Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) joins the Mongabay Newscast to detail the Aboriginal perspectives behind his latest book, Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. The book explains how stories shape society, how they can harm us and the environment, and how they may save our species and the natural world.
Yunkaporta explains how Indigenous laws, systems and lore can help us improve modern society, specifically in how humans relate first to the land, then to each other, and why this shapes how we exploit nature and care for it.
Identifying the “wrong story” is critical, Yunkaporta explains, to correcting harmful behaviors or ways of governing. Ultimately, it’s a lie, he says. Personified by what he characterizes as narcissistic or selfish behavior, it’s generally seen by those who exploit the natural world at the expense of community well-being.
“It’s a terrible thing to … misrepresent things, make false claims, bear false witness in a way that is bending story, the story that everybody follows. The narratives that people tell that weave together to make a community and to hold a community on the right path that’s sustainable for thousands of years.”
This concept can be seen in the folk tale of Tidalik, the giant frog, who drank up all the water and hoarded it for himself. The animal kingdom came together and made Tidalik laugh. By entertaining him, it forced Tidalik to spit the water back out. Yunkaporta compares this story with the current global cost-of-living crisis.
“All this wealth that’s hoarded there, the affordability crisis, the housing crisis, it’s all of these things. Our houses are just being held for people to park their cash and gamble with. It’s this big Tidalik. So, I don’t know. A lot of people say eat the rich. I say, entertain the rich.”
Charting a course toward a more sustainable society requires thinking about one’s relationships and obligations to others and the natural world, a concept described in the book as the “sacred mind.”
“It’s actually more of a way of seeing yourself as an individual who is defined by their connections, obligations, relations to the natural world, and family in a way that is sort of seamless and tied together with good story. Right story.”
Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Banner image: Mt. Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, captured March 16, 2022. Image courtesy of Planet Labs PBC.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Tyson Yunkaporta: It’s so important, like literally at this time when Wall Street and the place where you are from, they’re buying up all of our, like, water reserves in Australia. Now, you can make a lot of money just gambling on the water futures market, but they have to hold a certain amount of water reserves here. So they’re stopping the flows of water and they’re holding them. So Wall Street is tli, this giant frog who, he came out of a time 10,000 years ago when all the megafauna had to be downsized because the continent was drying out anyway. So tli, he drank all the water in the land. There’s not a drop. Everything’s dying. And they couldn’t get him to give it up. He’s just sitting there, containing this like a world full of water, and they tried everything. Everybody’s messing around, playing around, trying to trick him, trying to force him, try to persuade him, all the different species. And weirdly, it’s the eel who comes and ties himself in ridiculous knots. That makes ick laugh. So a couple of species hit on the idea that you gotta entertain. Entertain the rich. Don’t eat the rich. Entertain the rich. If you can make ’em laugh, it’ll help.
Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Editorial support for this episode was provided by Latoya Alu. Today on the newscast, we speak with Tyson Yunkaporta, a senior research fellow and Indigenous scholar at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, and the author of the award-winning book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Yunkaporta joins me today to talk about his second book in his described trilogy, Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. He explains the Aboriginal perspectives behind the conversations contained in the book, which show how stories are behind pretty much everything, from how we conduct modern society to how we treat nature and the environment, and what we can learn from these stories. In this conversation, Yunkaporta defines and details what exactly “wrong story” is, and pathways toward creating a more sustainable society that bases itself first on the relationship with the land, and then our relationship with each other. Tyson Yunkaporta, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.
Tyson: Great. Great to meet you. Yeah. So definitely.
Mike: Yeah. Thanks for coming on. We’re going to talk today about your book Right Story, Wrong Story, but first, can you tell our listeners what exactly is “right story” and what is “wrong story”?
Tyson: Yeah. In our Australian Aboriginal communities, we have a, we all speak cre forms of English. Sometimes it’s phrases or words that are quite different from English. Other times it’s the same English word, but it has a different meaning, like “wrong” and “story.” That’s English. You don’t hear us say “right story” very often. It’s mostly identifying, “Oh, that’s wrong story,” because story is everything. Story is law, LORE, and it contains LAW and flows from that law of the land. So it’s a terrible thing. Like, it’s a terrible thing to misrepresent things, make false claims, bear false witness, in a way that is bending story, the story that everybody follows. The narratives that people tell that weave together to make a community and to hold a community on the right path that’s sustainable for thousands of years. It’s not good to mess that up. And people will call that out: “Ah, that’s wrong story. He’s telling a wrong story,” like that. It’s one of the worst things you can do.
Mike: Yeah.
Tyson: Yeah, ’cause it misplaces things. And in our way it’s like, “I’m located, therefore I am.” It’s where you are, what your trajectory and purpose is, and you can’t occlude those things. It has to be open. Otherwise it’s suspected of somebody doing sorcery or cursing. And wrong story is a curse because it brings, it’s basically presenting an illusion as if it was real, in a way that’s intended to change the reality to match the illusion.
Mike: There is an, yeah, there’s an analogy you gave about this a couple hundred pages into the book, and you describe wrong story as, I’m quoting you directly, “an innovation that is placeless, with no map connected to any land. There are no songlines, only wrong lines.” Can you elucidate on that?
Tyson: Yeah. I guess it’s something innovative by people with evil purpose. And in all our old stories, they always contain a person who has that evil in them, which is narcissism, a lack of empathy, like an empathy disorder, whereby they believe, “I am better. I’m better than other people. I’m greater. You are lesser.” And from that illusion, they try to make that real. Yeah. And so it’s an innovation because story is so powerful, and especially spirit story, spiritual stories are so powerful. If you weave a spiritual narrative of good and evil that flips things, so that the evil that you’re doing to create a worse reality, but that serves you and knocks others down, then there it is. That’s the innovation. And it’s amazing. Like, it’s a psycho-technology. It’s also a spiritual kind of technology, because it is tapping into that spiritual kind of awareness and binding and consensus that people have, whereby we all build, we build a foundational reality. Even if we’ve got different stories, they all mesh together and we have a foundation of reality that everyone can agree on. And so you can make that ontology sick with this little psycho-technology, this spiritual technology. And yeah, I guess we’ll get into how we’ve seen that just multiply and multiply—
Mike: Right?
Tyson: —in cyberspace, and particularly over the last decade, and even more so in the last five years.
Mike: I found that you pointed out there’s no connection to the land to be pretty significant here. And in the book you explain that belonging and ownership means something completely different from possession in Aboriginal communities. So can you explain this more for our audience, and how it signifies what people and lands you belong to in your relationships?
Tyson: Yeah. That’s it. Even, so sometimes we might ask the question if we wanna know who someone is, it’s who are they connected to. So we might ask in that cre English once again, we might say, “Own you?” So, “Who owns you?” And that’s, I don’t know, that sounds terrible in standard English, like you are somebody’s possession.
Mike: Yeah.
Tyson: But that’s not it. So our understanding of ownership is more of a belonging, obligation, and connection. I’ll say, “Oh, Yunkaporta’s Ledge clan, Dad’s mob there, they owned me. They own me there, so I belong.” Can you— they’re not as— so it’s like belonging as an abstract noun rather than a belonging as a regular noun, yeah.
Mike: Can you explain the importance of belonging to land specifically?
Tyson: Yeah. Everything belongs in a totemic category, so everything in creation can be classified as being a different kind of substance. And often this will fit on one side or another side of a totemic system, of a kinship system, which is usually divided, at the first division it’s divided into two halves. And everything’s classified as being on one side or the other. And then, Ima, if you imagine another line across the middle dividing it into quarters, then there’s those different categories as well. That’s also the category that you are in, as a family, as a clan, you’ll be belonging somewhere in one of those quadrants. And depending on what kind of system it is, you might move up into the next one, like away from your mother, or you might stay there in your mother’s one. But if you move up to the next one, then you are with your grandmothers and siblings there. Everybody is born into one of these quadrants, and you can only marry diagonally across those quadrants. You’re not allowed to marry straight across. There’s avoidance relations there. So everything in creation is classified as different substances. So urine and blood, for example, they are in my totemic category. They’re in— different animals, birds might be classified as having light blood or heavy blood, for example. And then every substance, every object. So for example, knives, swords, steel, machetes, all these things that we encountered through the Silk Road trade, over a number of centuries before Europeans arrived in Australia. We traded along the Silk Road up through Indonesia. Not many people know about that. So we had— there was quite a bit of steel here that was managed through the north and traded south. Yeah. And that steel is in the same totemic category as stingrays. Yeah. And so anchors are also in there. Yeah. All the steel things that we took on and borrowed and brought into our culture that right way. So everything has a category. Everything has a place in creation. Even the introduced species, so you know animals that are brought in, that were brought in through that Asian trade, like the tamarind tree. I dunno if you like that tamarind paste in your cooking, but we really like that too. So it’s been here for about 600, 700 years. The tamarind tree actually did, like, become natural— yeah. It’s what they call naturalized in the environment. But we call it, we just call it, it’s just native. It belongs here because it has a totemic category. And everything has a story. So water buffalo has story. Cane toad has story. All these different things, they have story. We haven’t really been able to keep up with every single species, but—
Mike: So even—
Tyson: —though hopefully in time.
Mike: So even though it’s an introduced species, like you just mentioned, the cane toad, it still has its own place in, it still has its own story, is what you’re saying.
Tyson: Yeah. Yeah. It still has its own story. And even our species that have been either trafficked or traded elsewhere in the world, Indigenous peoples in other countries, they have their own story for our things. Their story for eucalyptus in Ecuador, for example, and they’ve made that part of their traditional medicine. So it’s been categorized that way. And also it has a lot to do with newborn babies. So there’s a special stone that they put in the navel of a newborn baby, and they use the eucalyptus bark as the belt to bind it there when they have a special ceremony for a baby. So it’s come in as part of their culture, and there is story and there is business— what we call business— like ceremony. There’s ceremony there for that. Yeah. And we talk to those people and then we exchange stories and make embassy that way. So story is how you do your border work with other people. It’s how you do your border work even between genders, and those in-between those genders, or making third genders, et cetera. Our story is how you do your border work, how you negotiate the boundaries between different kinds of people with different cultures. And men and women have different cultural responsibilities, different stories, different ceremonies. And then there’s the sort of Venn diagram in the middle, the stuff we all do together. Yeah, there’s lots of sacred things associated with that.
Mike: Can you then talk about, in the book, there’s this concept that’s described as the Sacred Mind, and it’s, as you say in the book, it lets you see the things the land gives you are always exactly the things you need. How could, or would, you see this mindset applied today? If we could see a broad societal acceptance of this concept, how would that play out, do you think, on a broader scale in how we interact with nature?
Tyson: It’s not about losing yourself as an individual into a hive mind or a big collective sort of hypnosis or hysteria, right? Like you see this happening in cults, et cetera. And that’s usually wrong story making that happen, like misusing spiritual stories. But in our way, and most Indigenous peoples in the world with their integrity, it’s actually ceremony and song and story that allows you to be in yourself, very aware as an individual and aware of your selfhood. But your selfhood is a collection of relationships, connections, obligations. So you are in your clan. In my clan I have obligations to a certain season on my father’s side, and then another season where we have to do bushfires and burn off the land on my mother’s side. So there’s different seasons you’re obligated to. There’s different sort of pantheons of totemic animals, et cetera, et cetera. So ironwood is important to me, and Broga, and the mud shells you get in the mangroves. A number of the mangrove orchids the science doesn’t know about yet, which is pretty cool. And there’s one with amazing properties, like you can actually crush it up in seawater and it will neutralize the salt and turn it into fresh water. That, that would be useful. Anyway, there’s a whole heap of things that you have a responsibility to, so that’s your self. So I guess what it could bring to the idea of collectivism is that there is, it’s not a forced choice between individualism and a collective, which is pretty much what divides most politics in the world. But that’s wrong story. It’s actually more of a way of seeing yourself as an individual who is defined by their connections, obligations, relations to the natural world and family in a way that is seamless and tied together with good story, right story.
Mike: Hello listeners. Thanks for tuning in once again. If you are enjoying the podcast, we want to hear from you. In the show notes of each episode, I’ve included a very brief podcast survey where you can let us know your thoughts. But if you want to support us more directly, you can donate to us. We are a nonprofit news outlet, so every dollar that you pledge to us goes toward supporting our work. You can donate by going to patreon.com/mongabay. Now back to the conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta.
Mike: You talk about this as a pop science party trick in your book, and I’m hoping you’ll indulge me here a bit. A woman named Auntie Mary in the book describes First Law, and I’m gonna quote you directly. It says it includes all ethical and moral behavior and takes care of existence in every aspect of a complete human being. It is a law of relationality that you can only learn from the land. The first relation is between land and people, and the second relation is between people and people. The second is contingent on the first. We learned this law best from our totemic connections with diverse species who teach us each ecological ethics that are transferrable to every aspect of society, from governments to economics. So I’d love you to explain that more for our audience. What does all that mean, and this concept of First Law?
Tyson: It lies in the land, because the land is filled with the essences of sacred ancestors who left their essences in the land. Their smell, their energy, along these lines. But then also in these certain places, which are places of continuous flow. Entropy happens in closed systems. It happens in the universe. But these flows are what keeps topping up your system, so you have sacred ceremony for that. And the ceremony is based on the stories, and the songs for those stories. And the songs are maps that— it’s like every kind of text that a society needs is contained in these stories and songs and in the landscape itself. Everything. Your models of governance, and the rules and protocols and norms of governance, and the laws, they’re all in there. All of your medicine. All of your science. All of your philosophy. Everything is there. And so your ethics is always bound up with everything. People— even now everyone in the world feels their ethics coming through some kind of cosmology that’s grounded in a theory of spirit and spirituality. And whether that’s “there’s no evidence of spirit, so it doesn’t exist,” or it’s “spirit is just complex systems, self-organizing and signals that are far too fast and complex for us to comprehend, so we call it spirit,” or whether it’s “Jesus died for your sins, do what you’re fricking told,” or yeah, ignore all the peaceful and sharing bits in the New Testament, or just do the peaceful bits in the New Testament— yeah, it’s whatever your morality is. Yeah, it’s bound up with spirit. And it shouldn’t be something that just changes from moment to moment depending on what you need to get done in your own self-interest. You are bound by these things, the obligations, yeah. When I— the ethical things I get from all my stories, but then also the stories that connect up, which I have to— I’m connected up with others in trade and diplomacy, especially because I travel all around Australia, always have, and all over the world. And when we make that diplomacy, we have to sit down and connect up our stories. So when I sit down with Canadian Indigenous people, and so there’s Anishinaabe people there, they’re telling me their whale stories. And then the same whales that migrate down along our East Coast and then all the way round, I’m sharing those stories back to them, and we’re finding that common law, and that shows us how to proceed. And then they might say, “Okay, you are— whenever you are here on Turtle Island, you make sure that people know that you are a Turtle Clan here, and you’ll be taken care of by Turtle Clan people wherever you go.” So even the laws of hospitality, and how to be a good guest, how to enter a place, when you have to wait, when you have to back off— all of your negotiation, of all your relationships, which is border work. Everything is border work. This determines your ethics, your morality, your law, and whether or not what you’re doing is lawless. And then how you correct yourself, or need to have others help correct you when you go the wrong way.
Mike: I get that this is probably too large a question, and by no means am I suggesting there’s one cookie cutter for every place in the world. But I think the thing that really strikes me about First Law is that it’s contingent first on relationship with the land. At least that’s what I’m reading here. And I’m wondering if you can explain if there’s any lessons here that societies and governments could really be learning from. This could be perhaps taking from and applying to their land, because it feels like— yeah, it feels like a lot of our governments and societies are out of touch with the land they inhabit.
Tyson: Sure. At a time when democracy is something that everybody has to actually gather collective eyes and fight for, this becomes apparent. It becomes apparent when you see places with settler-colonial sort of communities— if not the state, certainly not the state— if they’ve allowed themselves to have the land and the First Law of the place influence who they are and how they govern themselves, like outside of the state, how people do their governance together, like in mutual aid, or in gathering, negotiating disputes, all these sorts of things. And I think a really fricking good example right now is Minnesota. You ask people in Minnesota, particularly people who are gathering and doing their activist work and defending their entire state in defiance of federal law right now— yeah, the people I talk to, they keep telling me that they’re motivated and they’re guided first by the Indigenous laws, that they have a history of being first caring for the land, like understanding that, and second, caring for each other, which mirrors what Auntie Mary Graham was saying before. The first relation is to the land. And then the second relation is— so the first relation is between people and land. Second relation law is between people and people, and that comes out of the first. And I’ve heard heaps of Minnesotans say that: that they have blended that with a kind of particular Scandinavian— ’cause they have a large Scandinavian sort of influence in that state, and particularly around Minneapolis— around that sort of democratic, kind of egalitarian ethos that sort of comes outta Scandinavia. You don’t think of Vikings being like that, but Vikings are really into Viking culture. And yeah, there are a lot of egalitarian, but also ideas of people all having their voices and being able to take the law in their own hands if they’re following it properly, et cetera, et cetera. So you can see those two really complementary political, moral, ethical systems coming together. And you can hear it expressed whenever you hear the activists right now talking about what guides them, what drives them, what they hold in common, what gives them the moral certainty that resistance against the fascist narratives that are coming into their place and followed by kinetic violence— ’cause the story, the wrong story of that fascism, that’s setting up the scaffolding for the permission structure for more state violence to be done, or in the name of the state, against all laws and against the constitution as well. And so the people feel very grounded in the Indigenous and Scandinavian story stories, and the story of those things together. Yeah.
Mike: And so, Tyson, what is, what is, in your opinion, the wrong story right now being told about our planet or the environment in general that, that internally we are responsible for, and not heeding the call on, not rising up like Minnesotans are to take care of, to take care of the land— what’s that wrong story?
Tyson: That it’s the most powerful, and the one that it just always can just go straight through to everyone’s lizard brain. It’s very hard to resist. But it’s that narrative of good versus evil, the idea that there is spiritual warfare going on, that there is a war in spirit between good and evil, God and the devil, Allah and Satan or whatever. There’s that idea of good versus evil that’s been co-opted and had things woven into it. So the idea that a kind of white Christianity is on the side of good. And that there are these evil others who are pretty much the same others that fascism always goes after. So there are queer folk, migrants, brown people, Black people, et cetera, Indigenous people, the usual suspects, that somehow they are evil and incompetent, but somehow all-powerful, because they are supported by a global elite, which used to be scare-quotes code for the Jews. And now people are saying that much more with much more comfort and ease out loud. So I guess it’s the same narrative that was created, like, in Russia to try and prevent the erosion and the destruction of the feudal system. It started with the antisemitism and then grew from there. So it’s that idea of a spiritual war between good and evil, and that this is somehow linked to certain ethnicities, that one is more worthy than the other, and then genders, one is more worthy than the other. Yeah. It’s that— so it’s that big narrative that has basically been bound together under one story now of the idea of the Great Replacement Theory. And whether you’re saying it or not, or you’ve heard about it or not, that same signal is coming through. Even if it’s expressed in very mild ways, there’s a fear that the dominant cultures on the planet, that they are being replaced by outsiders, others who are being organized by evil cabals of masterminds, et cetera, and that they work for the devil and that everyone else is a patriot and et cetera that works for God. So that’s the big one. And that’s all it’s been for the last decade. It’s all that it’s been since the first few weeks of the Obama presidency— that narrative’s been being built. And now it’s built into policy, executive orders. It’s built into speeches, responses to slayings, et cetera.
Tyson: That continue to build a permission structure for one class of people to do violence against another. And then even within that class, one kind of people to commit violence against others. So like men against women, et cetera, et cetera.
Mike: And can you connect the dots for me— how that then connects to the planet as a whole, in terms of the environment and how we are exploiting and using the planet to its destruction?
Tyson: Yeah. So when you have that land-based, that good solid land-base story, so if you have anything, any way of being that is biocultural, it will follow you through it. It will lead you through all of the tracks of relatedness where there’s cause and effect and signals going through a signal system in the land that is bound up with the economy and with conflict, even just in-your-house conflict. Everything’s bound to this. It has impacts out in the world. And then things that happen in the natural world, they can also come impact in— they’re hitting you with signals all the time. So there’s frustration signals, of a climate in dismay and disarray, and of your soils in disarray, your waterways changing their course, changing what they do, where they’re blocked and they can’t flow across the land properly to drain it. Floods. All these things impact on you. And you’re picking this up all the time, before a big storm comes. And even if you haven’t heard it— if the meteorology people, especially if you— sacking the lot and shutting down their institutions, like some people are in the world— if you haven’t heard about this storm, you are still picking up the signal because the swifts are flying frantically close to the ground, and the ants are all climbing the walls and the fences and the trees with their eggs. You are picking that up on some level. So it’s more about that system of signals. It’s— there’s that complexity.
Tyson: But I’ve been carving a series of objects for eel story lately. A Māori person gave me this glass sculpture of an eel that she’d made and said she wanted me to focus on eel story for a while. So I’ve been doing that for a few weeks, and that’s bound up with everything. You know, making all these objects that have got this— this silky oak. It’s got the eel, but then it’s got the maturation ponds and the mating, sacred mating places where they mate. It’s got the crustaceans that are linked intimately to them, and then those crustaceans that are linked to the ants that shape the waterways. And I’m carving it in this red gum, which is really intimately tied to all of that story. And then I’ve got this rainbow snake, great serpent story, running through all of that. So all those things are linked. There’s that stage in the lifecycle of an eel where they’re a glass eel. And at the moment they are— they come down outta the mountains, all these eels, and like all the eels go down to the sea and they all spawn there. And these glass eels go right out to the Coral Sea, out to New Caledonia and all these places. They mature a bit there, and then they come in. And that’s where they’re caught as a delicacy in the Asian markets because they’re becoming very rare. There’s a black market that’s developed for that. So here I am, I’m making these things about these Australian totemic symbiosis, these biocultural connected groups of relations. And all of a sudden I’m in Scotland and Ireland and France, where their eel population is endangered and on the brink of collapse right now, because of overfishing and poaching of the glass eels. When they try to return back to the land and go up to the maturation ponds through the waterways, they’re captured there by the Russian mob and by Yakuza. So it’s a big mafia thing. The transportation of these poached glass eels for the high-end elite cuisine markets of Asia. It’s like a multi-billion-dollar industry every year, black market, that’s extracting money from the global economy and occluding that and stacking it up in places where it’s not doing anything for the world or for people. So you see that impact. If I’m just following an ant— I’m following an ant here for how they shape the waterways and looking at floods— suddenly I’m following an eel, and then suddenly I’m in Ireland and France fighting the Russian mob and the Japanese Yakuza, and thinking about how can we divert some of the glass eels from the Coral Sea into that market to flood it temporarily and drop the price and just— that way you can bust up all the mafia, all the mob, the Russian mob and the Japanese mob in Europe, and then save the eels, the native eels, European eels. You could do that with a bit of economic pressure and by sustainably using the glass eel fisheries in the Coral Sea. I could start up a boat right now that would— fricking— that would get me in a lot of trouble and probably get me killed by the Russian mob—
Mike: We don’t—
Tyson: —but then that would—
Mike: We don’t—
Tyson: —want— that would change things.
Mike: We don’t want to do that.
Tyson: ’Cause then they wouldn’t be buying up all the Trump real estate and doing the money laundering through that. And then that would affect things, and the real estate market would be affected in Turtle Island. And there are all these knock-on effects that are so, that are so intimately bound up with land. You know, if you’re following the signals of the land, you suddenly find ways into these economic problems, which are then climate problems, which are then social problems, inequality, everything else. Be in the land, follow the stories of the land, the law of the land, and you’ll finish up with good solutions and places where you can find the leverage points, put a bit of pressure, and change the whole system.
Mike: I love the way you went full circle with that story. Yeah. To explain how that big wrong story connects to the land and nature.
Tyson: Yeah.
Mike: That was— I hope people— I’m gonna go back and re-listen to that, and I hope other people do as well. I wanna ask you, because this was something that you, and I believe his name is Brother Dean— correct me if I’m wrong, if I got that wrong— that you and Dean talked about. It’s a great story. And also correct me if I’m pronouncing the name of this frog wrong, but it’s a story of a frog called tli, a giant frog, and how the animal community responded to him. And tli, if, as I read it in the book, tli is the version of a billionaire, someone who is— like a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk— or someone hoarding resources, right? And having all these ecological, economic, social impacts that you just described. And the solution, or at least the way that animal community responded, was really interesting, and I love this story. Can you tell our audience how the animal community responded to tli, the giant frog who is hoarding things, basically? What did they do, and why is that such an important story?
Tyson: It’s so important, like literally at this time when Wall Street, in the place where you are from, they’re buying up all of our, like, water reserves in Australia now for gambling on the water futures market. Now that water scarcity and insecurities become a thing in the world, you can make a lot of money just gambling on the water futures market. But they have to hold a certain amount of water reserves here, so they’re stopping the flows of water and they’re holding them. Oh— so literally our water has no liquidity, it’s insane. Yeah. And so that’s being held. So Wall Street is tid, this giant frog, who— he came out of a time 10,000 years ago when all the megafauna had to be downsized because the continent was drying out. So all of our stories from 10,000 years ago are about killing the large things and breaking them up into sets of smaller, more diverse, symbiotic groups. Anyway, so ick, he drank all the water in the land. There’s not a drop. Everything’s dying, and they couldn’t get him to give it up. He’s just sitting there containing this like a world full of water, and they tried everything. Everybody’s messing around, playing around, trying to trick him, trying to force him, try to persuade him, all the different species. And weirdly it’s the eel that, in the version that I’m thinking of— some of ’em have got different ones that do it— but it’s the eel who comes and ties himself in ridiculous knots that makes tli laugh. There’s— yeah, a couple of species hit on the idea that you gotta entertain the rich. Don’t eat the rich. Entertain the rich. If you can make ’em laugh, it’ll help. And so he starts laughing and vomits all the water back into the land. Yeah. So you see how all these things are bound up. And then you think about eel story, think about the Yakuza and the Russian mob. You think about how much of Trump Tower is owned by Russian mob and by Saudi billionaires, et cetera. You’re thinking about all this wealth that’s hoarded there, the affordability crisis, the housing crisis, it’s all of these things. Our houses are just being held for people to park their cash and gamble with. It’s this big tli. I don’t know. A lot of people say, “Eat the rich.” I say, “Entertain the rich.” I don’t know. I used to. I think I’m getting closer to: no, let’s eat ’em.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s— thank you for sharing that story and your thoughts on that. Before we get any further, I do wanna jump back because you’ve mentioned your totem, but we haven’t actually talked a lot about it. So your totem is a crane, at least I think that’s what you said in the book. How do you learn what your totem is? Does every person on the planet have a totem?
Tyson: It’s different from people’s idea of a spirit animal, which is a kind of perversion of that Native American sort of way. And there’s this idea that something magical will happen and you’ll be gifted this totem from spirit or something like that. And it’s not really like that. You can— every person’s got lots of different totems, and it depends on your relationship at the time and the relationship that you’re referencing in that season or in that place. There are inherited totems, father-side, mother-side totems, two completely different systems and sets. And then you’ve got your— you might be standing in your grandmother’s totem. So when I’m carving with ironbark, that’s— that’s not Pullaway or Cutaway, that’ll be— so that’s a particular class of totem, and that is tied in with the Broga story, because the red— it’s a very red sap in that tree. And so the broga, which is a crane that has a red stripe over its head, that redness comes from that tree. That’s where that comes from. So when I’m carving that, I’m doing that. Yeah. And so you just don’t even get to know, come to no place without the totems that you’re inheriting. So I’m in a place called— and there’s an oyster reef there, and it’s like— that’s where the body of the broga, that’s where the broga is hiding her eggs from the emu that wants to steal their children. Yeah. So there’s a lot of all this bound up, but I only hear that part of the story there, ’cause that’s what’s relevant for that time and place. And it’s that relation, then, I’ll link up with another place, with the— yeah, with that term, that red tree, trees up there. Yeah. So it comes through like that. But then you might be given totems for other business. So the way my clan— when I was brought in by, like, the most senior law woman, Gladys— when she was bringing me in from South Australian ancestors, and she’d dreamed along this songline of brown owl and white owl. And she had this white owl totem, which is also my mother’s side totem. And so she connected me in with that white owl dreaming as a way to respectfully have permission from that ancestral line in order for me to have my clan and Yunkaporta family as my primary family without offending any ancestral spirits or something. So that’s called— that’s called, we talk about being traded, being traded when you’re coming in, in that sort of diplomacy and trade across different groups. How we adopt each other across from different tribes, but also marry— we marry across and marry in that way. And the totems are important. So you might be given something else. So I was given a lot of white owl things as a practice of ritual and different things like how to call ’em, so I can call white owls to me when I need to, and then how to work with that in different ways for protection or for surveillance and different things like that, making things clear and seeing what is right story in a certain situation. The lens— white owl lens— is really useful for me for that. So I guess it’s a way of honing skills and putting your attention on different skill sets for different purposes that are of value to the group. Yeah. That’s what the totem thing is all about. But it also classifies you in the universe as being in this category of things—
Mike: This is a concern you share in the book, and I share it as well. It has to do with the Cuban participatory model. And I want to specifically talk about nature and the environment on this. You of course can connect the dots for us in that. But you say, and I’m quoting you directly: “My concern is that in a world dominated by the loudest voices and biggest sticks, it might not be possible to maintain a government of process and relation.” And I’m concerned about that too, Tyson. So how might that be solved? How might we have various governments across the world of process and relation collaborating with one another, specifically on the biggest ecological problems we face?
Tyson: Yeah, the worst problem is that— so we have a symbol in our culture of three circles. And you can use that to focus on how things need to scale before they can be stable. If you have something in the middle circle, which is your place, that’s not gonna last if it’s not also a pattern of relation and law in the second circle out to your national level, and then out to your global level, if you like. So, you know, man, poor Cuba— like they tried really hard, like they wanted to do participatory democracy, but there’s so much threat interference, invasion history, that just gets in the way of that. So if people are slamming sanctions on you, and constantly putting pressure on you politically, and that threat of war, security issues, and then there’s operations happening to try and destabilize your government, then your government has to become more autocratic, and you’re trying to do the participatory thing. But then they still do it. They have their big community meetings, and even their small community meetings, and the messages get passed. Everybody comes together and has the yarns, has the discussions, and expresses their political viewpoints. And then the top 10 bullet points from them get written down and passed up to the next level, where things are discussed in larger forums, and then eventually that’s gotta work its way up to the top. But the problem, as Brother Dean says: who’s taking the notes, but then who’s getting to speak as the meetings get larger and larger? Is it mostly men? Is it mostly the people who are the rich landowners, who are actually the ones who are trying to destabilize things for the— like more egalitarian socialist government that actually started out wanting to be a sort of pure participatory democracy and ends up having to act like a dictator just so the whole thing doesn’t get overthrown and it becomes a bloody, rabid capitalist sort of dog-eat-dog, nobility-at-the-top kind of system.
Mike: It’s true that some socialist movements and even governments express sovereignty with Indigenous rights. It’s not quite accurate to say socialist governments generally try to approach matters with a democratic outlook. One example where this isn’t the case would be Vietnam, where domestic land grabbing has occurred under what has been labeled egalitarian land distribution policies, where local people have traditionally followed customary land use practices that are at odds with the government stance. This information comes from Geoforum, under the paper “Are socialist domestic land grabs egalitarian? Insights from a case involving a rubber plantation in Yên Province, Vietnam.” Link is in the show notes.
Tyson: So I guess in Florida you’ve got all your Cuban migrants, and a lot of those are big supporters of the US and they hate the Cuban government, et cetera. And you see the same with Venezuela, et cetera. Usually these are the ones who are, who are or were the rich, or incredibly privileged, and wanted to be able to maintain that privilege. Yeah, so I don’t know, that’s how you ended up with a brown people voting for Trump in the last election—
Mike: It’s true that a portion, especially the first wave of Cubans leaving Cuba, were rich elites. It’s inaccurate to say that Cubans and Venezuelans who are or were against their socialist governments are all rich elites. Since then, a good portion are working-class people. A poll conducted in 2014 from NPR and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the Harvard School of Public Health found that 45% of Cuban Americans said their finances were quite strained. Currently, about 2 million people living in the greater metropolitan Miami area consider themselves Cuban American. Just before the 2024 election, roughly 70% of them expressed support for Donald Trump.
Tyson: But yeah, these are the problems, and it’s a problem of wrong story and who gets to shout the loudest, which is usually the people who are lying and trying to advance a narrative that is not really their intention. It’s not expressing their intention. It’s doing something else, saying “Save the children,” huh, when really you just want to get in and take away all of the checks and balances and institutions and bodies and laws that actually protect children, because you want them working in your fricking factories, et cetera, et cetera.
Mike: So what’s the antidote to this then, Tyson, especially as it relates to the environment, because we all depend upon it— what’s the antidote to that?
Tyson: Yeah, I guess Right Story, Wrong Story does a lot of mapping out the dysfunction. Yeah. I guess the first book, Sand Talk, it’s a trilogy. The first book Sand Talk lays out, “Hey, this is how we traditionally do it,” and our thinking and our governance and our economies here, and you know how some of that is still persisting, and hey, there might be some good stuff in that for you. And then that was the kind of invitation. And then Right Story, Wrong Story goes, “Oh my God, the world’s being torn apart by all these wrong stories and they’re so fricking powerful, and it’s gone around the world 10 times and mutated before story even gets outta bed. Oh my God, we’re in trouble.” That’s Right Story, Wrong Story. But the solution is in the third book, which will be coming out in the US this year. I think it’s coming out in the UK within the next couple of months, and it’s already released in Australia and New Zealand. The book’s called Snake Talk. And the Snake Talk book maps out how we do Indigenous border work and traditional Indigenous embassy. I was saying before how we’re talking to people from Ecuador about the eucalyptus trees, they’re also talking back to us about how their cane toads are going over here. That as well. And then we share all that law, and then we figure out better how to manage these species when they get outta control or they’re misbehaving. Which, if you’ve been to California, oh my God, the eucalypts are misbehaving there. Holy crap. Yeah. We’ve got an obligation there to help California with our gumtrees, our eucalypts. Yeah. That Snake Talk book is basically about the foundational law on almost every continent except Antarctica. Every human culture has serpent law at its foundation, and whether that’s persisting in stories about dragons or various different things, there is a serpent that predates religion, monotheistic religion or anything else, that predates temples. It predates everything else in creation. Even the stories of these snakes, they were in the deep, dark forever, and they’re able to bridge across from those worlds where all the potentialities of creation and everything that ever was, is, will be, could be— all those patterns are there. And it’s that serpent that manages that, swims through it and maintains his form here, comes through into this reality and then up to the next layer of reality and the next, and makes those bridges for us. He binds everything together, and he’s the one who facilitates the connections ’cause he travels. My rainbow snake travels out to your Turtle Island and talks to the serpent beings there. He talks to— we actually had a ceremony in Yarrabah at an eclipse about a decade ago, at that big eclipse, big ceremony in Yarrabah in far north Queensland, Australia. They called in Quetzalcoatl, so we had Mexican people there doing ceremony with us. And that big feathered serpent came. It came in. You could see it coming in across the sea and going there and staying for a while. We have our serpents in dialogue, and it shows us how to do proper border work, how to sit down and ensure that we’re sharing right story with each other. And then actually basing our relationship— whether it’s an avoidance relationship or a close relationship— it’s like how we’re managing that, and then how we manage our borders as ways of negotiating access, rather than— we negotiate the conditions of access to our lands. That’s what borders are for. It’s for— it’s a site of increase where we meet and we do ceremony. We celebrate together. We marry each other’s partners. We adopt each other’s children. We make a good embassy together. And that book is all about how serpent law around the world all points us toward that same place and gives us the foundational morals, ethics, gives us the foundational narratives that we can share and that we need to connect up in order to make a better interconnected world. Because they say, “Act local, think global.” You act locally— you’re drying yourself when you get outta the shower, you’re drying your feet first. Your hair’s still wet and your feet keep getting wet. That’s no good. You have to have an eye out through those three circles out into the world, those spheres of influence. You need to be connecting further afield if you want to be healthy at home. Yeah. And the serpent is the thing that does that. So yeah, that’s the answer to your question: the solution lies in serpent law, and it lies in what you find there and then what you can share with others.
Mike: Well, Tyson, I think that is a fantastic place to end the conversation. This has been an illuminating discussion on Indigenous thinking, especially how Indigenous Australian, Aboriginal thinking applies to how we might solve some of our global ecological crises. And I thank you for joining me today. Thank you for speaking with me.
Tyson: Yeah, it’s been great. Thanks.
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