> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### The Wrong Canoe > We all try really hard, but I tell you, I'm sick of hearing this rubbish statistic about 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity being diligently cared for by Indigenous Peoples. Most of us have only nominal Native Title and no real control, 'co-managing' the land at best, in ways that facilitate mining or agricultural interests, while we struggle to feed and shelter ourselves in the economy of the occupying culture. That doesn't leave us much time to look after the shred of biodiversity left in their water reserves, agriculture-complexes, real-estate developments and mining leases. Our family does continue this work in our sacred places (the ones that have yet been blown up or bulldozed), but it is very hard to cram it all into a weekend. > 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. > Relationships are the only way to store data safely in the long term. > Maybe we just have basic operating protocols hardwiring us to interact with our landscape, to graze on information from our country, language and culture, until we grow a relational net that they can collectively process complexity, a mind extending beyond the skull as far as our storied maps of being can go. Perhaps when we create, think, feel or communicate, we are only able to do so to the limits of these relational nets. ^ Reminds me of [[The Extended Mind]] > Apocalypses are unsettling things, but they become much more interesting if you have prepped by stockpiling relationships, rather than guns, gold and vitamin supplements. > All this wrong story is moving towards an important message: there are some inefficiencies, multi-polar traps, perverse incentive structures, and self-terminating algorithms in the current global system that could use some analysis from an Aboriginal point of view. > > At the same time, we have to be realistic and acknowledge that ancient wisdom is not your one-stop-shop for salvation through regenerative design. It is easy and confident to assume the hypothesis that this ancient method of enquiry and holistic knowledge system will contain all the answers. But it probably doesn't. On my own, I do not have the skills, knowledge, perspective, cultural competence, or qualifications to undertake any such an analysis. I do, however, belong to a vast web of relationships, made of yarns and connections, and that entity certainly is capable of the computational work necessary to examine the complicated systems that are currently burning our world. ### Bee the Change (Anger) Mentions this book by Katherine Collins, The Nature of Investing - https://www.everand.com/read/252846188/The-Nature-of-Investing-Resilient-Investment-Strategies-through-Biomimicry Katherine Collins is the chairman of SFI. > Katherine's greatest hope for the historical phase shift we are living through is the next generation of thinkers who are bringing contextual awareness and wonder to the table. > Although it's customary to sneer at the idealism of youth, like Katherine, I'm finding myself impressed with the next generation. Sure, they have performative ways of dealing with trauma that are unfamiliar to me, as though demographically, categorised ordeals can be transformed into some kind of social capital and then speculated on in an ideological futures market. But their way can't be any worse than mine, which usually involves privately ripping my spirit to shreds and scattering it across the earth while we dig all the graves for my loved ones and cut down all the trees for my masters. ### The Riddle of Steel (War?) > I try to avoid setting up comparisons with other cultures that suggest my people are superior beings (a practice that seldom ends well, historically), but if I may, I would like to suggest that we do death better than most people. > Remember, we are partners in this heretical act of looking out at the world together through a glitchy, Indigenous lens and riffing on what we see there. We're innquiring *through* Indigenous knowledge, not *about* it, and this is a deeply unsettling and unpopular process in a world that gobbles up minority narratives and wisdom like chocolate-covered strawberries and macadamias. > When we have our gaze set on an idealised past or a mythical future, we miss a chance to engage with right story in the present. Cultural longevity is important, but living cultures must always adapt to current context and remain fluid enough to allow for continual emergence. > There is some superstition in my science, but that's the part that demands rigour and adherence to ethical protocols. What else could provide the motivation to attend to these things? Material reality produces individual incentives for deception and destruction; spirit provides ancestral incentives for truth and care. We need spirit, whether it exists or not, if we want to thrive as people-in-place. > We are trying to make a steel boomerang out of the keel pin from a 19th-century sailing ship that was wrecked off the coast of New South Wales, while carrying luxury goods to the proto-oligarchs of a new colony. We have the notion that something historically ugly can be re-forged into something beautiful, and that the steel might give us some kind of message about hope and forgiveness to share with the world. We rush into this process without asking the steel its story, so all we learn in the end is that you can't polish a turd. Or, to put it in nicer way, you can't build sustainable systems on top of destructive processes. > > We forget that rocks have memory, and steel is made from rocks. In our metaphysics, information is absorbed into minerals and stays there. This is why stones can contain 'bad spirit' that you don't want to mess with. You can melt them down and repurpose them, but the story remains, whether good or bad. > We had been eager to spark some kind of reconciliation-magic by turning invasion-fleet artifacts into boomerangs, but healing isn't a thing to be rushed, not if you want it to last. > I haven't met anyone whose totem is a computer yet, and I'm wondering if the elders are waiting for Moore's Law to implode and slow its insanely fast cycles of innovation and obsolescence, so that they can include a motherboard in the totemic system that might last as long as a machete does. At the moment, mechanical totems would need to be abandoned and upgraded every two years, which is a timeframe that doesn't really work in our knowledge systems. > I'm reluctant to call a ceasefire in my war on digital imperialism and wait for everyone to discover an ethical innovation process. History makes it fairly clear that you should never cease hostilities until there is a treaty on the table > People, like all entities, leave traces of their story in the minerals they touch. When the minerals are formed into tools, they become part of a kind of extended cognition, another part of our minds and bodies. There's a kind of cybord relation here, but it's not a one-way street—the tool is not just an extension of your will, because you are also influenced by the design of the tool and the spirit of the minerals within it. > Since the first sword emerged from the first forge, humans have been struggling to find the right social technology to balance the needs of flesh, land and overpowered tech. The only thing that can meet this challenge is right story, which must never be authored by individuals, but crowdsourced over time by people in communicative relation with the land. This is the uniquely human process that has always been facilitated by riddles, yarns and thought experiments. ### You're It He describes the Aboriginal version of tag, in which whoever is 'it' has the power and agency to run towards a goal line. You claim that agency by tagging someone else who is 'it', and start running in the opposite direction. The game is super fast, and power never stays in one place. The kids often forget what side they're on, as they are lost in the pure joy of it. They form chaotic, self-organising patterns. > Dignity, mutual care and respect are our default settings as a species. Like most mammals, we must carry the capacity for violent struggle, but that has to be limited by good governance and never held by one person or one group exclusively. It must be accessible to all, moving from actor to actor constantly, just like the Indigenous version of tag. Any weapons usde must be beautiful, for display as much as defence, and must be limited in their potential to do large-scale damage. # Quotes