Buckle up your life jacket, this is one hell of a canoe ride!
A bumpy ‘journey by canoe across nine circles of developmental hell,’ Right Story, Wrong Story explores how our relationship with the land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. Disinformation has swept the world by storm, but how do we determine right story from wrong story?
Hours after I finished reading Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book, Right Story, Wrong Story, which examines the flows of disinformation through an indigenous knowledge systems’ lens, I receive a message from a cousin in Australia who I have been exchanging in (unhealthy) debates with recently regarding the upcoming ‘Voice’ referendum vote. Today’s message begins with a provocation:
“Dad says you can’t handle the truth.”
The message is backed up with a link to a No campaigner’s (a politician) Twitter (X) post. I don’t bother opening the link.
I have just woken up, am breastfeeding my newborn who was just starting to calm down after a rough start to the day 10 minutes ago. She had done an explosion pooh that required a full outfit change before she could even get her first breakfast boob into her mouth (and my daughter gets super ‘hangry’ if she doesn’t eat before starting her day). I should put the phone down immediately and just sit here looking into my daughter’s eyes as she drinks from my regenerative milk tap, but instead I am on this piece of questionable technology and my morning doom scroll has been interrupted with political polarization. I am too easily sucked into the vortex.
(Remy keeps telling me to delete Instagram again, and I keep not listening to him.)
At first, I am pissed, how dare my uncle send such a low blow through the insta-waves of his daughter? I haven’t even spoken to him in years! I consider my retaliation options too quickly, and decide to roll with intellectual smarty pants instead of abuse, bursting my ‘baby brain’ (it is a real thing, so if this blog post is a little crazy, just blame it on the baby fizz) to remember a quote or two from Tyson’s book about wrong story as placeless innovation, not connected to any land, and therefore not being able to withstand the test of time. I can’t grab my notes – they’re out in on the kitchen table and I’m in the bedroom with bubs still on my boob – but I think of something clever and bang off a few ‘I am greater than you, you are less than me’ self-terminating algorithmic texts that Tyson warns me of in his pages. My cousin responds as expected, defensive with some more absurd links that I know I won’t read. This has quickly descended into a meaningless exchange that’s probably making us both feel smart for 30 seconds, then annoyed, then smart again, then angry, and so forth. Shit, have I not learned anything?
I want to escape the madness and think of using the baby on my boob as an excuse to tap out of the texting, which is now really sucking my energy, making my belly tighten with stress, and pissing off my daughter who slipped off the nipple a few minutes ago and is wriggling around between my breast and bellybutton eager to be placed flat on her back for a bit of ‘rest and digest.’ Then it hits me, humor! Brother Tyson says that a bit of fun might not be a bad starting point for coming back into relation. Here goes nothing:
“Hey couz, go ask your dad what colour pants I am wearing today?!”
Uncle doesn’t pick up the phone to give me a call. But if he did, how would it play out? Would he engage in friendly conversation and make me feel comfortable enough to turn on my video and show him the colour of my pants? Or would he just dive right into a ‘truth’ sermon, piss me off, and have me hang up on him and then speed-dial mum to complain about the conspiracy theories her brother is peddling through his daughter?! Even if he went the kind route, and I did show him my pants, perhaps the colour would be distorted through the different pixel capacities of our individual phones, impacting our ability to agree on an answer. Or, perhaps we’d argue over ‘coral’ vs ‘ochre’ – oh what’s in a name? But it’s 9am and I’m not wearing any pants, not even undies. Baby is on the second boob now and I haven’t got dressed yet. I think about taking a photo of my present dress code, slapping a flower emoji between my legs for appropriate censorship, and sending it all off to my cousin to pass on to her dad with the words:
“Uncle, now who can’t handle the truth?!”
No, I don’t send a censored nude pic to my cousin! What would my belated Grandmother think if I did such a thing? (Book spoiler: always check in with Grannie, she’s probably got a story to help you figure things out.) Instead, I chuckle to myself and look down at bubs who is looking up at me from her spot on the bed lying flat on her back, flashing one of those enormous gums-and-all baby whale shark smiles that guarantees a better start to the day.
I check for a response to my pants joke, but my cousin isn’t online anymore, so I don’t know if she found it funny or it just pissed her off even more. She had previously sent me a love heart emoji, so I think all is not too bad there, but I do wonder how this would all play out if her, Uncle and I were sparring truth bombs at a family BBQ. It’s sure easier to dish out barbs through Instagram from the safety of our armchairs without anyone else – especially relatives – mediating or participating.
Second boob done, I strap my baby into her carrier and we go around the corner to the pine forest to walk the dog. It’s not a native forest – apparently Napoleon planted it many moons ago because he didn’t like the swampy marshland that he found when he ventured down to the southwest Atlantic coast. It’s a ‘managed’ logging forest these days, meaning guys with yellow bulldozers come in and raze swathes of the forest to the ground periodically so their employers can profit from shipping the felled logs around the world to be turned into wood slabs and maybe even actual furniture that is then shipped back and sold to us by way of click-and-collect Ikea bundles. I’ve been walking this particular expat forest’s routes for the past three years in an attempt to keep fit, entertain the dog, breathe in fresher air than I’m sucking in our mouldy rental house, all while trying to make sense of the world by paying attention to the land.
Three years is not really long enough to learn too much, but I do notice things. For example, this forest doesn’t seem like a hostile imposter, in fact it’s quite filled with diversity, seems to be thriving despite the annual bulldozer party, and the local wild deer (are they migrants too?) love to reproduce here (but they’re not such fans of the hunters who will start to come out soon until winter, leaving a trail of empty plastic bullet shells all over the paths for me to pick up in disgust).
I’m not native here either, I was born in Australia into a settler lineage that, according to the records I’ve seen, originates from the UK and Wales, but I have spent my adult life living semi-nomadically, in different places all over the world. Sometimes I wonder how I can develop better relationship to the land when I move around so much, but Aunty tells Tyson (who passes on the message in the book) that we are all indigenous to Mother Earth, so perhaps if I keep walking (and I have been walking since the stirrups to correct my dislocated infant hips were removed 40 years ago), and us-two keep yarning stories along the way, we just might be able to piece a bit of right story together.
So, the book…
A bumpy ‘journey by canoe across nine circles of developmental hell,’ (and I recommend you don’t step aboard without buckling up your life jacket tightly!), Right Story, Wrong Story explores how our relationship with the land is inseparable from how we relate to each other. Tyson is at his cheekiest (some of that has rubbed off on me here, can you tell?), and if you’ve listened to his podcast, The Other Others, you just might have a hint at the tone of the book. Story is at the heart of everything, but how do we decipher what is right or wrong story? Rather than deliver us with a monologue essay of lower case ‘g’ guru wisdom (listen to THIS podcast interview Debunking the Allure of Self-Help Gurus!), Tyson confronts his own biases through adventurous yarns with a range of thinkers who don’t all agree with him, something I know I need to do more of (how about you?) so us-two had better keep up our forest walks and subsequent yarns.
This is not a book with a hit list of ways to save the world (can we agree that we don’t need any more of those?!) - healing takes time and community. What it does offer, however, is an invitation to examine story together, so that we can build our capacity to identify just how rampant wrong story has become in our increasingly complicated world and how we might circle back into right story, which continues to survive the test of deep time. None of this can be done without coming back into relationship with the land, though, and in the pages or Right Story, Wrong Story, us-two might just discover a pathway towards necessary re-connection.
What you won’t find in this blog post are any hot quotes or nuggets of wisdom (I over-did that with Sand Talk already), nor am I giving you a review. In fact, Tyson suggests we burn the book to farewell all the wrong stories us-two have explored inside, but I’ve read my copy on my son’s iPad and I don’t think burning it will sit well with him.
The Voyage Virage Book Club is a community, a place to yarn about books, their themes, and everything that comes from having ‘conversations with the futile and passive-aggressive parts removed’.
Right Story, Wrong Story releases on October 3rd, 2023. Order a copy or buy it on Audible (narrated by Tyson!) and once you’re on the other end of the canoe ride let’s circle back for a yarn!
