Indigenous language and perception

“…you tell yourself a story and you have a map and you can close your eyes and walk that…”

Listen: ABC Radio National, All in the Mind. 1st September 2019
with

Dr Tyson YunkaportaSenior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges
Deakin UniversityProf Nick EvansAboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Languages
Department of Linguistics
AustralianNational University
Prof Pat DudgeonProfessor
School of Indigenous Studies
University of Western Australia



“…if you come up with a story that’s embedded in a place that you know well and points along that map and you tell yourself a story and you have a map and you can close your eyes and walk that…

Yarning is kind of vibrant and overlapping.

We also don’t have these debates where you’ve got to provide rebuttal and disagree with people. There’s this foundational protocol in yarning of building on what the other person has said. Because the aim of the yarn is different, the aim of the yarn is to build a loose consensus out of many different points of view, so you’ve got an accurate picture of the reality from as many different points of view as possible because that is more approximating the truth.

The aim of the yarn isn’t to end up with one point of you becoming dominant and proving, no, this is the truth and everybody has got to look at it this way. In a yarn you’re looking for a loose consensus and a kind of a distributed governance model then of decision-making based on that loose consensus.”

Publications:

Title: Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.
Author: YunkaportaTyson. Publisher:Text Publishing

Title: Dying Words: Endangered Languages And What They Have To Tell Us Author: Evans, Nicholas Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell