The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab was established in early 2021 by Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, author of ‘Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World’. The IKS Lab is an activist, public-facing think-tank, rooted in a strong evidence base of research. It uses Indigenous Knowledges as a prompt and provocateur for seeing, thinking, and doing things differently.
Production
Individually and in groups we conduct research projects across many disciplines to inform innovative knowledge and solutions designed to return all human beings to their ecological niche as a custodial species embedded in regenerative landscapes.
Transmission
Information flows are essential to the functioning of land-based systems and are crucial to the realignment of contemporary human systems with the Law of the land. This informs our pedagogies, communication protocols and decision-making processes.
Application
In every application of knowledge we seek to build in affordances that increase relationships with humans, non-humans and entities of place, creating feedback loops that continue to generate adaptive responses over time.
Regeneration
The only secure way to store data over deep time is in intergenerational relationships embedded in meaningful landscapes. We adapt our relational technologies for everyday use in order to keep humans in the loop in the project of long-term knowledge retention.
Relational Complexity
Our Lab is grounded in collective knowledge and collaborative practice grounded in protocols of embassy from sacred sites of great gatherings, where many peoples traditionally come together for knowledge production and transmission. Our old people from these places connect us, permit and guide our work.
This is how our knowledge and governance scales. From independent but connected individuals to autonomous but interdependent clans, to sovereign but syndicated tribes connected by a continental common Law, with trading relations extending overseas. We follow this fractal pattern of custodial relations, operating in a collective of collectives.
From the Bunya Mountains gathering protocols we do Wanjau (collective sense-making) to work with feedback loops – positive and negative – in ways that maintain Mimburi (flows) of regenerative systems. We connect with common protocols across many cultures, and help rediscover these for people who have forgotten them.
Latest Books & Publications
Indigenous scholars from IKSLabs at Algoma (Canada) and Deakin (Australia) Universities offer this bundle of general cultural protocols for engaging with the regulatory mechanisms of Indigenous Peoples when working with traditional knowledge and practice. This open-source document should be shared widely and local Indigenous groups should be encouraged to adapt it to suit their specific bio-cultural contexts and purposes.
Right Story, Wrong Story extends Tyson 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.
John Davis’ Strength Basing, Empowering and Regenerating Indigenous Knowledge Education demonstrates how to bring Indigenous Knowledges to the forefront of education practice and provides educators with the tools to enact culturally responsive curricula and pedagogies, ensuring positive educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and students.
In Hoodie Economics, Jack Manning Bancroft builds a values system revolution that centres a relational economy, offering urgent and transformative solutions to embrace Indigenous thinking and ideas from outside the margins and pushing the focus from capitalism to relationships – from the people in suits to the people in hoodies.