The only secure way to store data over deep time is in intergenerational relationships embedded in meaningful landscapes. We understand that digital information decays and is impossible to store for more than a few decades, so we hybridise our relational technologies for everyday use in order to keep humans in the loop in the project of long-term knowledge retention. For example, we continue our widely-acclaimed research in Aboriginal memorisation techniques, which utilise local landscapes to embed narrative, symbolic, relational and linguistic mnemonics for learners to utilise in their studies in any discipline. Ultimately this also produces a profound sense of connectedness with the landscape and community, while also improving outcomes in education and training.

Project: ‘Moving with the Land’

Residential communities of inquiry engaging with Indigenous knowledge systems, designing ways to return people to a state of good relation with land, land to a state of adaptive capacity, and economies to a state of balance with the biosphere.

Authors & project founders
Conceived and written by Tyson Yunkaporta (with Paul Kearney) and supported by The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab (Deakin University and the Indigenous Systems Knowledge Collective (an NFP founded by Tyson Yunkaporta).

Overcoming existential threats, while we live
We aim to create attractive ‘living labs’ test sites in consultation with Indigenous custodians and thinkers to design future-proof civic and environmental systems at the local level. These practical R+D activities anticipate catastrophic risk scenarios involving economic instability, institutional failure, finite resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, climate disasters, mass migration, housing crises, food and water insecurity and social fragmentation.

We seek ways to negotiate and implement consortium investment in built environments and habitats affording symbiotic relationships between human and non-human living systems. These investments of knowledge, time and capital will offer returns beyond biodiversity offsets and
carbon credits, as they will also establish niche tertiary sector outputs involving knowledge production for sustainable development.

These living labs are not intentional communities or eco-villages, or even conservation projects. They are estates that accommodate communities of practice trialling methods of stewarding an interconnected, networked commons of land, living space, resources and knowledge. resistant to
future pandemics, supply chain disruption and financial instability.

New tools, new propositions of value
These estates have the potential to become a new asset class as real-estate becomes increasingly uninsurable in the face of escalating floods, fires, storms and drought. They will have the unique capacity to ‘move with the land’ by means of a fluid and adaptive infrastructure designed for pre-vacuation, itinerant civic arrangements with the capacity to shift the focus of
community operations to different locations seasonally.

This unique feature of potential mobility within a defined land-base not only provides security for residents, but also affords better opportunity to enjoy and care for migratory species that are essential to diversity and systems health, including humans who may need to be hosted temporarily when their living spaces are disrupted by the extreme crises that are becoming more
of a feature than a bug in this era of escalating change and complexity.

In environmental philanthropy and regenerative finance spaces, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous wisdom are hot commodities that are often only engaged with in shallow ways for marketing purposes. Our commitment will be to establishing authentically rigorous relation with Indigenous sibling communities and groups. As their knowledge systems have emerged from millennia of adaptive responses to climatic, geological, biological, microbial and military threats, our living labs will be interdependently entwined with them in deeply respectful relations of
mutual care, co-learning processes of inquiry and bio-cultural design principles that may be shared incrementally, as the knowledge and reliability of participants increase over time.

Nature is ultimately the generator of all wealth, no matter how it is defined. Indigenous peoples all over the world have understood how to care for all nature, through care for country, and have not only kept that traditional knowledge alive, but continually updated it in response to changing systems and emerging knowledge.

The inalienable core of any meaningful undertaking aimed at dealing with the havoc wrought upon humans and all natural systems must be the return of land into hands that hold this knowledge and will work with it to (re)apply this care and praxis, so that people of many cultures can work together towards ways of healing and caring within local bioregions.

The only true foundation – land
The unique approach of these projects is that we seek to embed humans in their ecological niche in the natural system, rather than isolating biodiversity and carbon sinks as ‘wild’ spaces. We do not regard humans as a destructive pestilence that must be isolated or punished, but as a unique custodial species regarded by Indigenous cultures as being essential to the health and care of the land.

Systems for verification and quality assurance will be established through networks of peer review with similar communities, also paired and partnered with Indigenous Praxis Labs, which will model Indigenous environmental community projects in which the local community holds and controls its own land and applies traditional knowledge for land care, community design and
governance.

It is expected that embassy practices and customs will be established between these networked groups, eventually facilitating alternative supply chains and trade routes, including the sharing of specialist skills and unique products. Above all, the transparency and scrutiny of continuous hosting of guests from other communities sharing evaluation and insights is expected to play a
role.

Governance models long debated in game-theoretical scenarios and the design of Distributed Autonomous Organisations, often including traditional Indigenous systems and commons development scenarios, may be designed and trialled at scale throughout these networks of living labs.

Motivation to begin
At a time of profound existential risk, when all investment carries elements of uncertainty, there are some returns we begin to desire beyond short-term money-on-money return. We feel an urge to hedge our bets, to invest in relationships with bloody interesting people who want us to engage with deep thinking and sensemaking, reading the land and connecting with global
networks of influencers and geniuses, in robust debate, meaning making, traditional ceremonies and land-based practices retrieved forward for a livable future.

We want to be part of something, not just feel as though we’ve contributed some capital towards vague measurements of biodiversity increase in strictly demarcated areas devoid of human care, knowledge and spirit. We want to be included, find our place at the cutting edge of innovative property design, in which boundaries are for facilitating human and non-human relationships,
flows and trade, rather than arbitrary regulation and control.

We want to find a richer purpose beyond our current occupation, to access more land and resources without the constant need to acquire excessive amounts of either, to remain competitive or even just secure. We do not want to be taken advantage of in our longing for these things. We do not trust those who say, “leap and the net appears”. We want to weave the net together, make it strong, then try it out with a few tentative jumps. We want to be involved in
making meaning and weaving hope. We want stories to keep in our hearts and mouths, not just bonds and tokens to keep in our safes. (Although those things are also very nice…)

‘Using Indigenous knowledge in Climate Resistance strategies for Future Urban Environments’ Chapter 12, Design for Regenerative Cities and Landscapes, Marshall, C., Twill, J. 2o22.

Regenerative Songlines Australia is working to create a continent-wide network that connects regenerative projects and practitioners.