What are the most important messages you want to send about how Indigenous thinking works in a Western world?

You don’t need to learn about Indigenous knowledge to be in touch with this. You just have to remember your own. In the systems that we’re living in, there’s a very big collective memory loss. People don’t really remember who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of people when I talk about Western this and that — people assert this idea that they don’t have a culture. No, other people have cultures. Everything outside of the West is a culture. But the West itself is neutral.

People say the West isn’t a culture to you?

People really assert it.

It’s funny. You’re somebody who’s living in the system and you don’t have a lot of choices in that system. And we need to be looking up rather than sideways and going: Victim — victim — oppressor — evil person — hero, classifying ourselves. What do we need to be able to do to free ourselves from this?

What lessons can we learn from Indigenous custodians of the land?

Take Indigenous astronomy: Did you know that Aboriginal people knew that meteorites form craters before Europeans did? It’s only a few decades ago that they discovered that in modern science. But we’ve got Dreaming stories about that. People record these things and then they write it as a paper. It’s just “Wow. Aboriginal people knew about this. So Aboriginal culture is a lot smarter than we thought.” And that’s it. O.K., what are we going to do? Astrophysicists need to be sitting down with those old fellas and going into detail in those stories. Tell us the properties of that asteroid.

Their knowledge is respected and even put up on a pedestal a little bit. So it’s not that — it’s this uncertainty of how to proceed.

In the book’s introduction, you say you don’t want to talk too much about your own story.

You have to tell your whole life story, not just yours but the traumatic story of all your recent ancestors. It’s like re-traumatizing yourself over and over and I just find it really interesting that’s the main Indigenous genre people want to see and it is just the same story over and over again. And it’s like, that’s all that people want to hear.

There’s a scholar called Martin Nakata who’s said, we need to resist the self narrative. He calls it “the ubiquitous Indigenous self narrative.” It’s killing our thought. It’s killing our scholarship.