Sand Talk | Tyson Yunkaporta

In nonfiction, a writer's credentials are often used to assure readers of their expertise and are meant to lend legitimacy to the text. Books on health, for example, often guarantee us that the author is a medical doctor. Writers of business books use dust jackets to brag about their own successful businesses. And the author's photo inside a gardening book depicts them with their plants. But in the end, the text has to speak for itself.

I was sympathetic when Tyson Yunkaporta opened his book by complaining about a readership "preoccupied with notions of authenticity and the writer’s standing as a member of a cultural minority." This betrays a kind of reader who wants to tick boxes, one who has misunderstood identity politics and cares only about whom they read rather than what they read. But he soon relents and does provide a short autobiography, which identifies him as belonging to the Apalech clan, apparently fit to examine "global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective," which is how he describes the project of the book.

And we quickly find out why he does this: his identity is the only reason one might possibly want to read the book. The content does not live up to the expectations set. For one, he is often confidently wrong about things. He claims that, in the thought experiment, Schrödinger's cat is poisoned before being put in the box. He attributes the long time between the releases of the films Avatar and its sequel to people being simply too blown away by the first one. And at one point, he uses blockchain as an illustrative example while mischaracterizing the way it works. After spotting these, it would betray great naïveté to trust him blindly on the rest of his assertions.

Second, a coherent structure is greatly lacking. The chapters are based on "yarns," conversations the author had with other people. It's often difficult to grasp where a story is headed or why an anecdote is told. Some interesting ideas are only implied, while others are repeated over and over. A written table of contents is completely absent from the physical copy¹.

The structure could be excused as more closely aligning with Indigenous ways of organizing knowledge. The associative jumps between topics evoke the feel of an unstructured conversation. There is a replacement for the table of contents in the form of a mosaic comprising icons representing each chapter. But when it is placed in the middle of the introductions and page numbers remain absent, it is unclear how we are to use it. At the same time, other Western conventions are followed: the book opens with an introduction, it closes with acknowledgements, the back provides a blurb. This calls into question how intentional the other changes really can have been. In any case, they are unsuccessful and result in an unsatisfying reading experience.

The book itself is written in a conversational style between reader and writer, highlighting the relationship between what he calls "us-two." This brings us to my final complaint: the author comes off as rather unlikable. Granted, this is a matter of personal taste, which is why I will do my best to provide examples of what specifically bothered me.

First, there's a lot of toxic masculinity, racism, and sexism. For example, at one point he claims—or jokes?—that "any blackfella caught eating tofu could lose his race card on the spot." Further, he seems quite immature. In one chapter, he describes being in a hotel he believes to be haunted by a ghost. The author reasons that the ghost must be a heterosexual male frustrated at finding him in his home. The specific words he uses to describe the situation are: "Now he's all unbusted ghost nuts and acting out."

One of the first things Tyson Yunkaporta talks about is "the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you," and he comes back to this a couple of times. And still, he himself often comes off as arrogant, signaling his own superiority. About Schrödinger's cat he says, "I can't see any sustainability solutions in thought experiments about felines in boxes." Well, I can't see any value in reading this book, where the content does not seem to have been checked for accuracy or edited for comprehension. An empty book by an author full of himself.

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