Right Story, Wrong Story - Outside of a Dog

English language

Published March 2, 2023 by Text Publishing Company.

ISBN:: 9781922790439

No rating (1 review)

Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta’s bestselling debut, cast an Indigenous lens on contemporary society. It was, said Melissa Lucashenko, ‘an extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming’.

Right Story, Wrong Story extends Yunkaporta’s explorations of how we can learn from Indigenous thinking. Along the way, he talks to a range of people including liberal economists, memorisation experts, Frisian ecologists, and Elders who are wood carvers, mathematicians and storytellers.

Right Story, Wrong Story describes how our relationship with land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

And, as he argues, story is at the heart of everything. But what is right or …

Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta’s bestselling debut, cast an Indigenous lens on contemporary society. It was, said Melissa Lucashenko, ‘an extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming’.

Right Story, Wrong Story extends Yunkaporta’s explorations of how we can learn from Indigenous thinking. Along the way, he talks to a range of people including liberal economists, memorisation experts, Frisian ecologists, and Elders who are wood carvers, mathematicians and storytellers.

Right Story, Wrong Story describes how our relationship with land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

And, as he argues, story is at the heart of everything. But what is right or wrong story? This exhilarating book is an attempt to answer that question. Right Story, Wrong Story is a formidably original essay about how we teach and learn, and how we can talk to each other to shape forms of collective thinking that are aligned with land and creation.

1 edition

Jim Brown reviewed Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta

“You're not going to find your way through this mess in drum circles and sweat lodges."

No rating

Yunkaporta offers Indigenous modes of thought and storytelling as a method, but he's clear that “‘ancient wisdom’ is not your one-stop-shop for salvation through regenerative design.” (24)

But he offers "right story" as a method, a way of offering a complex, multi-dimensional set of stories that ground technologies and cultural practices in relationality and responsibility toward one another, nonhumans, and land:

“Right story is not about objective truth but the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patterns of land and creation. right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land. wrong story wrong way - this means unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought.” (21)

"Right story" is a lot of things, but the idea I found most useful was Yunkaporta's argument that any technology must …

Yunkaporta offers Indigenous modes of thought and storytelling as a method, but he's clear that “‘ancient wisdom’ is not your one-stop-shop for salvation through regenerative design.” (24)

But he offers "right story" as a method, a way of offering a complex, multi-dimensional set of stories that ground technologies and cultural practices in relationality and responsibility toward one another, nonhumans, and land:

“Right story is not about objective truth but the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patterns of land and creation. right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land. wrong story wrong way - this means unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought.” (21)

"Right story" is a lot of things, but the idea I found most useful was Yunkaporta's argument that any technology must be accompanied by a psycho-social technology, a set of ideas and practices that ensure that this entire technological ecology will not do harm:

“You need to leave the ore in the ground until you have strong enough story to regulate its use in the world.” (192)

Subjects

Ethnology
Indigenous peoples