I met and sat and talked with indiginous people in fitzroy crossing who walked in from Adelaide across the centre of Australian deserts by the use of their stories.
the folks who needed an oral tradition to stay alive, and were failed by said oral tradition _died_ and weren't here for you to meet.
You're clearly very passionate on this subject, though you appear to be arguing against claims that aren't being made.
First, your claim that oral tradition seems inefficient compared to writing is extremely hard to defend. The accuracy, scope, density, longevity, and reproducibility of written information has clear advantages over speech-based transmission.
Second, I don't see that sigstoat was claiming Australian aborigines have no right to determination. I read the observation at face value -- if you have two groups of people, both relying on oral tradition to pass on information necessary for survival, and only one group is around today -- this does not indicate that all oral tradition was effective, only that some subset / subgroup was. (Naturally this ignores OCP's.)
> "All lost knowledge is invalid, or else it would have persisted" is, essentially, an imperialist perspective.
Quoting something that wasn't actually said by the person you're responding is misleading.
In any case, no one is claiming this.
There's a regrettable abundance of 'knowledge' (literature, oral traditions, customs, etc) that have persisted across every society or culture, that by all rights should not have.
37,000 years of oral tradition versus .. 5,000 years (?) of written? The jury is still out.
Recency of invention is not synonymous with inefficiency.
Consider that you're trying to assert oral tradition is more efficient than writing systems ... in a written format on a construct accessed by hundreds of thousands of people around the world over many years rather than demonstrating the validity of your claim to a half dozen people around a fire.