Right Story, Wrong Story

Tyson Yunkaporta

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times, December 12th 2023

Tyson Yunkaporta, an Aboriginal scholar and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University, studies how Indigenous methods of investigation can be applied to complex global problems. In Right Story, Wrong Story he invites us to join him on a narrative journey (a trip through Dante’s Inferno in a traditional canoe) that draws on his own research as well as the expertise of a range of experts – Aboriginal Elders, economists, tech gurus, a Saxon ecologist, a Celtic beekeeper, and a Hungarian Tamil Kendo master to name just a few – to analyse everything from capitalist economics to the proliferation of online misinformation through an Indigenous lens.

As Yunkaporta describes it, ‘right story’ is relational, non-centralised and embedded in time and place: “Not about objective truth, but the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities…never comes from individuals, but from groups living in living in right relation with each other and the land.” ‘Wrong story’, in contrast, is that “made by individuals or corrupt groups separated from land and spirit… unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought…[that] eliminates trust and destroys social cohesion.” As such, by privileging writer and reader, this book is a ‘wrong story’, but one that is necessary to achieve a larger objective. That is not to say Indigenous wisdom will save the day, or that this way of knowing is inaccessible to colonial culture. Indeed, in many ways, the collective commons of science created through an analogous process: “a community with a long lineage, comprising members of almost every culture on the planet, collectively sharing enquiry in rigorous, rule-governed ways, with peers reviewing peers in distributed networks of autonomous institutions that aren’t controlled by any single centralised authority”. 

Each chapter examines a different problem and describes how looking through an indigenous lens could provide new insight or solution, as well as how it connects to his own lived experience.  One of my favourites describes a reverse-anthropological project studying online ‘settler-on’ settler street fighting videos using Aboriginal epistemology. By evaluating them according to traditional methodology and criteria of rules-based violence (they did not score well) and comparing them to another study that did the same with Indigenous videos, we may one day identify common social structures that could allow us to incorporate physical conflict in a way that increases rather than damage relatedness.

He also gives us insight into Aboriginal ways of knowing through doing. For example, traditional knowledge is embedded symbolically in story, landscape, and object, so for each chapter, he must create a tool or weapon from which his writing can originate. And by combining traditional and contemporary ways of knowing and being rather than focusing on an idealised past or a mythical future, he hopes to engage with right story in the present, ensuring the culture lives and adapts to current contexts.

It will take many re-readings to properly understand everything Yunkaporta is trying to say in this amazing essay, but it is a journey I am more than willing to join him on.