Learning session 17: Snake Talk
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world (Can’t read the full Medium article? All learning session syntheses can also be found on Substack.)
🎧 Prefer listening? Just click the built-in “Listen” play button right below the title at the top of this page
The 17th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox explored Snake Talk: How the World’s Ancient Serpent Stories Can Guide Us with Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University and co-author, with Megan Kelleher, of Snake Talk.
Drawing on conversations with Indigenous knowledge holders across the globe, the book explores serpent stories as carriers of knowledge about creation, transformation, relationships, and the place of humans within a wider world of beings. What might these stories offer us in a time of ecological and social crisis? What can they tell us about recognising our roles, aligning our gifts with the patterns of creation, and understanding the relationships that make our worlds possible?
The dialogue ranged across questions of knowledge, consent, collective life, ceremony, and how relationships develop between different beings. What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
🌿 Learning Session 17 (October 2026) — Synthesis
Snake Talk: How the World’s Ancient Serpent Stories Can Guide Us, with Tyson Yunkaporta
What if serpent stories are less a collection of myths than a body of law: what is right to create, what is right to destroy, and who keeps the right to say no?
1. The Serpent as a carrier of knowledge
What kinds of knowledge might serpent stories make available in this moment of crisis? What becomes possible when we approach them as knowledge that can shape how we live, rather than simply as mythology, metaphor, or cultural heritage?
A law older than temples
Serpent stories carry a foundational law concerning what makes creation right or wrong, and what makes destruction right or wrong. They ask not simply what a serpent represents, but what relationships a story sustains, what ways of acting it makes possible, and what responsibilities follow from entering those relationships.
More than written content
Stories can carry more than their written or spoken content. They hold understandings of how the world works, how beings relate, and how people might act within the relationships that sustain life. Yet the relationships, embodied experiences, and ceremonial contexts through which that knowledge is held are not necessarily transmitted when a story is written down or shared.
From interpretation to relationship
This matters when engaging with Indigenous knowledge. A story is not a container of information from which an observer can extract a useful lesson. Its meaning is bound up with the relationships and responsibilities through which it is known.
What upheaval has produced
The serpent also places crisis in deep time. Upheaval is not only loss; earlier periods of disturbance have produced new climates, adaptations, governance arrangements, permission structures, and protocols. The question becomes: what can upheaval regenerate, and what forms of relationship and collective care might emerge from it?
🌱 Seed:
A story can carry knowledge that exceeds what can be explained in words. Understanding it requires attention to the relationships, practices, and responsibilities through which that knowledge becomes meaningful — and to what upheaval might make possible.
2. Different Serpents, different worlds
The Rainbow Serpent, Naga, Quetzalcoatl, Goorialla, Jörmungandr, and other serpent beings emerge from different worlds and traditions. What becomes visible when we follow the Serpent across these worlds? And what can their differences reveal about the plurality of creation?
Four serpents, four roles
These beings do not perform the same role. Some create and shape landscapes; others guard waters, bring rain and knowledge, connect earth and sky, or hold the boundaries of a world. Their stories arise from particular places, relationships, and knowledge systems.
The generative potential of difference
Following a pattern across traditions can be generative, but similarity does not make beings, meanings, or knowledge interchangeable. A connection visible from one perspective may not be central in another. The value lies in discovering what different stories and relationships make possible to understand, rather than reducing them to a single interpretation.
Balance as the constant
Across these differences, however, the conversation returned repeatedly to balance. Even where a serpent appears as a destructive force, it may form part of a larger relationship: serpent and hero, destruction and regeneration, boundary and crossing. The struggle between them can be understood not as simple opposition, but as one of the tensions through which life and creation emerge.
🌱 Seed:
The value of following a pattern across stories lies not in proving that all traditions say the same thing, but in discovering what their relationships and differences make possible to understand.
3. The Serpent as a way of reading patterns
If serpent stories carry knowledge about creation, movement, and transformation, how might they help us read the patterns we are already living within?
Binaries that dissolve
The Serpent unsettles binaries: here and there, now and then, above and below. It crosses territorial boundaries and moves through layers of creation, bringing what is held below into relation with what is visible above. Reading patterns through the Serpent means reading across layers, borders, and relationships, rather than seeking one fixed position from which the whole can be seen.
Patterns are not always plans
This became tangible in Tyson’s descriptions of his garden, where plants, insects, worms, fungi, and animals interact in ways that continually reshape conditions for life. What happens in one part of the garden affects other parts, sometimes unpredictably. An unexpected interaction can become an invitation to observe more closely rather than a problem to eliminate.
Learning through response
This way of working does not begin with a complete plan. It involves noticing what is happening, responding to changing circumstances, and learning through the consequences of those responses. For practitioners working with complex ecological and social systems, it raises a useful question: how much of what is called a problem depends on viewing relationships in isolation, or expecting them to behave according to an established model?
🌱 Seed:
Reading patterns requires attention to relationships and their changing effects. What appears to be a problem in one part of a system may look different when its wider relationships become visible.
4. Human gifts and responsibilities within creation
If serpent stories help us understand humans as participants in a wider creation, how do we recognise our gifts and responsibilities within it?
Purpose as a story from capital
The session challenged the idea that each person has one predetermined purpose waiting to be discovered. Tyson associated this expectation with a logic in which people seek a fixed destiny: to become a particular kind of professional, leader, expert, or authority.
Roles that shift
His alternative was more contextual: roles change as circumstances change, as relationships develop, and as the needs of those around us shift. He illustrated this through caring for his children, growing food, and tending a garden alongside neighbours. These were not presented as the fulfilment of a fixed vocation; they emerged from the circumstances and relationships of his life.
Responsibility as something enacted
The garden offered a tangible example. Tyson described watching plants, insects, worms, fungi, and animals interact, noticing unexpected effects, and adjusting what he did in response. Practices that seemed to break the rules of companion planting became reasons to observe more closely rather than impose an established model.
Gifts in context
What we can contribute matters, but so do the circumstances in which those capacities become useful, the beings with whom we are in relationship, and the needs that emerge over time.
🌱 Seed:
A role need not be a fixed identity or predetermined destiny. Responsibilities emerge through changing relationships, and recognising them requires attention to what is happening around us.
5. Knowledge across beings
If serpent stories speak of a world made through relationships among humans, languages, flames, skies, waters, and rocks, what does it mean to understand knowledge as something that can emerge between different kinds of beings?
Knowledge made between
The conversation approached this first through relationships between people. Two people who share stories, experiences, and conversations come to understand those things in a way unique to their relationship. Each may have shared the same material with others, but the understanding that develops between them is particular to their encounter.
The relationship as a source of knowledge
Knowledge, in this view, is not simply transferred from one person to another. Something is produced in the meeting itself. This offers a broader understanding of co-creation: a relationship can become a source of knowledge in its own right.
Knowing through relationship
Applied to the more-than-human world, this raises a question: what might become knowable through a sustained relationship with a particular being or place that would remain inaccessible through detached study alone? The question is not only whether other beings hold knowledge in a form humans can recognise, but how the nature of our relationship shapes what we are able to notice, understand, and respond to.
🌱 Seed:
Some knowledge exists in the relationship itself. Sharing information does not automatically reproduce the understanding, responsibilities, or conditions that made that knowledge possible.
6. Stories that are still active
What allows an ancient serpent story to remain living knowledge rather than simply an inherited account of the past?
The altered state does not travel
What is encountered in ceremony remains within the ceremonial context. It cannot simply be carried out of its context. The altered state is not transferred from ceremony into everyday life, continued as a personal or spiritual condition. Ceremony is a particular context of communication and exchange between human and more-than-human communities, and its altered state belongs to that context.
Story travels
But story can travel. Stories carry meanings from these encounters that help people understand how to act in the world. What can travel beyond ceremony is story. Stories carry meanings from these encounters that help people understand how to act in the world. A story is not simply a record of something that happened; its meanings can remain active, shaping relationships and responsibilities as circumstances change.
What travels, and what does not
A story’s significance does not depend only on its age, circulation, or how many people know its narrative. It also concerns the relationships and practices through which its knowledge remains active. When a story moves into a book, classroom, or conversation across cultures, something may become available to new audiences, but its context — the embodied experience, ceremonial practice, obligations to particular communities, and relationships with place — do not automatically travel with it.
Avoiding portable lessons
This distinction matters for how stories are encountered outside their original context. A story may inform present-day thinking, but it does not thereby give access to the ceremonial state, relationships, or responsibilities through which its knowledge is held. The question is how stories can continue to generate knowledge without being treated as portable lessons detached from those relationships.
🌱 Seed:
A story remains consequential through the relationships and practices that give it life. It can inform how people act in the world, but circulating it does not reproduce the ceremonial relationships and responsibilities through which its knowledge is held.
7. Boundaries as sites of relationship
What can serpent stories teach us about boundaries, and what might this mean for how we meet others in times of upheaval?
A being that crosses borders
The Serpent crosses boundaries: between places, layers of creation, moments in time, and states of being. In Snake Talk, Tyson and Megan Kelleher explore serpent stories that hold creation and destruction together, unsettling the distinctions through which people make sense of the world.
Borders as sites of kin-making
Tyson described borders as sites of relation and kin-making: places where relationships can develop and access can be negotiated. A boundary is not simply a line separating those who belong from those who do not. It can be a place where distinct beings and groups meet, work out how to relate, and build something together.
Two kinds of boundary work
He contrasted this with another kind of boundary work: defining what belongs inside, purifying it, excluding what does not fit, and then expanding outward. The alternative is not to dissolve boundaries, but to meet at them. Each person, group, or community has its own boundaries; relations develop where these boundaries meet, through the work of connecting, negotiating, and building.
Making relations in upheaval
This work extends across many kinds of relationship, from people living alongside one another to relationships between human and more-than-human beings. In times of destruction and upheaval, the capacity to make and remake these relations becomes especially important. Mutual aid, respect, and support are part of that work.
🌱 Seed:
Boundaries can serve as sites of relationship rather than instruments of exclusion. The work lies in maintaining distinctness while creating the conditions for connection, access, and new forms of kinship.
8. Place, story, and the conditions of exchange
Serpent stories are connected to particular places and knowledge traditions. What happens when those stories travel? How can encounters across places and traditions become generative without assuming that every story is available for everyone to use?
Everything changes
Tyson’s answer was, in effect, “everything changes.” The relationships around a story change when the story moves. He linked this to what plants do: a plant moved to a new place behaves differently because it meets different soil, climate, organisms, and neighbours.
Watching what a place does
Plants respond to the soil and beings around them, and in doing so they change what grows beside them. Reading a place in this way takes attention over time. The story of a place is learned through watching, tending, and participating in its changing relationships.
Get Renilde Becqué’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Sharing is not access
This brings questions of place and relationship into focus. Knowledge may be shared, but sharing does not automatically confer access to every practice, nor does it remove the responsibilities associated with a particular tradition.
The right to refuse
The right to refuse is central. A relationship cannot be assumed simply because one party wishes to establish it. Different parties need the capacity to negotiate how they meet, what they share, and what remains outside the encounter.
The conditions of exchange
For practitioners working across knowledge traditions, the question is not only whether an exchange is intellectually interesting or mutually beneficial. It is also whether the conditions of the encounter are appropriate, whether relevant boundaries are respected, and whether the relationship is allowed to develop on its own terms.
🌱 Seed:
Learning across traditions requires more than openness and curiosity. It requires attention to place, context, consent, and the conditions under which knowledge can appropriately be shared.
9. Living in a pluriverse
What would it mean to live in a pluriverse of creation beings, where different accounts of how the world comes into being coexist?
More than one account of reality
A pluriverse invites us to consider a world that cannot be reduced to one account of reality or one understanding of what humans are within it. The different serpent traditions brought together in Snake Talk offer a starting point: their beings and stories emerge from different contexts, and the relationships they describe cannot simply be collapsed into one universal explanation.
Difference without isolation
Living with this plurality raises questions about how different accounts of the world meet, how knowledge is shared, and how relationships develop across different understandings of creation. Difference does not require isolation, nor does it mean assuming all traditions are interchangeable.
Questions of authority
Relationships can develop across boundaries while the differences between those who meet remain significant. This also raises questions of authority: who determines how a story is interpreted, how knowledge is shared, and what counts as a legitimate account of the world?
🌱 Seed:
A pluriverse requires ways of relating across difference without demanding a single account of reality. The challenge is to sustain relationships without making one tradition the measure of all others.
10. Consent, refusal, and the conditions for co-creation
If serpent stories invite us to reconsider relationships between beings, what conditions allow different beings to come together and create something collectively? Why must the possibility of refusal remain part of that process?
Consent as the seat of relationship
One of the clearest threads in the conversation was the right of refusal. Tyson described consent as foundational to the possibility of relationship, because it allows boundaries to be negotiated rather than imposed.
Agreement, not access
Coming into relationship involves agreement: parties meet, bring their respective boundaries together, and work out protocols for what is acceptable. The right to refuse is therefore not an obstacle to relationship. It is part of what makes relationship possible.
Freedoms beyond the human
He extended this principle beyond human relationships, arguing that freedom of movement, affiliation, and refusal belong to all beings in creation, including seeds, small animals, and snakes.
When refusal becomes difficult
The discussion also connected the loss of the right to refuse with economic and institutional power. When people are deprived of the means to meet their basic needs, their ability to refuse demands diminishes. Wealth and control can then become means of securing compliance rather than simply resources in themselves.
From participation to negotiated relationship
This is particularly relevant to contemporary design, planning, and governance, where participation is often defined by the people who establish the process. What would change if the right to refuse, the negotiation of boundaries, and the protocols governing relationships were treated as foundational conditions rather than procedural details?
🌱 Seed:
Co-creation requires more than bringing different participants together. It depends on the conditions under which relationships can be entered, negotiated, and refused.
11. Beyond reciprocity: the relational commons
If the Serpent connects different beings within the patterns of creation, what might this reveal about how a shared world is sustained? Can a commons flourish without measuring every contribution against an equivalent return?
No competition, no ledger
Tyson challenged the familiar description of Indigenous economies as economies of reciprocity. He distinguished reciprocity, as he used the term, from giving into a commons without expecting a return.
Giving into a commons
In a relational commons, people contribute in different ways and at different times. Someone who contributes less may still receive what they need, while someone who gives extensively cannot assume that others owe them an equivalent contribution.
The relational surplus
This does not mean that relationships involve no exchange, or that contribution is irrelevant. It means that the value of a relationship cannot be reduced to an accounting of individual inputs and outputs. Tyson described a relational surplus that emerges from the complexity of a commons: over a lifetime, the value received through such a system may exceed what any one person contributes.
Value that cannot be seen from outside
Nor can the value of another person’s contribution always be judged from the outside. The person who appears to contribute little by one measure may be doing something whose value is not immediately visible, or may need support at a particular point in their life.
Beyond transactional relationships
The same question arises in relationships with the more-than-human world. If every exchange is approached as an investment from which a return is expected, relationships become transactional. Giving freely allows something to develop that no participant could have produced alone.
🌱 Seed:
A relational commons is not sustained by keeping accounts of who owes what. Its richness emerges from contributions, needs, and relationships whose value cannot be fully measured in advance.
12. Protocols of embassy: how relations are established and sustained
What can serpent stories and the relationships they carry teach us about the protocols needed to meet across differences, including between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems?
A structure of relations
Tyson described relationships as structured across different scales: from one person in relation to another person, through pairs and more specific groups, to larger and more inclusive collectives. Each scale calls for protocols suited to the relationships being formed.
Foundations that hold
Some foundational principles hold across contexts, while the protocols through which relationships are enacted need to be negotiated in context. He named the right of refusal, freedom of movement, and freedom of affiliation as such principles. Every being, he argued, needs the freedom to choose its connections and to move.
Protocols of embassy
This connects to Tyson’s work on Indigenous knowledge protocols, developed through the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University and an Anishnaabe Indigenous Knowledge sister lab in Canada, with Melanie Goodchild among the collaborators. This work has been made more accessible through Protocols for Non-Indigenous People Working with Indigenous Knowledge.
Objects that open conversation
In the session, Tyson described protocols as something people discover and negotiate through relationship. Objects that hold meaning within different cultures can provide a starting point: people share the objects and the stories associated with them, creating opportunities to explore how their respective understandings of relationship, permission, protection, collaboration, and conflict meet.
Relationship on its own terms
The objects are not simply illustrations of cultural difference. They help open a conversation about how people might relate. A general commitment to collaboration is not enough: the relationship needs its own terms, shaped by the people and communities involved, their histories, their responsibilities, and their authority.
🌱 Seed:
Protocols are part of the relationship itself. They establish how people meet, negotiate access, work with difference, and respond when relations become difficult. Their foundations may endure across contexts, but the protocols through which relationships are enacted must be negotiated in context.
13. What the Serpent asks of contemporary institutions
If serpent stories invite us to understand humans as participants in a wider creation, what would change in planning, design, or governance if relationships with other beings were taken seriously?
People inside institutions
Consent, the right to refuse, negotiated boundaries, and the protocols governing relationships all have implications for how collective decisions are made. So does the recognition that knowledge can emerge through relationships rather than being held exclusively by designated experts.
Mapping relations across scales
Tyson suggested that Indigenous systems knowledge can map relationships across scales, from individuals and groups to entire ecosystems and economies. This points towards ways of understanding collective life that do not treat each level as an isolated unit.
From applying knowledge to changing relationships
There is a difference between extracting a lesson from a knowledge tradition and allowing an encounter with that tradition to change the conditions under which decisions are made.
Relational language without relational change
An institution might adopt the language of relationality while continuing to control who participates, which forms of knowledge count, and what outcomes are permitted. It might speak of reciprocity while maintaining transactional relationships. Or it might claim to represent more-than-human interests without creating meaningful ways to recognise boundaries, negotiate relationships, or respond to refusal.
What would need to change
The challenge is therefore not simply how to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into existing systems. It is how the encounter might change the relationships, protocols, and assumptions through which those systems operate.
🌱 Seed:
Engaging with another knowledge tradition becomes consequential when it changes how relationships are organised, how authority is exercised, and how responsibilities are recognised. Incorporating new ideas without changing these conditions risks leaving existing structures untouched.
Cross-cutting insight threads
Stories → Knowledge
Serpent stories can be approached as carriers of knowledge about relationships, creation, destruction, and transformation. Their significance cannot be separated from the contexts, practices, and responsibilities through which that knowledge is held.
Patterns → Relationship
Reading patterns means attending to relationships and their changing effects. What appears to be a problem in one part of a system may look different when its wider relationships become visible.
Human gifts → Contextual responsibilities
Rather than assuming each person has one fixed purpose, responsibilities emerge through changing relationships and circumstances. Recognising them requires attention to what is happening around us and what those relationships call for.
Boundaries → Consent
Boundaries can become places where relationships are negotiated rather than reasons for exclusion. The right to refuse is fundamental to this possibility, including in relationships involving unequal power.
Exchange → Relational surplus
A commons cannot be understood simply as a system of equivalent contributions and returns. Relationships generate value through their complexity, including contributions and needs that cannot be measured or anticipated in advance.
Ceremony → Collective responsibility
Ceremony connects human and more-than-human communities through communication, exchange, and protocols. Its significance extends beyond individual experience to the ways relationships are sustained and responsibilities enacted.
Knowledge → Co-creation
Knowledge is not always an object one person possesses and another receives. Some knowledge emerges through the relationship itself, shaped by shared experiences, particular contexts, and the ways participants come to understand one another.
Relational principles → Governance
Consent, freedom of movement, affiliation, and negotiated protocols raise questions about how institutions and collective decision-making might be organised. Taking relationships seriously requires attention not only to the knowledge institutions use, but also to how they exercise authority and establish the conditions for participation.
Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and a co-founder of the Indigenous Systems Knowledge Collective, a non-profit organisation supporting systems-based Indigenous thinking and innovation. His work applies Indigenous methods of inquiry to complex issues, global crises and catastrophic risk. He is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World and Right Story, Wrong Story, and co-authored Snake Talk: How the World’s Ancient Serpent Stories Can Guide Us with Megan Kelleher.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved — and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
Our popular monthly online learning sessions use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world.
We also regularly publish Field Dialogues (audio track & synthesis), providing snapshots from a living field — surfacing stories, practices, and insights in the evolving work of engaging the More-than-Human
To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues directly in your inbox, find us on Substack, LinkedIn Newsletter, and of course here.
We donate our time and energy to this sandbox. If you value this space, consider co-funding this work by leaving us a tip.
