Tyson Yunkaporta
As the founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Labs in Australia, Dr Tyson Yunkaporta explores how the world’s oldest ways of thinking can help us solve some of today’s thorniest problems.
Projects delivered:
Protocols for Non-Indigenous People Working with Indigenous Knowledge.
"Fireside moves at the pace of story, which is hard to do in a world of deadlines. The result is quality and depth. Working with Ben and the team, often in difficult circumstances, I've found their care and relationally responsive ethic to be exceptional, making the impossible possible."
- Tyson Yunkaporta, author, educator and Senior Research Fellow at Deakin Research
The challenge:
In 2024, Dr Tyson Yunkaporta released a practical guide for non-Indigenous people who want to learn how to collaborate with First Nations communities and knowledge holders. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of people were reading these protocols online.
But the document's dense structure and theoretical complexity created a problem: the people who needed it most were struggling to use it. And as Tyson watched what he called a “gold rush” of interest in Indigenous knowledge, getting these protocols into an accessible form became even more urgent.
How we helped:
Working with Tyson, we approached this project through what the protocols themselves describe as "embassy" – the practice of creating proper relationships at knowledge system borders. Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems operate like incompatible computing systems that need protocols to translate between them. Rather than simplifying content, we worked to preserve the original document’s authority while creating bridges to non-Indigenous understanding.
During a series of extended dialogue sessions held over the course of a year, we restructured the document to lead with relationship-building rather than abstract concepts, turning dense theoretical frameworks into practical guidance.
With the writing complete, we worked with designer Lila Theodoros to reimagine how the document looked and felt, optimising it for smartphone reading and recognising how people actually engage with important content.
The response was immediate – the new version went viral with more than 100,000 views in its first few days, reaching organisations worldwide seeking respectful cross-cultural partnerships.
You can view the protocols here.
Here’s what we learned:
Here’s what we learned:
- Roughly a thousand things about First Nations knowledge systems that we would struggle to articulate in a pithy dot point.
- That collaboration is hard, even when there’s goodwill between both parties. This project reminded us why it's worth the effort.
