Oral backups

Modern neural science has been able to map the way print literacy rewires the human brain. It is a fairly catastrophic process, rearranging neural networks and connections between different areas of the brain in ways that are inefficient at best and highly abnormal at worst.

I'm not trying to discourage people or communities from pursuing literacy skills, by the way. I'm not rejecting an entire way of knowing and cultural tradition out of hand-that would be advocating ethnocide, which is never a good idea. I'm merely suggesting that it's helpful to mix things up a little, avoid putting all your cognitive eggs in one basket, keep your brain functioning more optimally.

Further, you should never commit all of your cultural knowledge to a print or digital repository. Archives are great, but they are only temporary. The Egyptians learned that the hard way.

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition. This doesn't need to replace print, but it can supplement it magnificently— those two systems might back each other up rather than merely coexist. Relationships between systems are just as important as the relationships within them. Oral traditions grounded in profound relationships represent a way of thinking that backs up your knowledge in biological peer-to-peer networks and provides a firewall against dictators who might decide to burn down your libraries.

It also mixes things up cognitively and allows your brain to rewire itself in more healthy ways. I call this way of thinking kinship-mind.

Kinship-mind is a way of improving and preserving memory in relationships with others. If you learn

something with or from another person, this knowledge now sits in the relationship between you. You can access the memory of it best if you are together, but if you are separated you can recall the knowledge by picturing the other person or calling out their name. This way of thinking and remembering is not limited to relationships with people.

The kinship-mind symbol shows the connectedness between two things—places or people or knowledge or any combination of these. Maybe even synapses. The two distinct entities form a pair, connected by a relationship represented by the line at the centre. Additionally, each entity is connected out to a multitude of other pairs and so the relationship is dynamic, responsive to shifting contexts.

There is a tension and balance maintained between the individuality of each entity in each pair and their interdependence in a network of pairs.

In Aboriginal worldviews, relationships are paramount in knowledge transmission. There can be no exchange or dialogue until the protocols of establishing relationships have taken place. Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going? What is your true purpose here? Where does the knowledge you carry come from and who shared it with you? What are the applications and potential impacts of this knowledge on this place?

What impacts has it had on other places? What other knowledge is it related to? Who are you to be saying these things?

In our world nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things. Most impor-tantly, those things that are connected are less important than the forces of connection between them. We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together.

When knowledge is patterned within these forces of connection it is sustainable over deep time.

Read more from : Sand talk by Tyson Yunkaporta