview with Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta, we explore the connections between his first book, Sand Talk, and his latest, Right Story Wrong Story — including how they flip the standard protocols of trigger warnings for suicide and depression upside-down.

Join us as we chat through the idea of kin-making to responsibly integrate introduced species into Indigenous landscapes, and recalibrating our perceptions of the world through listening to specialists based on specific contexts.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.

Artistic credits:

  • Song feature: “Ocean of your tears” by Leïla Six

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interview transcript

Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Kaméa Chayne: We last spoke a couple years ago, mostly based off of your book, Sand Talk. That was a very memorable conversation for me because I distinctly remember it having a more spunky, and chaotic, and unpredictable flavor than any other conversation that I had hosted before in the most brilliant way. 

I learned retroactively that when you had written Sand Talk, you were in a state of mania when you went through that process. I'd like to start off by asking you, how did the aftermath of your personal reflections on the state of mind that you were in, coupled with the world's reaction to Sand Talk, lead you then to questions that you were curious to explore in Right Story, Wrong Story?

Tyson Yunkaporta: I think I was writing Right Story, Wrong Story when I was talking to you. If it was a spunky, chaotic situation, I was probably in an upswing then as well. But I hadn't been diagnosed with bipolar yet. I just thought that it was a terrible place to live in my brain. I didn't realize there was an actual disorder going on. 

It was a struggle after that. I didn't think many people would read the book, but it turned out a lot of people did. I think my craziness in the two weeks that I wrote it, and in a year or two building up to it landed well with everyone else's craziness in the world at the time. So it sort of found a niche that way. But that also meant that lots of people wanted to talk to me, and so that really did unsettle things in my life, and in my family, and all around. 

I guess the stresses of that exacerbated things with my mental illness to the point where, over that period in between then and now, I finished up quite a few interactions with police, psych wards, prison cells, handcuffs, and pepper spray. I guess while I descended into crazy, everyone else was as well, because Sand Talk came out just before COVID lockdowns—during lots of the culmination of the rise of disinformation online, and radicalization, trolling, and disinformation campaigns.

That got everybody's kind of righteous and proper indignation and opposition to establishment and to the colony, the system, the everything, the global order. Everybody's questioning and struggle against that. it just sort of culminated, but in an unhelpful sort of frame, and in a sort of skewed, view of reality, which I was certainly carrying around when I wrote Sand Talk. Which is reflected in quite a few of the bits. 

So anyway, I felt during COVID, I woke up to that because of the kinds of people who were interested in my book, and who were finding justifications in there in savage, cool Indigenous sort of support for their ideas, around misogynistic ideas and hate-based ideologies. And a lot of the “just asking questions” guys and all that kind of thing who were piggybacking off complexity theory, and evolutionary psychology to try and justify some pretty horrendous MAGA insurrectionist ideologies. Which have pretty much taken over the world now. 

But it wasn't long into COVID that I realized what it was that I had gotten sucked into a little bit when I was writing Sand Talk, the thinking, and the kind of rhetoric, and the kind of cherry picking of information. Do you remember the bit in Sand Talk where I was saying, “More people die of vitamin D deficiency than they do from skin cancer?” So, all the big public health campaigns, getting people to wear hats and sunscreen, these one-size-fits-all solutions, they've killed more people than they've saved. Do you know what I mean? 

And that was me cherry picking one crappy research paper, and that supported my personal preference for not wearing hats because I don't like hats. You know what I mean? And then I've spun that out into a whole anti-public health methodology that I then snuck in across the whole idea of natural medicine versus big pharma kind of thing, which then went on to support a whole range of weird stuff. 

And it wasn't long into COVID that when all those people went really off the leash, I saw the extremes of it. Then I saw those patterns reflected in my thinking. And so then I went deep dive into examining that, auditing my thinking. But that was on a very long downswing when I plummeted into a deep, suicidal depression for a long time.

So, Sand Talk I wrote in two weeks, but it took nearly two years to write Right Story, Wrong Story, the next one, which was very much debunking a lot of Sand Talk. Or at least some of the rhetoric in it, which was sort of false. You know, a lot of false binaries and fallacies. So yeah, debunking that and sort of trying to re-situate my knowledge with the reality. And that's the Venn diagram you want to get right.

If your epistemology, knowledge or thought processes departs too far from what is real in the world, then you can become quite dangerous, to yourself and others.

So, it's a Venn diagram. You want to keep increasing that space in the middle as much as you can. So, I worked hard at that and, Right Story, Wrong Story came out of that. It's a struggle because I'm sharing my crazy with other people who have the same crazy, and then trying to work it out together.

But then the third book in the trilogy is coming out mid year this year, Snake Talk. That's a far more unified and healthy text after I've gone through my struggles of mania, vainglorious and expansive Sand Talk. And then a big depressed self audit and audit of the world, in geopolitics and everything else in Right Story, Wrong Story. 

This last one is sort of medicated. Tyson is in right relation with the world, and right relation with my partner, with my spouse, too. So I'm not writing it alone, I'm co-authoring it with her. So I'm doing the “us” thing instead of brilliant me telling everybody about how important relational pairs are, and kinship, and good thought. I'm walking my talk, so that helps.

Kaméa Chayne: Well, I'm so excited for Snake Talk and when it comes out. And maybe we'll get to share a conversation dedicated to that when the time feels right. 

Tyson Yunkaporta: Definitely.

Kaméa Chayne: I find your humility in all of this very honorable, and I respect that. And we'll dive into all of this throughout our conversation.

Tyson Yunkaporta: It's not. That's just part of my pathology. I have a habitual lack of self-care that's more to do with my mental illness than any kind of noble, cultural humility or personal humility. I don't have that. I just don't care enough about my reputation or looking after myself. I don't think that's a virtue. But thank you.

It's important, though, to have some discernment between humility and sort of self-sabotage or self-loathing.

I think a lot of people, when they're asking cultural humility, or humility of a person or an ethnic group or agenda, when they're asking that, I think they're more demanding that those people hate themselves and demonstrate it that way. So I think the distinction is important.

I don’t think my self-loathing, lack of care and willingness to examine my shit is something that should be promoted as a healthy. I’d like to find people who do have proper humility and find out what their practice is. I think that's you. Anyway, if I ever let you talk in this conversation, then I might learn some of that from you.

Kaméa Chayne: In a past conversation, you shared about how in the process of writing Right Story, Wrong Story, you had several editors help you to delete portions of the manuscript that might feel triggering for people based on your experience of having people reach out to you about having suicidal thoughts after they've read Sand Talk. And I want to, of course, honor that this is a very delicate subject and also softly bring this into the spotlight, because a lot of people do resonate with the kind of pain and suffering in the context of these times. 

So I'm curious if you can elaborate on this “Avatar depression” and how you clarified the murky lines between a sense of hopelessness that might lead to total despair if people can't really see a way out of the mess that we're in, versus a sense of hopelessness that is still brutally honest about where we are, but maybe keeps us wanting to stay engaged and stay with the trouble, in the words of Donna Haraway.

Tyson Yunkaporta: It's so funny to me, this idea of trigger warnings, that they are so linear. Like, if you talk about the problems or the traumas that people have, that will somehow exacerbate them. And so, if you're talking about suicide, that might make suicidal people commit suicide. But, I guess I only just realized this now when you were asking the question. 

Sandtalk was presenting a beautiful worldview and showing people what it's like to live within an extended distributed consciousness of Indigenous cultural modalities. It was the same thing that happened the first time people saw Avatar and they saw this beautiful Indigenous life of blue people running around in a jungle. And they went, “I want that, I'm never going to be able to have that. Man, I'm just going to kill myself. This world sucks. I want to live there.”

There was this actual clinical thing that we’re calling “Avatar depression”: People who weren’t depressed before, but then they suddenly hated their urban or suburban life.

That made people want to kill themselves. I had to talk to a lot of people off a lot of ledges. I spent a lot of time every week for a few years helping people who really struggled after they read Sand Talk, and just didn't want to live in their own life anymore, but knew they couldn't live an Aboriginal life.

But it's weird, nobody has with Right Story, Wrong Story. It was so dark and pressing on the sore bits. I was in deep depression and just rolling around in there, taking the reader with me. I had two different psychologists go through and audit the whole manuscript to take out the stuff that they felt, professionally, might be dangerous for people to read who were vulnerable in terms of mental health. And so there was a lot taken out, but it was still dark, and there were still concerns that I might trigger people. 

Nobody’s contacted me saying they wanted to commit suicide over Right Story, Wrong Story, which was dark and going into the horrible places. But Sand Talk was showing the bright places and the possibilities of being human, which made people want to kill themselves. 

So we should do a trigger warning for this podcast. It should say like, “Warning, beautiful ideas about what the world could be that will make you feel hopeless and want to die.” That's what the trigger warning should be like. Like, this film only contains happy stuff that'll like make you feel like your life sucks.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, that's very interesting. I think about being on social media, and when there are these clips of maybe like a couple that are deeply romantically in love, and you see the comment section, and a lot of them are like, this just reminds me of how alone I am. Maybe it's kind of like that where we, just because we reflect everything on ourselves, it's like, that's a possibility that I don't have and that I can't have right now.

Tyson Yunkaporta: True. Yeah, maybe that's how the whole wellness industry works. The kind of cult like following that wellness influencers get. They take care to get the right spray tan, and look amazing and glowing. And I guess that makes everyone feel like shit, and then go, “Man, I feel like crap, what are the supplements those people are taking?” I'm going to buy all of them supplements. She's telling us to drink our urine? All right, let's do that” [laughs].

Kaméa Chayne: Well, I'm aware that in recent years, you've started getting medication for bipolar, and maybe you're still experimenting with what feels most supportive to you. But to this, you point out that “Bush medicine is for living in the Bush, and that ailments from civilization require civilized medicine.” This reminds me of a past conversation I shared with Dr. Christopher Ryan, where he talks about how modern medicine, essentially, is addressing a lot of the illnesses created by modern civilization. So, prehistoric humans didn't need modern medicine because they didn't have a lot of these diseases. 

It also reminds me of this part of your book where you write, “Ancient wisdom may provide examples of healthy models of governance, economies, and technologies, but these can't help at the moment unless there's a through line to now. They can only help if examined alongside stories of development, growth, cybernetics, liberalism, modernism, and so on.”

I think this is trying to get at the need to contextualize. And I'm also curious, if we need to meet a lot of modern ailments with medicine from modern civilization, then what is the modern medicine that civilization itself needs to be met and medicated with?

Tyson Yunkaporta: There's this almost leap of faith in complexity science and systems thinking. When you start to understand complex adaptive self-organizing systems, you see this pattern again and again when there's a disruption or a threat to the system.

The system becomes destabilized it throwing up like an immunological response at some stage. Something will arise within that system that will combat the virus or whatever is introduced to the system. There's always that response with the self-organizing system. It's almost spiritual, and then some people sort of have a faith in that.

But it can also just be a good basis for inquiry, so that when you're looking at systemic problems, you're keeping an eye open for what are the little strange attractors propping up that might, produce really out of the box solutions that don't seem obvious initially, but will have those knock on effects that will spread through the entire system and stabilize it.

Or adapt it and change it, make those mutations, that actually sort of come into balance with everything that's in relation across that system. 

Kaméa Chayne: Is this kind of like going into your analogy where you say, “Now we finally arrived to dismantle the master's house using the master's tools, but he doesn't live here anymore, he's buying up water rights and spearheading land grabs elsewhere. He hopes we'll tear down his house because it's insured for more than he could get from selling the place,” and on and on. So it's kind of like, now we're adapted to being able to work with the system, but whatever we're trying to toss out as solutions is already integrated into what the system can handle.

Tyson Yunkaporta: I guess we're just finding out now that that's not what the power structures are based on. And that would somehow change the system. And I guess we're just finding out now that that's not what the power structures are based on. 

Our entire focus in the academic idea of decolonizing is wanting to tweak the culture, or decorate the culture, with bits and pieces of sparkly inclusivity.

So yesterday, I was sitting down with an Indian academic at my university, and we were looking at working on a research project together. She's working on a project for Indigenous domestic violence. And she was telling me all of the things they're looking at, like all the standard stuff that's in the research about domestic violence and Indigenous domestic violence, and what they're looking at to address and start up different projects and interventions, et cetera, to deal with this problem from the grassroots in the community up, which sounds good. 

She asked, off record, what the realities are of domestic violence? And I gave her all those things. And the more we went into it, the more it just seemed like such a tangled mess that can never be untangled. It moved into Aboriginal men and women and their experience and patterns of behavior that we use to survive during this occupation of our land, which will never end. So the idea of post-colonial is ridiculous. 

And then she's from India. So she's in post-colonial India. And with the knowledge that the British only left India when they could see that the people of India could become self-colonizing subjects who would keep extracting from their land and oppressing each other to keep sending those resources and riches back to Britain and to the U.S. 

So there's like corporate ownership of India. But no foreign governance of it. Foreigners still get to own it.

The colonizers still get to own everything, but they don't have the responsibility of managing it. They just get passive income from it, you know what I mean? And the people are self-colonizing. So we're looking at that best-case scenario for Indigenous communities, and Indigenous sovereignty, self-governance, potentially. Would that be a way? Is self-determination part of sorting out the problems of domestic violence?

But even that, when we looked at the trajectory of India, and that was part of the post-World War II order, now we've got a whole new world order coming out that is moving back towards a multipolarity. So, a multipolar world where there aren't these big treaties and alliances, but it's every man for himself, with the big dogs dominating more so than ever.

So we looked at that and what this new, new colonization era will look like, and what sovereignty could mean there. And then every time we scaled out and scaled back into the problem of domestic violence, we only saw the causes and the desperation, and our only possible survival responses to those would exacerbate domestic violence for Indigenous men and women.

We went through every possible permutation and concluded that the only thing we can do to end domestic violence in our communities would be to end capital. It keeps coming back to like, in the end, the structures and caste system that is required to enforce capitalism, not just in India, but everywhere, the inequality that's needed, the desperation that's needed to make sure the demand exceeds supply so that our GDP can grow every year, that requires a lot of people living in misery and increasing numbers every year. 

And part of making that happen and stopping people from getting their shit together at the bottom of society is domestic violence as part of it.

We can’t address the worst parts of our lives through research, policy or program interventions. The only way you could take that pressure off is to end capitalism. 

We were talking about it like getting out of the shower, grabbing a towel, and deciding that the best way to dry yourself would be starting with the feet. And so you dry your feet, and then all the water runs down from your hair and down from your body and wets your feet again. And then you keep drying your feet over and over, going “God, we just have to address this domestic violence.” But, you know, in the end, you've got a big head full of wet hair, which is capitalism, that's going to keep dropping that water down on you.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, it's like the very foundation, right? And the logic is wired into the system. So, unless you can address those foundations, you're kind of just, they say rearranging chairs on a sinking ship. Unless you can get to the roots of everything. A lot of the nonprofit industrial complex, like philanthropy, is trying to work within these systems, very limited in terms of being able to address the roots.

Tyson Yunkaporta: It is, but even the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous voices in that space, particularly in the sort of regenerative finance and green finance sort of side of things, and the sustainability side of philanthropy. Everybody wants to center Native voices there, but also have consultations with Indigenous people and to try and co-design systems of finance, and even alternative economies, and circular economies, for sustainability, and different ways to do offsets and trading schemes that place a dollar value on everything in nature and therefore preserve it. 

Kaméa Chayne: Right. Like, rights of rivers. 

Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah. They want Indigenous knowledge in there, and they are consulting with us. And they want to bring us in, all the time, for these things. And, a lot of us are happy to be brought in.

But we have found over the last sort of five years that being a really big, trendy, popular thing to do, people like to have that branding on their website. We are Indigenous knowledge-centered. But centered, it should be just scented. Smells like Indigenous knowledge. It's a little lemon myrtle, potpourri in there. 

Corporations cherry-pick [Indigenous Knowledge] then drop us like a hot potato, and run around with those things just for their branding.

Or we will build the whole program for them that they are presenting to us as something that we all own collectively. So, we will bring people in and we'll invest all of our time, and our lives, and effort, and all of our work will bring that in and put it into our commons here altogether. And then you find out, so what's the mechanism for ownership here? Oh, it's this philanthropist's private company, which is a consulting firm, and they now own all of our IP. 

I even had one of them assert to us that they owned our relationships. And that we weren't allowed to speak to each other without informing what was essentially a white manager. Informing them that we were speaking, and then what we were speaking about. The relationship itself, but then anything that we talked about belonged to their private business. And when I questioned that, that person started screaming at me about reverse racism. And that I was colonizing them. And that we, as Indigenous people, were colonizing that white philanthropist business owner. It was just like, what?

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, and this is what you say to watch out for is when the people doing the oppressing kind of flip the script to self-victimize and say that you're the one doing it to them.

Tyson Yunkaporta: That's the fascist turn. When the people you're oppressing decide to start portraying them as your oppressor. 

Kaméa Chayne: I want to weave this into it, because a lot of this is about like selectively choosing which parts of, for example, certain people's knowledge to incorporate and what to leave out. And a lot of this is about context. So I want to bring this back to you and how you share about how in your community, you're known in part as being hearing-impaired and crazy, where you know you're capable of moments of brilliance, but you also know you can't be trusted in certain ways to contribute to governance because you don't leave altered states of mind after ceremony. 

This makes me think about how none of us are meant to be trusted in every context and capacity. And, what if all of our stories and sayings came with a pretext? Like, I proposed this idea at a time when I was feeling hurt and vengeful. So, that's the context that people should keep in mind. Or, I feel a need to control and hoard things because I grew up with scarcity, and I'm operating from mentalities of fear.

So there might be elements of truth across all of these stories, but like you share, right story in the wrong place is a wrong story. And maybe this is kind of just all a part of the ailment of the system in that it rejects neurodiversity and context and really props up the monocultural delusion of separation and endless growth.

Tyson Yunkaporta: I know that it's an ableist thing to say about myself, that I should not have any decision-making authority. That doesn't mean I can't put my ideas and knowledge forward to influence the decision-making or informed decision-making of people who are more stable than me. But I should not have my hand on the button. Maybe no one should.

When you think about it, every state of mind is in one way or another an altered state.

I think the good analogy would be that Venn diagram again of a tangible reality, a material reality, and then your way of thinking-your mind, your knowledge processes, that that should overlap as much as possible with the tangible reality. And you can't do that on your own. You have to do that collectively and check in all the time.

In ceremony, those two circles separate completely because we're in an agreement that we're going to come into the spirit world here, that we're going to move ourselves, outside of the tangible reality and bring ourselves into that other world. And we do that together, so our mind shifts and we're in a very altered state. 

For crazy people like me, you're constantly in an altered state. Your circles are often separated, and then they may not overlap as much. But I mean, the gift of that is that there are interesting things, inputs coming from you, or outputs, you know what I mean? Many could be ignored, but if you listen to that marginal stuff, there are now and then amazing sparks of ideas that come out.

Maybe that's the immunological response of a system that's unstable. Maybe that could be found there. But the person who's spitting these things out all the time shouldn't decide which one is the relevant and helpful one because they're not there. They're not in this reality. So, I mean, I think that's important. 

There was another part of what you were saying there that I was moving towards, but yeah, it was very strong, and we might come back to it.

Kaméa Chayne: Maybe, it’s just like, this system kind of propping up this monocultural delusion. And rather than honoring neurodiversity and that there are different contexts and spaces for different people's brilliance to shine in particular ways, we're kind of like, the system props up a lot of narcissistic tendencies. And arguably, the system itself is also narcissistic in many ways. But instead of honoring the range of diversity that everybody can contribute to a kind of, it is narrow in what it rewards and elevates.

Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah. And, you know, a good way to accurately map the material reality is to include everybody's viewpoint as a data set, and find in the aggregate of that, things that you can test and, you know, compare them with the other things. Find internal cohesion of that logic by removing elements and trying different things out in the system to see if these ideas work, again and again and again, every time. Then you can get a more accurate model of reality like that. 

Unfortunately, that idea of collectively doing that has made a post-truth reality where everybody's point of view is possible; for that to be. Well, that’s my alternative facts. And you get to just debate me, bro.

If you’ve got the dirtiest tricks in debate and the stupidest ways of putting stuff across that appeal to people’s misconception of what common sense is, then you can promote a very skewed view of reality that you don’t even hold.

But that's just supporting some shitty agenda that you have. And that's why you find those things are winning. And we're finding that altered states, or even pretended altered states and views of reality, are gaining supremacy in a world that's increasingly seeking supremacy.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, well, this makes me think about diversity in thought in more nuanced ways. I remember you talking about how we perceive the location of the moon. And if you have people scattered along the beach, everyone's going to have a slightly different perception of where the moon is. But it's the aggregate of all their stories and perceptions that approximates the reality of where the moon is. So that diversity in perspectives is crucial for us to arrive at a sort of meta-story of what is going on. 

But I'm thinking about how a lot of diversity in thought, like you touched on just then, fruiting from these times, aren't grounded in relationship to land and to the laws of the land. So, instead of people sharing stories about where they see the moon, maybe some people are arguing over whether that star over there is actually the real moon, or whether the moon even exists, or is just a mirage and a conspiracy. 

So the aggregate of this ungrounded diversity in thought doesn't help us to average out to a meta story of right stories that approximate truth. So yeah, I'm curious what else comes up for you when you talk about, or when people talk about, freedom of speech and diversity in thought.

Tyson Yunkaporta: Well, this is the danger, in English, of aggregate. The idea of aggregate data and finding an average sort of works most of the time for most people. That's a bell curve. If you're analyzing a distribution like that, the outliers are important on the left and the right. And the outliers will tell you things that are interesting about the whole rest of the distribution. 

But there's also such a thing as a skewed distribution. Your bell curve isn't always like a beautiful hill. Sometimes it just leans right off to the side and gets skewed one way or another. So, your average is pulled by sort of viral outliers out on the fringes. They can end up pulling the average and skewing the distribution to lean right over. I guess in those cases, the aggregate is not helping, but that's why your specialists are needed. 

Knowledge isn’t just a democratic process where everyone votes on what their preferred reality is. Because soon everything will be dead if you do that. You need to have specialists who are respected.

The people on the beach are deciding where the moon reflection is and then learning, no, it's reflecting on all the ocean at once, yeah, that's a good thing for everyone to arrive at, and that aligns with the reality. 

But if that same group of people, then with their limited knowledge of the moon, decide that they want to predict where the moon is going to rise the following night, for a night fishing expedition, and they use the same process, then you'd end up with a lot of drowned people that next night, because you need to then listen to your experts. 

Because, you know, the old woman over there knows all the lunar cycles. And she happens to know that the ring that we're seeing around the moon tonight means there will be a king tide tomorrow, and that's not going to be a good time for us to paddle out into the dark. 

So yeah, there's this kind of democratization of common sense. And then elevation of that above everything else means that we are dismissing those artists, slash scientists, slash scientific consensus, those specialist points of view of people who hold that knowledge.

In our Indigenous societies, everybody has a specialization. They’re the ones you listen to in the context. 

Ah, that's the thing that you said before that I was trying to remember, the context dependence with these altered states, and what you choose to highlight, and follow, and include from moment to moment. It is context dependent.

Kaméa Chayne: I do think about how a lot of places that are so-called democracies are not true democracies right now. But even if people in these democratic places were to have, even if everyone were to have equal weight in their votes, I don't know if we would be able to vote towards a more regenerative and healthier planet because our understanding of what that takes is so skewed based on mainstream education, and colonized minds, and worldviews, and so forth. 

I think what you're saying is crucial.

Tyson Yunkaporta: Yeah, that would only work if there was some kind of regulatory control on monopolization of influence by any power group. Then there would be a chance for people to coalesce around, if everybody then would seek the advice of specialists, and they would want to see their credentials and their track record of how many times they got it right. And then people would elevate those people and look at all the nuances of that. But nobody's doing that.

People are listening to hours of shitty influencers who have an agenda that’s not actually in the interest of the people that are following them. And those interests and agendas are often hidden. 

So it's not possible in an information landscape that is completely monopolized, dominated by bad actors, with very huge agendas, billionaires who do not have a national identity. They're existing outside of the order of sovereignties that we're currently in. And they can do it. They're leaning people towards whatever their goals are, which are not good.

Kaméa Chayne: So, the precondition of a healthy democracy is also the democratization of information and media, and storytelling. And to come back to context, you talk about how altered states are meant to be “secret, sacred, and in ceremony, and they're not meant to cross over into the mundane.” And I think I'm curious about this because I wonder about how it relates to worldviews of separation and compartmentalizing everything, and that being part of the issue. 

Maybe to see sacredness, for example, in all life and everything is different from having altered states of mind everywhere. But then what role do these altered states of mind serve if they're meant to be kind of contained and separated? And then what aspects about them are meant to spill over?

Tyson Yunkaporta: Well, there's this capital “C” sort of ceremony, the collective process of going, passing into that other world while still retaining form in this world. That's pretty full on. That’s the dangerous place to be, so you must have good tradition and good people, thinking together as one. Otherwise, you can be harmed there. You can bring things back from there. Yeah. 

I mean, you set circle at the start for protection and to create that sacred space, and then you have someone who keeps circle, so someone maintains the fire, and is very vigilant about the borders and the border around the ceremony where things can come through and things can go out. But these things need to be observed. 

And then you have a closing circle where you finish the ceremony, you restore people to the real. And you brush sweep that ceremony space away, so it's not left open for other things to keep following us back to this side. This is all important. And that's a big “C” ceremony.

And while you may not carry the altered state back here, that doesn't mean you can't carry the knowledge gained, the inspiration, the illumination, the realizations that you have in ceremony. The common understandings and values, practices, and all these sorts of things. And you can continue to maintain that feeling and that connection to the wisdom that comes from ceremony. You can do that through ritual all day.

If you pass a tree, you might greet that tree. That’s a ritual. It doesn’t produce an altered state of consciousness for you, but it allows you to walk with reverence for the sacred. 

Like when people in Mesoamerica are planting corn and they're acknowledging the four directions, elements. They make that four-part ritual into an algorithm for the planting of the corn and the patterns of the planting that happened to align with the natural system and the biology of the place, and the patterns of spirit in the land. That's great. They're not disappearing from this world in their consciousness while they're doing that. They are present, and their ritual grounds them in the sacredness that they learn in ceremony. 

The knowledge that they learn from that big, feathered serpent who teaches them the wisdom of the three sisters, and when to plant, and how to plant, and the patterns of relation there. And how to make something like a civilization sustainable within a healthy landscape.  They’re not coming back, they're not bringing the altered state back from ceremony.

But there's a difference between ceremony and ritual. And our rituals, like even a prayer before a meal or whatever, like, this is something that just grounds you in the sacred and is a call back to ceremony and ceremonial states. But it should not inform your thinking.  The ecstatic stuff you do in church, in the Bible passages that have set you on fire during that sermon, you should not come back and make that inform your policy on women's health, for example, without consideration of any other data, or the the impacts that's going to have on people's lives.

How many women are going to die of sepsis because of your divinely inspired knowledge from the ceremony and the church? Do you know what I mean? You know, when you do that, when you bring back older states from ceremony, you kill, you harm, you damage, you undo creation. Yeah.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, I hear context, context, context underlying a lot of this conversation. I also want to bring in this quote that you shared, where you write, “Cultural longevity is important, but living cultures must always adapt to current contexts and remain fluid enough for continual emergence.” And I think I'm curious to go a bit deeper into rooting our lives in the land, when the laws of the land are also ever-changing and co-iterative. 

Here I think about some of the work of Native habitat regeneration and reforestation that I'm engaged in and how it often feels like an upwards battle, because a lot of the introduced grasses and weeds to this particular biofregion that are considered invasive, as in they grow a lot faster, they proliferate like crazy, much faster than the native understory shrubs and trees of the rainforest and the wet forest. 

And so sometimes I do pause and reflect, like, what are we doing if it requires so much energy input to regularly run these huge tractors, bush hogs, and other heavy machinery just to try to maintain a sort of illusion of pristine, in this particular fenced-off pocket of space? 

What are we doing if the work of protecting the land here relies heavily on fuel made possible through oil drilling, or open pit mining, and the devastation of lands elsewhere? And is this fixation on rushing towards some outcome and trying to control something also something that we need to examine?

Tyson Yunkaporta: It's like those life-sized dioramas in a museum, where they have a dinosaur scene, and they've recreated the ecosystem from then and the dinosaurs in it, or cavemen or zebras or something like that. Sorry, I felt like there was more coming at the end, but that image just came into my mind.

Kaméa Chayne: Yeah, I think just these questions kind of just come up for me, and I know I feel uncomfortable sitting with them because they do challenge my perspectives, and I don't have the answer. But it does make me ask, like, what is the difference between honoring cultures and lands as continually emerging, and changing, and letting that all be messy, versus problematizing other forms of change as disruptive or invasive and not life-affirming? 

So, how do we root ourselves not in some pure, pristine past, and also not in some disoriented illusion of the present, but in a more real present that is also already transformed and will keep transforming?

Tyson Yunkaporta: I'm so glad for the gift you brought of centering the concept of context, seeding that in there and keeping that there to trouble what we're saying. Because I think that's the most important thing. So, Indigenous cultures or even what we've referred to as the Global South. We've got the Global South and the Global North.

The cultures that are Indigenous to the Global South tend to be more high-context cultures, with field-dependent cognition.

Everything depends on context. So we have a situational bias towards, like causality and behavior. So, we will judge actions based on the situation, rather than the dispositional bias, where it's assumed to be an integral part of that person.

If they behaved like this, then that's the kind of person they are. Or if this weather event happened, then that's the kind of climate that's here. You know what I mean? That's more an orientation of the Northern Hemisphere, which tends to be low-context cultures. 

But at the same time, there is a lot of the Global North in the Global South. A lot of them live here. And a lot of the cultures and economies of the Global North dominated the Global South. Also, because of that extractive action and all the resources flowing towards the Global North, a lot of our peoples, communities, and cultures have followed those resources because they must survive. And so, a lot of us are in the global north now, and we influence them a lot. 

It's not even this little fleck like yin and yang, there is a real swell of a North in the South and South in the North. So yeah, you can't generalize, you have to look at what is. And you have to look at the true context, which is not a melting pot, but a mosaic going on. That pattern, you follow that into your land regeneration efforts. 

And what's the most important thing, is there are Indigenous forms of embassy, particularly Indigenous norms and practices, processes, protocols around border work. Border work is important. Every system it has boundaries, but those boundaries are fluid. And there must be things to flow through that system, like migratory animals. People talk about the biodiversity of a region, but that changes every season.

Most of those species will migrate out of that system at different times and return through, and they need to move through the other systems they move through. Wind and water flow, flows of airborne dirt, all kinds of different things, insects, and climates. These things are always moving and flowing across systems. But more importantly, humans in diaspora and journeying humans go across those borders. And they bring non-human kin with them as seeds and as animal companions as well.

And those animals come into there, and they can be a problem if they're not welcomed properly, if they're not managed properly into that system.

So, there must be kin-making. If new species come in, they need to become totems for people who understand the land and who can manage those species’ relationships.

So, we have an Indigenous embassy with Indigenous people in Ecuador, for example, for the gum trees, the eucalyptus from Australia that have been planted there. And, for their cane toads that are introduced here and are sort of regarded as a pest. So, we do lots of ceremonies with them and different knowledge and things like that that we exchange to shed light on what we need to do to come into a better relationship with these plants that have come from abroad. 

I've been doing that a lot in my practice with carving as well. I've been carving with a lot of what they call “weed species," invasive pests. I've been carving with those woods a lot, with privet and with what's that one from the Iberian Peninsula, it's gone from my head, white poplar.

I've been carving with white poplar, which is an invasive pest, but potentially could be helpful with managing how fire moves through our country here, because it's a very fire-resistant wood. Which is why they use it for matchsticks. But it's a problem here along waterways because it's also thirsty, so we must bring it into relation by creating symbiosis between that and other species. 

And we need to do that for the wildcats, for the foxes, for all these things, how to bring them into relation, into a stable, what they call in biology, “naturalized.” But I think there are a lot of migrant populations who wouldn't be happy with that word.

When you bring something that’s not indigenous to a place, when it becomes part of that system, the system will depend on it because it’s interdependently woven in through different symbiosis. 

And that's when that population will settle down and stop behaving invasively and become part of it, become autochthonous, and then eventually Indigenous to the place. And when working with our non-human kin, plants, and animals, this helps us with processes, timeframes, and attitudes, and border work protocols that we need to apply to our human kin who don't come from here as well.

Kaméa Chayne: There's a lot here, and I really appreciate you bringing all these threads into this conversation. It makes me think about my most recent discussion with Serene Thin Elk, where we talk about this question of, if truly holistic medicine is tied to culture, to land, to community, to place, then what does it mean for us to heal in a vastly diasporic and uprooted world, because that's the reality of the world today. 

A lot of people are born into places where they might not have deep ancestral roots. A lot of people were forcibly displaced. A lot of people have chosen to relocate out of free will. And a lot of people were also born into places or grew up in homes and spaces where they don't necessarily feel like are safe for them to find healing within.

So, this question of how to rebuild community in diasporic worlds is one that I continue to think about. And as we kind of end here, I want to invite you to elaborate on this question. Also, in the context of cities where people might feel maybe just more layers of separation from their food, water, fuel, and other land-based relationships. 

So, how can people re-nurture these webs of relations in places where maybe the laws of cities and the metropolis and urbanization have been imposed on top of underlying laws of the land, all the while, not reinforcing this binary of natural versus unnatural, or wild versus not wild?

Tyson Yunkaporta: Well, it's very simple. We need to stop thinking and talking about health and wellness. These are individualized things where people hope to get some sort of competitive edge over everybody else.

And it's a short step from that to eugenics. And there's a lot of eugenics-adjacent philosophies in the wellness industry. Especially with wellness influencers, and going through all the practices and supplements and traditions. These become cults that end up looking like eugenics. 

We need to move away from personal ideas of health, that each of us as a self-managing neoliberal subject will be responsible for making ourselves capable of optimal performance in service of the glorious nation, or the glorious ethno-state, or the glorious religion that we follow, or whatever. That's all dangerous shit that makes genocidal public health policies and movements. 

Okay, so what would replace that? Because we still want to be healthy. So, what do we talk about instead?

We need to talk about care. We need to replace the words health and wellness with care. How are we caring for each other? How are we accessing care?

How are we accessing care in the community, not just from government institutions that are unstable because they’re constantly under attack, and privatization, deregulation are always shaking these institutions to their foundations so that we cannot rely on them for care?

How do we create communities and economies of care? I’m not talking about institutional economies like economies within a state. I’m talking about our black-market economies, our informal human economies. The networks that endure after a major disruption to an economic system. What are our informal economies of care in our communities?

Can we develop those to the point where we can trust them and know that if we fall, we're going to be caught? Yeah. How are we going to be in a position where, I mean, how many people in the world have to wipe the ass of a relative who's incapable of wiping their ass?

Everybody should be wiping somebody's ass [laughs] who's sick because, with this real knowledge that one day someone will need to wipe yours, you're going to be sick one day, you're going to be old one day, your ability is going to be diminished. So, how do we do care? 

And I think when we end up with that, when we end up with communities and economies of care that honor the work of the carers who currently do that as slaves for free in this world, and who are diminished and diminishing and have never been honored or respected.

If we honor the carers, and everybody becomes a carer, everybody creates systems of care, that extend to non-human kin and the landscape, then we start talking about care as our obligation, our duty, our love of life.

Our goal is communities and economies of care. Once you start doing that, then healthy systems, habitats that we live in, will come from that, and personal health will come from that.

But it's hard because you must only create a system like that if everybody is putting in more than they expect to get back in the short term. It's over the long term, over a lifetime, that a system of abundance that you're putting everything into will give you, everybody, back more than they ever put in. That’s the magic of increase.

That's the magic of a commons that is sustained as a complex system with custodians. It gives back more than what everybody puts in. That's the magic of that. And that is not the system’s health. That is not personal wellness or development. That's just care. That's systems of care. So, I would recommend a shift to that.

// musical intermission //

Kaméa Chayne: I'll close off on this quote that you share, that your final words of wisdom reminded me of, which is that “Apocalypses are unsettling things, but they become much more interesting if you have prepped by stockpiling relationships, rather than guns, gold, and vitamin supplements.”

Tyson Yunkaporta: Beautiful, bankable meme that one. Fridge magnet quote. 

Kaméa Chayne: [Laughs] So yeah, I want to invite you to share anything else on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about, and any final words of guidance you'd like to share with our listeners.

Tyson Yunkaporta: I think where we ended up, and I think with how you guided us and centered us around that idea of always coming back to context as a way to align our thinking as much as possible with the complex reality.

I think that's what's brought us around to a pretty good conclusion of starting to move our focus together towards economies of care and communities of care, rather than individual wellness and well-being.

 

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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