Tyson Yunckaporta yarns about many things, but one string I’d like to hop onto is this. The very abomination of communication in English, across the Internet, which is precisely where I meet him. Us-two meet in the null space of a global culture which has no name because it’s so ubiquitous. You could call it globalization, or development, or progress. These are just modern names for the now offensive term civilized. As much as we change the words, the Gods see what we’re doing and they don’t like it. This is a story told over and over again, perhaps because we keep doing it. As Yunckaporta writes:
Inland on freshwater Country, the Baakindji people faced extinction when they experimented with nation-building long ago, which worked well enough until the land and sky moved and they were no longer able to move with it. Their story, as I was told, recalled a time when all the tribes and clans of the region gathered and stayed in one place in permanent settlement. There were abundant resources to support this lifestyle and the people assimilated into one uniform language and culture, forgetting their previous diversity.
A massive meteor crashed nearby and killed most of the people, scorching goannas with different marks to make diverse varieties as a reminder to the…
