Tag Archive for: indigenous culture

,

Why Rebel | Jay Griffiths

Why rebel? Because our footprint on the Earth has never mattered more than now. How we treat it, in the spirit of gift or of theft, has never been more important.

Because we need a politics of kindness, but the very opposite is on the rise. Libertarian fascism, with its triumphal brutalism, its racism and misogyny – a politics that loathes the living world.

Because nature is not a hobby. It is the life on which we depend, as Indigenous societies have never forgotten.

Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars, and they are lining up now to write rebellion across the skies.

‘This, bluntly, should be our generation’s Gettysburg Address’ ~ Rishi Dastidar, selected Why Rebel for guest contribution to May 2023’s What We’re Reading Now.

Jay Griffiths has been a long time collaborator with Extinction Rebellion and Writers Rebel. Last year, in collaboration with actor Mark Rylance, composers Sam Lee & Anna Phoebe and Paint the Land, she co-produced Almost Invisible Angels, a haunting short film which speaks out in praise of insects. Her accompanying written piece for Writers Rebel gives us a chilling insight into a world without insects – a world that creeps uncomfortably closer with every month of global inaction to protect our remaining biodiversity.

,

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World | Tyson Yunkaporta

This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger’s cat. Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

‘As consequences of civilisation squeeze modernity in a death grip, connecting with the ancestral world, breaking out of our box of time, is perhaps the most radical act any of us can do.

In his startling manual Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Tyson Yunkaporta describes five ways of seeing from an Aboriginal perspective – kinship mind, storytelling mind, dreaming mind, ancestor mind and pattern mind. All five help perceive the land and ourselves within it, kin with creatures, rivers, rocks and sky. This knowledge is embedded in ritual, storytelling and practice that hold communities and cultures together, so human beings can be ‘custodial’ for places and living beings. We have a thousand-year clean up ahead of us, Yunkaporta tells us, and generously hands us the imaginative tools to begin the work.’ – Charlotte Du Cann, guest contributor to May 2022’s Rebel Library Recommends

 

Purchase Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World from Hive online bookshop

,

The Last Quarter of the Moon | Chi Zijian

‘A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.’

At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.

Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it.

‘An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia – nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries… This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent’ Financial Times

 

See more from Penguin Vintage Earth