[Pittsburgh, PA] – September 22, 2009- The first Three Rivers Bioneers (www.3riversbioneers.org) conference takes place this October 16-18, 2009 at the Pittsburgh Project on the Northside. The Three Rivers Bioneers (3RB) conference is a leading-edge forum highlighting breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet.

As a satellite conference of Bioneers (www.bioneers.org), 3RB provides a hub for people who are hungry for change and are working to make a real difference in their local communities. Bioneers is a nonprofit educational organization hosting the national Bioneers Conference in California for its 20th year. 3RB will broadcast live fifteen visionary speakers from the national conference to Pittsburgh, including Andrew Weil M.D. and Michael Pollan. Weil is the nation’s foremost authority on holistic medicine and Pollan is author of the bestselling The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals..

The Three Rivers Bioneers Conference will also feature local leaders in the areas of green jobs, sustainable agriculture, and environmental restoration. Among the forty local presenters will be keynote speakers Khari Mosley, Pittsburgh’s liaison for Van Jones’ organization Green for All, and Greg Boulos, Western Region Director of Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA). 3RB endeavors to give residents the tools and inspiration to be catalysts for change in their own community. According to organizer, Maureen Copeland, “Combining Bioneers national speakers, with presentations from Pittsburgh’s brightest and most passionate change agents, in addition to interactive art, music, and wellness activities makes for an event to inspire and re-energize Pittsburgh for our greatest work ahead.”

Three Rivers Bioneers builds upon the success of two previous conferences hosted by the Urban Ecology Collaborative—the Green Forum and MERGE (Methods to Engage Residents in Grassroots in the Environment). Providing a space to learn, network, and reflect, 3RB is an incubator for ideas and strategies that inspire positive change. A youth studio, activist network room, and peace garden complement the daily workshops and speakers. The Pittsburgh Project (www.pittsburghproject.org), a community development center on the Northside, provides the backdrop for the 3RB conference.

To view a full list of national and local presenters, visit www.3riversbioneers.org. Registration is open and a discounted early bird rate is available until October 1st. Register at www.3riversbioneers.org/registration.

About the Urban Ecology Collaborative

The Urban Ecology Collaborative (http://www.urbanecologycollaborative.org/uec/) is a ten-city collaborative that cultivates healthy, safe and vibrant cities through collective learning and united action. UEC does this by developing a unique multi-city network for urban ecosystem research and restoration that makes the connections to issues of social justice; combining programs in education, urban forestry, and advocacy to address common urban ecosystem issues; and creating an integrated tool-kit for sharing these strategies.

About Bioneers

Bioneers (www.bioneers.org) is a nonprofit educational organization that highlights social and scientific innovations inspired by nature and human creativity. Its acclaimed annual national conference brings together people passionate about making a difference and serves as an incubator for new strategies for just and sustainable change. Through the conference, recordings, books, a radio series, online social network and other resources, Bioneers provides the tools and inspiration to help people connect with each other and catalyze positive change in their own communities.

Arnold van Gennep worked as an ethnographer and folklorist at the turn of the last century in France. He gets credit for founding folklore as a field in that country, but most today remember him for his 1909 work, Rites of Passage. In it, van Gennep described three phases to any rite of passage:

1. Separation. This phase focuses on the end of the participant’s old life and identity, sometimes put in terms as extreme as the death of their old self.
2. Liminality. Separated from the old life but not yet initiated into the new life, the participant enters a delicate liminal state, neither this nor that. This ambiguity and plenipotential makes the participant powerful, giving them the power to achieve the initiation required.
3. Re-incorporation. In the final phase, the participant re-enters normal society in her new life, and relieves recognition and acknowledgment in the new identity.

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), Joseph Campbell introduced what some have called “the hero’s journey” or “the monomyth,” a basic, archetypal template that, Campbell argues, all heroic tales follow. In the book, Campbell summarizes this template: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Campbell identifies three stages in the hero’s journey—departure, initiation, and return—and further details many of the various sub-themes and archetypes involved in each (for example, “the call to adventure” and “refusing the call” under departure), which occur often, but not always.

The similarity of Campbell’s monomyth to van Gennep’s rites of passage does not happen accidentally. Campbell studied van Gennep and relied on his work to describe the stages of the hero’s journey, making the story of any hero the story of our own rites of passage. The separation from the old life becomes the hero’s call to adventure; the adventures of the hero becomes the experience of liminality; and the re-integration following becomes the hero’s return.

In Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, Rane Willerslev offers a different template for them both. Like Ingold, Willerslev “takes animism seriously,” refusing to take the “easy answer” of metaphor or myth, and thus conclude that every traditional person has either lied to us, or has severe psychological problems. Instead, Willerslev looks for the roots of animism in the lived experience of people.

For the Yukaghirs, hunting means seducing an elk to give itself up, and that requires a process of mimicry, entering a liminal state where the hunter becomes not elk, but also not not elk. The difference proves crucial in both directions—a perfectly identical elk would have no power over the prey to kill it, but such an identical performance would also mean a hunter had lost touch with his humanity, and would become lost to elkhood forever.

To perform this dangerous dance, hunters must first isolate themselves from the normal human community. They must expunge the smells of humans, particularly women and children, and the smells of sex. They must also abandon normal human language. Hunters must not speak of killing animals directly, lest the animals overhear; so instead, they must speak a ritualized and indirect hunting language. For the Yukaghirs, speech and scent mark critical identifiers of their humanity, but in order to succeed, hunters must leave those things behind, separating themselves from their humanity.

The liminal space Willerslev describes—a space where every animal perceives itself as human—reminded me a great deal of Calvin Luther Martin’s description of the world just past the skin of the earth in Way of the Human Being, which had in turn reminded me strongly of the stories of Faerie in Ireland and other Celtic countries. In this liminal space, profound things happen. Power comes from one’s moments spent here. Most basic of all, here the dance of seduction becomes possible, and the Yukaghirs can kill their prey and feed their people.

The return plays an important part as well, precisely because the hunter has no guarantee of it. Willerslev relates the story of the “wild men” who remain lost in that liminal state; the ultimate anti-social creatures, they walk on two legs like people, but grow fur all over them like animals. The description reminded me of stories of Bigfoot, and even moreso, Pat Murphy’s short story, “In the Abode of the Snows” (included in Kim Stanley Robinson’s anthology, Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias). Willerslev describes storytelling among hunters as a humanizing activity, precisely this last part of re-integration, giving the hunter a chance to become human again.

So, the hero’s journey and the rite of passage, in this light, seem to spring from a much more basic source: the experience of the hunt itself.

Naturally, all of these things reminded me of storyjamming. Willem Larsen introduced the notion of using “warm-up games” used in improvisational theater in his articles for the College of Mythic Cartography, “Warming up and Working with Energy” (I, II). Since then, we’ve both worked on ways to weave these more tightly into the experience of play itself, rather than leave them so seemingly extraneous. I can personally vouch for the separating experience of these warm-up games. They push me towards a very different frame of mind, separating me from my normal day lucidity, and priming me to not censor myself, to reach for eloquence, and to allow the story to flow through me.

With that separation, I can much more easily see story as something to discover, rather than something that I “make up.” The separation of these “warm-ups” moves us into a liminal state, a shared imagining, where we can track, stalk, and seduce the story together in the jam itself.

• Ritual Phrases, on the use of ritual phrases in story games like Polaris.
• Separation
  • Calling the World: Warm-Up Games, Character Creation & Creation Myths, which touches upon some of the key differences between creation myths in oral and literate cultures, and why that difference would make you want to tell a creation story as a warm-up, to set a pattern for the story to come.
  • Sitting Down to Your Second Game, which addresses the common mistake of discarding the pedagogical process upon sitting down to play a game a second time.
• Liminality
  • Immersion & Flow in Storyjamming’s Liminal Space, in which I make the argument that what roleplayers call “immersion” simply describes what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called more generally “flow.”
  • Hunting Story, in which I suggest that hunting down a story (as opposed to making one up) presents a challenge well-suited to producing flow.
  • Story in the Landscape, in which I discuss some practical ideas for techniques that might implement these principles.
• Re-incorporation
  • Coming Home, on the importance of re-incorporation, and what it says about us that we so often neglect this crucial part of our stories.
  • Finding Your Way Back, in which I discuss some practical ideas for techniques that might add more re-incorporation to storyjams.

Petersen could easily have fallen into silliness with a story about talking mice, but Mouse Guard succeeds precisely because of the unflinching earnestness with which it approaches that setting. It takes itself seriously. Other animals appear with the kind of realistic precision that seems plucked straight from a field manual, and even the upright mice, wielding swords, do not look like cartoons.

In an interview, David Petersen described how Mouse Guard emerged from his experience with the wild places he grew up with in Michigan. “This is the environment that I grew up in, and so, I think I just absorbed that. That’s the kind of adventure that I tried to put into Mouse Guard. Mouse Guard is also kind of like my love letter to Michigan.” That love of place bleeds through every page of the comic. I quickly fell in love with it, because I could recognize the effort here to re-enchant the local landscape—something that has preoccupied me with much the same ambitions as David Abram or James William Gibson.

Many reviewers find the obvious comparisons between Mouse Guard and The Lord of the Rings, and while they rarely pursue this beyond the trappings of medieval adventure, I find the comparison even more appropriate in this regard. Many have remarked on Tolkien’s influences and goals; his romanticism and deep-seated skepticism about modernity in general, and his ambition to create a new, English mythology, one that repudiated industrialism as “the One Ring” that would invariably corrupt those who tried to master it on the one hand, while on the other celebrating things like the elves’ deep connection to the natural world, or the hobbits’ simple, rustic values, or the inner lives and perspectives of trees that the ents provide. In Defending Middle Earth, Patrick Curry explicitly discusses Tolkien’s ambition to bring about a “resacralizing of nature.”

Like Tolkien’s ents, Mouse Guard relies heavily on the opportunity it presents to show us the world from a different perspective. In this case, rather than the long view of trees, the world seen from a vantage point so close to the ground. Things we might not give a second thought to pose grave dangers for mice—and opportunities for adventure for the brave Mouse Guard. You can hardly help but think that here, we have new stories of “the little people.”

Of course, “the little people” don’t necessarily share a mouse’s size. Graham Harvey relates an incident wherein he asked someone in Newfoundland about his beliefs about “rock people.” This person offered a gift to some rocks, asking them not to take offense, and then returned, now using the term “little people,” a phrase originally from the British Isles but recognized and adopted by English-speaking Algonkian people. “While some would mistake this for a description (of the kind that led to Victorian and Edwardian fantasies about the diminutive size of faeries), it is better understood as a traditionally polite avoidance of naming. It either avoids inviting the presence of the un-welcome or it avoids distracting those who would rather not be bothered by our conversation.” (p. 124)

Calvin Luther Martin writes movingly and poetically about the skin of the earth. “As soon as they disappear from our sight across the membrane, say the mythtellers, ‘the animals take off their feather cloaks or skins. There they appear to one another, and converse with one another, just as we do here among ourselves. They too, in other words, are people.’” (p. 40) Perhaps because I read Soul Hunters immediately after The Way of the Human Being, I noticed how Rane Willerslev approached the very same belief from a different angle. Where Martin’s poetic descriptions move and inspire, Willerslev’s combination of pragmatic field work with the incredible insights of Tim Ingold provides the kind of eye-opening experience that allows us to finally appreciate the importance of the former. Willerslev makes the point reiterated by phenomonelogical philosophers that, to a certain extent, what we might call our “humanness” involves not just our biological reality—living inside our own bodies—but also the lived experience of those bodies from the inside. Other animals, of course, don’t experience the biological realities of the human body, but they do experience their own bodies from the inside. Our perception of the animal objectifies it: it exists as an object in our vision. But beyond our vision, it exists only in its own perception of itself; it has slipped beyond the skin of the world, where it slips off its fur or feathers and has its own life, just like ours. Willerslev makes the point that we can’t dismiss animism with the simplistic charge of anthropomorphism, because it concerns itself with the things that make different animals different as much as the things that make us the same. And in the stories, even in this “human” form (for lack of a better term), they retain details that identify them as other-than-human: they leave hoof-prints, or have an elk’s musk, or speak only with elk calls.

“Maybe by some strange logic, some unfamiliar reality that’s difficult for us to comprehend,” Calvin Luther Martin suggests, “beaver could turn around and produce ‘kettles, axes, swords, knives’ and so forth—maybe the fellow wasn’t joking after all. When one takes into account the skin of the world and the Common Self, where beaver people are the reality behind the facade of sixty-pound rodents called Castor canadensis, perhaps these things add up.” And what of Mouse Guard? What of Lockhaven, the headquarters of the Mouse Guard—that mouse castle carved into the rock, hidden by ivy, with its hive of bees? Certainly, I’ve never seen a mouse hole carved into the shape of a medieval castle, but what do we really mean by a word like “castle” anyway? If we did not have our experience, our tradition, telling us that this shape indicates home and fortification, would we recognize it, or would it seem to us like a meaningless jumble of stones? So, what does a mouse hole look like to a mouse? It might seem like a permission for poetic license—depict a mouse hole like a castle because it means to a mouse much of what a castle might mean to us—but I think this image depicts something deeper than that. “The fellow wasn’t joking after all.” The human experience doesn’t just mean our particular biology, but the experience of living in your own body; and likewise, a “castle” doesn’t just mean the particular shape, but the feelings we attach to that shape. I say, rather than poetic license, drawing Lockhaven as a castle, and depicting mice standing upright, speaking, wielding swords and practicing crafts, gives us a more accurate depiction of the world from their perspective than the alternative.

I have heard people say that traditional stories “hide” deeper truths, but the more I’ve studied them, the more I’ve rejected the word “hide.” They tell those truths as simply and plainly as possible. To make it any simpler or any plainer would make it no longer true. I’ve heard many people refer to the anthropomorphized mice of Mouse Guard, but I have no interest in an exercise in simplistic anthropomorphism. I love Mouse Guard because it challenges us to see the world from an other-than-human perspective.

David Petersen achieves all of this brilliantly—by never saying a word about it. His comics don’t concern themselves with this kind of philosophy; they handle it in a far superior way, by showing it, rather than telling it. You get it in the context of an action-packed adventure story, rather than a dry lecture like mine. A bioregional adventure, a love letter to your local watersheds and coasts, all seen from an other-than-human perspective, re-enchanting the land with the stories of adventure and daring that take place just out of sight, just beyond your notice, right here, right now.

And all of that would give us adequate cause for celebration and excitement, and we could congratulate David Petersen for his genius for offering us one more way, one more story, that helps heal that wound and reunite family and land. Except that David Petersen then worked with Luke Crane, the designer of an independent roleplaying game called Burning Wheel. Luke took what he knew about designing games and applied them to David’s setting, and produced the Mouse Guard RPG. It has received a long list of honors this year, including the Origins Game of the Year, and for good reason. Luke has long had a well-deserved celebrity status in the independent roleplaying game scene, and he brought all of that talent to bear on Mouse Guard. As a result, we not only have David Petersen’s work—we have it as an open invitation to join him, and begin jamming our own, new tales about these “little people.”

In a lot of ways, Burning Wheel plays like a traditional roleplaying game. You have a GM who brings the adversity to the table, you have your skills that modify your dice rolls, you roll your dice and compare them to a target the GM sets, and based on that you either succeed or fail. But Burning Wheel does some things with that basic setup that I’d always wanted to do to it, back when I still liked that basic setup. For instance, in a traditional roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, you gain experience, and when you have enough experience to cross a particular threshold, you “level up.” Enough video games have adopted this model (especially MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft) that I suppose most of you have some familiarity with this. So, after wading through goblin gore, I get smarter, or I learn how to do library research. In Burning Wheel, you accumulate check marks each time you use a skill, so they advance because you use them. And even more importantly, in Mouse Guard, you need both successes and failures. After all, you learn most from your failures, but you practice with your successes. You need both to get better.

You have traits that add personality to your character, and you can use those traits to make things easier for yourself, or to make things harder for yourself. For instance, Saxon, the red-cloaked firebrand in the comic, has the Fearless trait in his write-up in the RPG. If you play Saxon, you can use that trait to get an extra die when you act fearlessly. You can also use it to make things harder for yourself, say, when you recklessly charge into battle at the worst possible moment.

Why would you want to do that? Well, unlike a traditional RPG where the GM also brings the story, Mouse Guard really doesn’t work unless you all come to the table hoping to discover the story there. If the GM comes with a story in mind, it will show, and the game will fall flat. The game actually has two phases: the GM’s Turn, and the Player’s Turn. On his turn, the GM pushes the patrol, but he comes with very little in mind. Instead, he has twists. Throughout the book, Luke uses the story from the first comic as an example. Lieam makes a scouting roll to find the grain peddler. If he succeeds, then Lieam finds the grain peddler. The comic follows the storyline in which Lieam fails, so the GM introduces a twist. Lieam finds an overturned grain cart—instead, a snake has eaten the grain peddler, and the patrol will now have to deal with her. Just like in so many good stories, failures propel the story forward by introducing twists and complications.

When the GM finishes, the Player’s Turn begins. Each player gets one check by default, which frankly, won’t allow them to accomplish much. To complete their mission, fulfill their goals, or even just recover from the conditions accrued during the GM’s Turn, they’ll need more checks, and they get those by using those traits against themselves. By acting in character, even when it works against them, players get the rewards they need to do more later on.

Most importantly, we define characters according to their Beliefs. Your character advances by playing into that belief—whether by acting to uphold it, or acting against it. The GM needs to push against those beliefs in play, so the story emerges very much from the characters at the table. Amongst traditional roleplayers, you’ll often hear talk about “munchkins” or “min-maxers,” and usually with contempt. These people study the rules of the system and try to maximize the effectiveness of their character. Usually, this means absurd combinations that violate the story (hence the contempt). But what do we call someone who has mastered the rules of chess and knows how to use them most effectively, except “a good chess player”? In what other game do we have contempt for those who have mastered it and play it well? The very fact that we might use the term “munchkin” points to the fact that in these traditional RPGs, the roleplaying and the game have become two separate, divergent activities, so becoming very good at one means ignoring the other. We stop roleplaying to play the game, or we stop playing the game to roleplay. Burning Wheel in general, including Mouse Guard, turns roleplaying into a game. To maximize your effectiveness in this system means playing your character to the hilt.

For example, since you need both successes and failures to advance your skills, you have two general options. If you do what you can to succeed on your rolls in the GM’s Turn, then you’ll only have one check for the Player’s Turn during which to get your failure. On the other hand, if you decide to stack things against yourself to fail in the GM’s Turn, you get your failures, twists complicate the story, and you rack up plenty of checks to use in the Player’s Turn to get your successes. So, your optimum strategy involves highlighting the flaws of your character in roleplay, compete fiercely for the opportunity to fail, and then in the second half of the game, make a heroic resurgence to save the day. That strategy propels the story down a very satisfying adventure story’s arc, and requires you to keep an intense focus on playing your character. The game adds something to our roleplay that freeform roleplay maybe wouldn’t give us on its own.

It didn’t take much for me to drift the setting to Cook Forest, one of the last remaining old growth forests in the eastern U.S. The mice, though, call it by its old name: the Black Forest, also evoking its Old World cousin, and the fairy tales associated with it. I ran a patrol at home, and one with the Myth Weavers (see episodes 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15). Our first mission with the face-to-face patrol really illustrated some of what this game can achieve, when the patrol stumbled into the hunting grounds of a northern shrike. This unassuming little bird hunts mice and other rodents, and it hunts more than it needs to eat at the moment. The rest it impales on thorns or sharp twigs, to eat later. The patrol saw a dying moue impaled on the thorns above, and found themselves ambushed by this little bird. I don’t think anyone at that table will ever forget the hunting habits of the northern shrike. Reading it in a field manual gives you one kind of knowledge, but a story gives you a way to relate to that knowledge.

It appeared in the right place and the right season. In fact, place and season play such important parts the game actually address them in the rules. Mouse Guard characters can specialize in Weather Watching as one of the important contributions they might make.

Like the comic, the game focuses on seeing the world from an other-than-human perspective. The very practice of roleplaying means an intense exercise in sustained empathy, in putting ourselves in someone else’s place and trying to see and experience the world as they do. Every time we play Mouse Guard, we spend a few hours seeing our landscape from the perspective of “the little people.” We spend our time jamming new stories, exploring the stories in the landscape together, trying to find the tales of adventure and heroism that take place just beyond our sight, just beyond the skin of the world.

I really can’t think of a better way to spend an evening, can you?

• The College of Mythic Cartography. You can’t talk about storyjamming without mentioning the man who coined the term, Portland’s illustrious Willem Larsen. I do take some pride in having a hand in pushing Willem to dust off his old teenage hobby and see the potential in it.
• The Myth Weavers. An online story band I sometimes jam with. At the end of each episode, I call it “the actual play story games podcast for people who rewild.” We haven’t jammed nearly as often as I’d like, so episodes come very sporadically.
• Buried Without Ceremony, an incredible blog written by Joe McDonald, an independent game designer who came up with some beautiful games, including Ribbon Drive. He brings together rewilding, guerrilla theater, appreciative inquiry, urban foraging, guerrilla gardening, nonviolent communication and so many other wonderful things that every time he posts a new entry, I feel a positive tingle of anticipation.
• Story by the Throat, the blog of Joel Shempert. I think example will fill in here better than description. Trackers Portland does youth camps to introduce children to the outdoors, and teach them nature awareness, basic tracking, the kinds of basic skills we all used to have. To make it fun, and to make it come alive, they put on a camp called “Welcome to Middle Earth.” All the more fitting, since Tolkien himself aspired to create a new English mythology. Tony got in touch with Joel, who helped apply story games design to the event. He blogged about it recently. The combination of skills and story, woven together so tightly, all to weave back together family and land, to find the stories in the landscape, seems so beautiful I could cry. That gives you an idea of the kind of stuff Joel gets involved with.

Do you know about anyone else? Tell me about them!

Even “social dances” like those have an incredible depth and meaning to them. We saw some dances that you have to take even more seriously, but even in the least formal dance of all, my faux pas breached something important. Among native people, dances almost always have this kind of importance. Dancing involves the entire body, bringing everything into a common rhythm, harmonizing all of it to a single beat. It also harmonizes your movements with the movements of the other dancers, all moving in time with the drumbeat. And the drumbeat itself does not sound in isolation; it, too, harmonizes with the rhythms of the land where we dance. It harmonizes us as individuals, and harmonizes our community; and then, it reaches out, asking all around to join in that rhythm and harmonize with us. It opens up the space for bald eagles to come dance with us.

I don’t see much of this aesthetic shared by intentional communities or ecovillages today. People interested in sustainable living rarely rank things like “dances” or “songs” very high on the list of things they need to learn to live that way. Sustainable life first requires community life. Our civilization tries to define us as individual consumers, and while some environmentalists champion the idea of sustainability through individual purchasing decisions, I will assume I do not need to reiterate the barrenness of this approach; or, to quote the tweet I recently read from Cameron Burgess, “When I read ‘eco’ and ’shopping’ in the same sentence I’m sure another species makes the endangered list.”

We’ve seen no shortage of intentional communities, eco-villages, and other such groups coming together, trying to create a sustainable life together. Yet very, very few of these succeed more than a year. In Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities, her study of the communities that failed and those that succeeded, and the things that made the difference, Diana Leafe Christian writes, “Rudolf Steiner said that shared physical activities—when people move the body and vocal chords—bonds people at such deep levels that their connection tends to last. This certainly confirms most groups’ experience of what makes people feel connected and committed to each other—working together in shared labor, eating together, telling each other their life’s experiences, speaking from the heart about personal or interpersonal issues, singing, dancing, doing rituals, and celebrating birthdays and holidays.” (p. 33)

In her essay, “Reclaiming the Body as Home: The Bodybased Arts as Center of the ‘New Village’” (PDF), Nala Walla writes that “If we observe indigenous tribes—both human and non-human—we notice that people come together regularly and cyclically. Perhaps they gather around the campfire each evening, singing songs at sunrise or the full moon, celebrating, perhaps, the first day of the summer. We also notice that everybody in the tribe participates. There are no rows of chairs where people sit down, watch, applaud the ‘performers’ and then leave.”

In Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold describes the dwelling perspective: the perspective of the world as one dwelling in it, as opposed to the “building perspective,” which conceives of a primary world of ideas where we first plan things out, and then a secondary world of our experience, where we bring those ideas into being. So, for example, the “building perspective” fits in well with the notion of art as a commodity. A painter first conceives of a painting, and then creates it. A writer conceives of a brilliant story, and then writes it. The painting, or the novel, exists in the artist’s mind before they take form in our world. We value art as objects and wish to collect them because they express the artistic genius internal to the artist himself. Even with those art forms that leave little trace, like singing, dancing, or acting, we try to fit them to the model by recording them; and even in live performance, we approach these arts as an audience.

According a dwelling persepctive, we dwell in only one world. An object does not “express” an “artistic vision” that exists in some other world. It simply shows the trace left from a skilled performance. Even an art as seemingly productive as painting fits into this mold. Forms like sand paintings emphasize this point, but even the most durable paintings eventually deteriorate. “Now like dancing and storytelling, painting, too, is a performance. The movement of painting is congealed in the depiction just as that of the storyteller is congealed in the traces of his gestures in the sand, or that of the dancers in the imprint of their feet upon the earth. But the analogy is between painting, dancing and storytelling, not between paintings, dances and stories. The painter does not, in his picture, seek to portray the actions of ancestral beings … he seeks to re-enact ancestral activity—to ‘go over’ it again and again, quite literally in the case of retouching—in the very movement of his work. Thus while painting is an activity, paintings do not depict activity.” (p. 128)

From such a perspective, we might admire a recording or a painting, but not as an object; rather, we admire it as the trace of a skilled performance. Moreover, it shows us the skilled interaction between the artist and the medium. So rather than consuming objects of art for collection because they express someone’s personal genius, we admire skilled performances as fellow performers, and hope to learn from them how we can improve upon our own performance.

In her TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert spoke of the unusual habit of artists towards self-destruction, and how, in her experience, it owed much to the pressure placed on artists to produce their next work of art. She found solace in the idea, common even in the ancient era of our own civilization, that creativity did not originate inside the brain of an Artist elevated by his own, personal creativity, but came to them as a muse. Indeed, the notion of creativity as something external, something we participate in rather than create ourselves, seems to fit in much more easily with the actual experience of artists, just like Gilbert discusses.

In fact, native traditions also insist that we participate in creativity; we do not create it ourselves. Like the air we breath, it belongs not to our human brains, but to the landscape itself. In their 2006 paper, Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat try to describe how they experience creativity and imagination as Onkwehonwe. “From a Haudenosaunee or Mohawk perspective, we notice that minds colonized by these assertions concerning the universality of imagination’s origins and functions are contributing dimensions to larger conceits maintained by anthropocentrically biased cultures. Cultures colonized by these conceits tautologically confirm the interior sources of their intelligence. Minds colonized by such conceits think and conceive of themselves in this grammar of possessive individualism. Onkwehonwe (unassimilated, traditional Haudenosaunee), in contrast, regard any assumption concerning the existence of autonomous, anthropogenic minds to be aberrations that violate the unity, interrelation, and reciprocity between language and psychology, landscape and mind. The ecology of traditional Haudenosaunee territory possesses sentience that is manifest in the consciousness of that territory, and that same consciousness is formalized in and as Haudenosaunee consciousness. Of course, other beings manifest that consciousness in their literature of tracks,chirrups,and loon calls.”

So perhaps we should not feel terribly surprised if we consider that these differing attitudes about the origins of creativity lead us to very different considerations of its importance in our lives, or its relevance to a sustainable life. We consider creativity a personal expression, perhaps personally cathartic or fulfilling, perhaps even beautiful, but certainly not a necessary activity. It seems like a luxury, with little practical value. In fact, some theorists define art as precisely those things we do that have no practical value. From this perspective, however, we see creativity as something we engage in with the landscape itself. After all, the landscape inspires us. Its rhythms and sounds set our beat, its images populate our imaginings, and its materials provide the media for our art. As Michelangelo himself said, the statue already existed in the marble—he simply cut away everything else. Sculptures do not come from a gifted sculptor imposing his will on the stone, but from the dialogue of skilled performance between sculptor and stone, each exploring and pushing against the other and transforming each other, bit by small bit. A story worth telling doesn’t exist because somebody made it up; it already exists, in the landscape, and someone found it.

Like Scott Momaday, as he wrote in The Man Made of Words, “I am interested in the way that a man looks at a given landscape and takes possessions of it in his blood and brain.” I have ancestors who have lived on this Turtle Island as long as some of the Inuit had when Columbus arrived, and yet, while none would doubt their claim to living as natives here, I still live in the same pattern as an invasive species. I have written recently of the Neolithic trauma that still rings through my shallow traditions, cut off suddenly and violent along with my elders; I have written about the crucial importance of oral tradition and how it knits together family and land; and I have written about the importance of eloquence for grief and praise. Why I live upon the land as the most destructive invasive species of all, should seem obvious, then. When the Inuit came, they set about straight away becoming native, and they did so rather quickly. My ancestors have devoted enormous energy to remain separate. Despite their efforts, this land has done some work on them, but in response, we merely fought against it harder. We have brought the world to the brink of annihilation rather than become native. So I share Momaday’s interest, because I find nothing fulfilling in this kind of life; and if I want to have any kind of life at all, we must straight away set to the same work those ancient Inuit did to become native, to find the oral traditions that will put the landscape into our blood and brain.

Traditions emerge from a long time of participating, engaging—dwelling—with the land. And therein lies the shallowness and crime of cultural appropriation. If you do not belong to that tradition, then it cannot sustain you. You have no part in that history of dwelling. It doesn’t help you. So what do we do? How could we possibly regenerate an oral tradition, and do so in a new place? Like I said, my ancestors have lived here long enough that this Turtle Island has its claim on us. If you tell us to go “home,” I have to ask where we could possibly find that. I have never even seen the Caucasus Mountains. How can we authentically find an oral tradition, the stories that will knit together family and land—the stories that, by now, we can see as critical survival skills for any sustainable community?

I can describe much of my journey over the past several years as a series of alternating epiphanies, epiphanies on how much we’ve lost, followed by epiphanies on how much we have at our disposal. I have shared already some of my epiphanies about how much we’ve lost, but it has also struck me that we also have a uniquely powerful tool for solving precisely this problem: roleplaying games.

Yes, you read that right. Roleplaying games. RPG’s. As in Dungeons & Dragons, that thirty-year-old standby of geeks living in their parents’ basement. As Paul LaFarge wrote in his article, “Destroy All Monsters” for The Believer in September 2006, “in a society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural; its project, when you think about it in these terms, is almost utopian. Show people how to have a good time, a mind-blowing, life-changing, all-night-long good time, by cooperating with each other!” It reminds me of the story of missionaries who taught native children somewhere to play soccer, and became very upset when, instead of competing to win, the children would play until the two teams tied. The games we play reflect the universe we perceive—and the world we want to live in. Throughout the animal kingdom, people learn how to behave by playing. Our games of competition and domination teach us how to live in a world defined by those things. From their beginning, roleplaying games have pointed towards cooperation.

Roleplaying plays an important part in more obvious survival skills, like tracking. No less than Tom Brown said, “Once a person has mastered role playing, he becomes almost invisible to the animal in all respects. The Native American people took great time and care in this preparation before a hunt, and this age-old practice can be very beneficial to you, also.” You might object that Tom Brown obviously means an empathetic exercise, to play the role of a deer you stalk, for instance; not playing an elf out to fight some orcs. But how much do the two exercises differ? A roleplaying game around the campire still exercises your empathy and your ability to project yourself into the role of another. Indeed, that elf came, ultimately, from the faint echoes of European animism, the old native hunter’s understanding that just beyond our perception, animals slip through the skin of the world, take off their animal clothes, and perceive themselves like humans—like elves. But even if that fantasy milieu didn’t engage the last vestiges of European animism, any roleplaying game makes us better roleplayers, exercises our capacity for empathy, so that when we do go tracking, we can do it better.

More recently, independent roleplaying games have taken those ideals of collaboration and cooperation even farther, together with a similar “indie” aesthetic as you might find in punk rock or other indie art forms. It values participation and performance, social engagement, and breaks down ideas about the separation of artist and audience, or art as commodity. Nala Walla talks about our “cultural clearcutting,” by which we engage as isolated individuals with art produced only as an object for consumption. In his presentation at Interesting Portland, Mike Sugarbaker talked about independent story games, and how, despite the rising popularity of DIY or “do it yourself,” we still don’t make our own stories; we leave our stories to television networks, novelists, movie producers, and other “professionals.” He warns, “Sometimes when you let corporations make your stories for you, you get what you deserve.”

Like a dance, a roleplaying game doesn’t leave much trace: the scratches on your character sheet, perhaps, or notes you might have taken, but nothing like a painting or a sculpture for others to admire as the object you produced. Indeed, you can’t really even have much of an audience. As Ben Lehman, the designer of several independent roleplaying games, most popularly Polaris, points out, “Trying to describe it in the aftermath is comparatively boring. It would not be a satisfying short story, nor would it be of any quality as improvisational theater. Talking about it with others in our play-group who weren’t present, we fumbled for words, coming up short (as I just did, again), as if we were recalling something through the thick haze of a black-out night.” Lehman writes here mostly about RPG players looking for legitimacy, but by the standards of the “building perspective” that sees creativity as internal, and art as a matter of expression, a roleplaying game seems like a frivolous pastime indeed.

These independent roleplaying games have co-mingled with improvisational theater and improv theater games, the same things that inspire Dave Pollard’s vision of “creative activism”. Graham Walsmley learned from Keith Johnstone, and wrote a small book he titled Play Unsafe. Willem Larsen learned from Viola Spolin, and coined the term “storyjamming.” “This doesn’t differ much, if at all, from musical jamming,” Willem writes, “especially as expressed in Old-Time music gatherings, where a circle of fiddlers, guitarists, and others will crank away at tunes for hours, purely for their own satisfaction, riffing and playing with the form.”

He also frequently talks about storyjamming to “share a vivid waking dream.” The techniques that both he and Graham Walmsley talk about point to an activity both related to roleplaying games, and crucially different from them. “Therefore, we see, rather than invent,” Willem writes. “We go there, to the vividly imagined place, and then bring it back in words and gestures.” Storyjamming rests on that very native idea that the story already exists in the land—we jam together, we play together, we try to find that story together. With no one leading the way, we can eliminate the ego or whims of any individual; the collaborative framework helps us find that story together, to find what Willem so often calls “a story worth telling.”

• Play! Storyjamming shouldn’t feel like work. Simple playfulness offers the key to discovering the stories there honestly. We will need to tease them out, and that will take openness and playfulness. If we lose sight of that, we become too serious, and we risk starting to direct the story towards things we make up, rather than things we discover. Think back again to the image of friends jamming together with music; the simple playfulness allows them to find the music together. If they took it too seriously, the jam would fall apart as each individual tried to pursue the song they wanted to play so seriously.
• Play the obvious. The pressure of feeling on-the-spot, of having to deliver a clever performance, undermines that sense of play. It also means you’ve introduced something you considered terribly clever, rather than the thing you saw, the thing that came to you immediately. Trust the creativity you engage with; what seems obvious to you won’t necessarily seem obvious to everyone else. In his book, Graham provides many examples of great elements that really pushed a game in an interesting new direction that came from someone just going for what they considered obvious. If you try to come up with something clever, the pressure will bog you down and you’ll only introduce something of your own design; if you stick with the obvious, you’ll stay in the jam, bring us back to what we discover together, and still end up introducing clever twists anyway.
• Go for average play. Trying to hog the limelight or outshine your fellow players won’t make for a good jam. You want to jam together and keep the flow of that vivid shared dream going, not break it up.
• Make each other look good! In professional wrestling, it falls on each wrestler to “sell” the other. A wrestler looks menacing not by hitting the other guy, but by the other guy making the hit look like it hurt. That takes trust; you need to trust each other to sell each other. The same happens in a storyjam. We won’t believe in the smooth-talking womanizer if your female character feels utterly unswayed by his advances. If everyone focuses on trying to make their own character look good in the story, none of you will. You’ll all look inept, because nobody will respond to your impact. We usually ran into this problem as little kids playing make-believe. Remember the old argument of “I got you? Nuh uh!”? Even in the best case scenario, you’ll only have yourself trying to make your character look good. If everyone jamming together concentrates on making each other look good, then you’ll all end up looking good—because instead of just one person, you have everyone else there trying to make you look good! Again, think of musicians jamming. If everyone tries to stand out themselves, it will sound discordant. A good jam happens when all the musicians respond to each other’s cues and back each other up. It takes a lot of trust, and it takes some skill to understand and respond to the cues of your fellows, but therein lies one of the crucial gifts such a jam offers.
• Yes, and…! Improv actors know very well that a single negation can kill a scene. Build on the energy you already have, the ideas and images that others have already offered up. They participate in the same creativity as you. Finding the story rather than making it up rests heavily on mastering this technique.

With techniques like “Go for average play,” and “Play the obvious,” this might seem like something that leaves little room for skilled performance. On the contrary, storyjamming invites us to practice our eloquence and learn to exercise those long-atrophied muscles. Like musicians jamming together, we can cooperate and subtly challenge each other to greater and greater heights of performance. We don’t perform for an audience, or to create an object; we perform for those of us present. Even people who love to play roleplaying games abhor “gaming stories”, and even watching a roleplaying game unfold will not give you the experience. To have that experience, you have to get involved. This only works as participatory folk art. You have to jam.

Jamming together, we can find the stories in the landscape. We can practice our eloquence again. It makes a certain sense, I think, that we would need to approach our stories playfully first, before we could expect to entirely regenerate our oral tradition. And yet, here we have the perfect set of tools to begin that project. It will take time, effort, and careful attention, but we have a place to begin and a course of action. Considering the momentous nature of the task, I feel infinitely grateful for that—it feels like a gift far greater than what I expected to find. So to regenerate our oral tradition, to find the stories worth telling that will weave together family and land again, to feel this landscape in our blood and brain, we just need to start jamming.

It takes some doing to kiss that stone, though. Once climbing to the castle’s peak, you must lean, backwards, over the parapet. Traditionally, you’d have someone with you to make sure you do not plummet to your death—something that happened much more commonly before they installed wrought-iron guardrails.

One story goes that when Queen Elizabeth—that sovereign most often credited with overseeing the dawn of the modern age—demanded oaths of loyalty from her subjects, Cormac Teige McCarthy, the Lord of Blarney, responded with flattery and flowery words. He subtly danced around the issue, seeming to honor her, but nowhere “giving in.” The Queen supposedly remarked that she had received “a lot of Blarney.” That “gift of gab,” that “blarney,” has come to mean something trivial and insincere. That modern interpretation sits uncomfortably with the ritual—a long pilgrimage, culminating in a rite that risked life and limb—a sure sign that our attitudes have changed. We harbor a suspicion of flowery words and pretty speech, but once, you could afford another person no greater compliment than to remark upon his eloquence. In native traditions, eloquence still stands tall as one of the primary virtues. Throughout his books, Martín Prechtel writes of the importance of eloquence, and its use to express both grief and praise. “True praise is not something that raises people away from the earth they must finally rest in,” he writes. “Praise is a grief-soaked type of life-endorsing way of speaking that brings the praised closer to the world that is otherwise so hard to live in. Praise does not make haughty, it brings life. Anything else is an empty seduction that makes words into things that are lesser than they should be.” (2005:80)

Most of us have had far too much experience with such empty seductions, and it has made us bitter and cynical. It has turned the honor once heaped upon an Irish poet into our cynical regard for “blarney.” And why not? We live in a cold and uncaring universe, unresponsive to our pleas, so what good does such “blarney” do, except to try to seduce or trick someone? It takes a lot of pain, never grieved, to teach us such cynicism and bitterness. After all, the world does not present itself in such a way. When you press your hand against something, you can feel it pressing back against you. The very act of seeing the world means taking up a point of view in it, and feeling the potential of others seeing you. We do not see, hear, touch, smell or taste anything in isolation; we sense and perceive with our whole bodies, in every way, all the time, feeling the world flow through us. With every breath, we can feel the wind inside us and the wind outside us, separated only by our fleshy membranes, and returned a moment later. To drink or eat, and then excrete, means to feel a flow through our bodies that only moves a little slower. The world around us responds to our presence constantly. It reacts to us. To our immediate senses, everything we see, hear, touch and smell reacts to those senses like a living thing, with its own volition and will. “To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions.” (Abram, 1997:56)

To convince ourselves of anything else, we must carefully train ourselves to disregard the report of our senses. I must train myself to think of the wall that presses back against my hand as not responding to my touch. Even if I can convince myself of this consciously, my minute-by-minute experience continues to contradict this, so even if I have the energy to keep up the charade, it still seeps into my speech: something calls my attention, or catches my gaze, or grabs me. So, I must remind myself to never trust myself. “The senses are deceptive,” you have no doubt heard. “You can’t trust them.” This passes for great wisdom in the modern world. If you repeat it like a mantra against the evil eye, and put enough faith in it, you can ignore your own senses. You have probably mastered this yourself. Jean Piaget calls animism a stage in childhood development. I call this systematic alienation from our own senses a critical part of enculturation in the modern world.

In fact, most of the humans on the planet today have mastered this so thoroughly that to consider anything else—to really get back in touch with our own senses—seems like a daunting task, one that might intimidate us even to the point of thinking we could never possibly succeed in it. We have our human nature on our side. After all, our senses try to show us this world constantly. We have mastered a way of speaking that helps us keep our senses at bay. By speaking of the world as if it contained no personhood, no will, no volition, we can convince ourselves of it. The seemingly endless list of nouns in the English language helps us to objectify the world around us.

For example, consider the simple word is. While it may have some comparatively innocent usages, it serves primarily to equate this with that. But when have you ever experienced, in the world of your own, sensory experience, any two truly identical objects? As the famed philosopher George Santayana, best known for his prediction that those who ignored history doomed themselves to repeat it, wrote: “Whenever I use the word is, except in sheer tautology, I deeply misuse it,” for, “it names and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.” (1923) David Bourland proposed a subset of English without the verb is in any of its forms, called E-Prime. Even with the rest of the English language intact, the exorcism of this particular linguistic demon and the objectification it serves seems to have an immediate and measurable impact on the quality of the writing it produces, and the critical thinking it promotes. (Bourland, 1989; Wilson, 1991) This objectification in our language not only divorces us from our senses, it also muddles our thinking. Martín Prechtel also remarks on this difference between English and Mayan languages: “For Mayans, without a verb ‘to be,’ a ritual need not ‘be’ a symbol or metaphor for something that it cannot ‘be’ literally in a ‘to be’ language like English. A ritual can ‘be’ the universe, because the ritual and the universe can be the same thing.” (2005:119)

I gave a speech titled, “Writing, Language & Thought,” where I spoke about some of this, and some other subjects besides. As an example, I compared the English word “coyote,” a noun that describes a particular object, defined by a particular set of characteristics that make it a member of the species Canis latrans, to the word in Chinuk wawa, or Chinook jargon, talêpês, a verb that describes a particular pattern of movement. Part of the objectification of our language lies precisely in its enormous collection of nouns. The urban myth about the “forty Eskimo words for snow” comes from the fact that Inuit languages, like so many native languages, fall under the heading of “polysynthetic languages.” In other words, rather than a collection of nouns, they have a rich collection of affixes. This allows them to create very precise verb forms, so they can speak almost entirely in verbs. Dan Moonhawk Alford asks, do you first see the dance, or the dancers? Noun-dominated languages like English describe the scene in terms of objects, objectifying our senses, telling us about the dancers. Verb-dominated languages cleave closer to our sensory experience, not of objects, but of dance. (1999) In a world of objects, shapeshifting seems like pure fantasy; we are what we are, after all. In a world of verbs, where talêpês describes not an object but a pattern of moving and acting and relating, shapeshifting becomes easy, even expected.

Willem Larsen proposes E-Primitive, as a means of rehabilitating the English language by taking E-Prime even further. (2008a) It adds to E-Prime ambitions of high-context language (language grounded in rich oral tradition) and verbing our language. For a traditional hunter and tracker, these practices become crucial survival skills. For English-speaking trackers, no error causes more problems than misidentification. Our language of nouns urges us to put a name to the track. As the tracks change, our investment in the first name we applied can keep us from adapting. But if we have only verbs, and we can’t say, “A coyote made this track,” but, “He coyoted here,” then we can easily adapt, and as the tracks change, we can say, “Here, he started dogging!”

In fact, we experience a shapeshifting world all around us, all the time. My walk spot taught me this lesson, too. You look, and you think you see a particular shape. You come closer, and you see something else. Our objectifying language says that it was that all along. Our senses tricked us. If I instead trust my senses, then I have glimpsed something much more profound. To us, the revelations of relativistic physics seem nigh incomprehensible. For example, what sense can we make of the paradox that light is both a particle and a wave? Yet I cannot even state the apparent paradox without once again summoning that little demon, is. As Benjamin Whorf noted in his study of the Hopi language, the paradox disappears without that. Light particles, or light waves. In fact, that rather neatly describes the experimental results; when we look at light one way, it particles, and when we look at it another way, it waves.

That same physics has started to show us that observing the world changes it. Before our observation, all possibilities exist—plenipotential. Only when we observe it does it snap into one thing and not another. It overturns the understanding of reality that we learn from our objectifying language, but it validates many other animating languages. Calvin Luther Martin writes beautifully about the plenipotential of the universe just beyond our perception, and relates a Lnu (sometimes called the Mi’kmaq) story of a hunter in a strange winter when he could find no game. Desperate in the woods, somewhere along the way, he passed a threshold, and saw Someone. That someone took him back to his home, and gave him good food to eat, and sent him home with a great big bag of something to take with him. He left it by the door and told his wife. When she brought it in, she demanded to know why he had brought him a bag full of poplar bark.

Gone is the Power of something; in its place are rigidly measured shapes: poplar bark, beaver, beaver lodge, with no room for being any other. A great cosmic door has slammed shut; reality itself has moved over a notch. A beaver is now a beaver is but a beaver. Our hunter is now thinking as an empiricist; he has doubted his role in the “participatory universe.” (Martin, 1999:84)

His words pour from his mouth like a spell, collapsing the plenipotential he experienced into a single thing. The story goes on to explain why the hunter has gone wrong here. Our senses swim in a world of plenipotential, a participatory universe, a constantly shapeshifting world. The spirit world, the other world, the realms of faerie, they lie just beyond the reach of our senses, where everything remains possible, just before we perceive them. The skin of the earth stretches at the limits of our perception, and the closer we cleave to our senses, the more room we leave open for the magic of that world to enter our lives. The longer we keep open that respect for Someone, describing only what we perceive and trying, as much as we can, to keep our judgments or identifications from it, the longer we remain open to that plenipotential.

Our objectifying language does a terrible violence to that. It collapses the world even before we perceive it. It invades the spirit realm from which we derive our own life and sustenance, and names it this and not that. Alienated from our senses, magic slips from the way of all life, to fantasy, and the world becomes the cold, clockwork machinery of Descartes’ delusions—the man who “nailed his wife’s pet dog by its four paws to a board and dissected the creature while it was alive.” (Spencer, 1996:201) He wrote that we must ignore the seemingly plaintive wails of such creatures, though they might seem to show signs of terrible agony, though your empathy might reach out naturally to them, you cannot trust your senses. They cannot feel pain. They are not persons like us.

Our language does not have to alienate us from our senses, each other, or the world we live in. Once upon a time, when we honored eloquence and poetry, it brought us closer to them. Once, we offered our speech as a gift to the world around us. We spoke of a more-than-human world where we made our home. We still find some traces of this, though we tend to brush it aside as poetry or metaphor. We find it in fairy tales and art. “There is something about this storied way of speaking—this acknowledgment of a world all alive, awake, and aware—that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us.” (Abram, 2009)

Compare, for instance, these two stories. Richard Dawkins tells a story about our selfish genes; how, really, we exist to serve them. They use us as vehicles to perpetuate themselves, their chemical lives prescribed by natural laws. (2006) “A traditional faithkeeper of the Tzutujil Maya tells the story that the Gods speak Poetry, which creates all life. That you embody the eloquence of a God’s language, along with all other beings. Saying the complex poetry of your name creates you; if the gods didn’t speak, and speak beautifully, you wouldn’t live.” (Larsen, 2008) They seem to tell a similar story, of strange and immortal beings that sing us into creation, but for their tone. Dawkins’ story objectifies the world; the faithkeeper’s story animates the world. While our science now probes the limits of how far our objectifying language can take us, finding that it falls apart into double-talk, paradox, and babbling when we press into the quantum or the galactic realms of reality, much like Einstein’s theories displaced Newton’s before—or even become serious impediments to us in such an earthly pursuit as tracking—these very same discoveries seem to come round about, to confirm and validate this animating language.

David Abram proposes a great undertaking. He suggests that all of our environmental activism may well ultimately fail if we do not succeed first in a monumental task of eloquence, if we do not bring ourselves back to our senses, and weave ourselves back into the fabric of a more-than-human world. Our endlessly objectifying language makes the world seem dead to us, and it makes us deaf to its cries. We can abide the ecological destruction we wreak only because we first became blind to it. More important than any amount of laws or regulations, Abram suggests, we must feel that tragedy again. That means returning to our senses, in every sense, and that task requires all of our eloquence.

Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves—to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that lace us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs—letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf. (Abram, 1997:274)

So we come back around again to Martín Prechtel, and his eloquent words about praise. Our eloquence can bring us back to our senses. Our gifts of praise can begin to restore our broken relationships with a more-than-human world. But perhaps, first of all, we must express our grief. We have much to grieve. I suggested before that perhaps we can find the roots of our present pathology in the sudden loss, 10,000 years ago, of our elders. Certainly, we have acted like the lost children of Golding’s novel, The Lord of the Flies, ever since, each generation perpetuating that trauma upon the next. We have lost our traditions, our rootedness and sense of place and home, our stories, even our own humanity.

And we have never grieved for that. We have even celebrated it, called it “progress,” and shouted down anyone who would even suggest taking a glance to see what we might have lost along the way. What do you think so much ungrieved-for pain could do? Could it turn a whole society mad, plunging it on an insane quest to conquer the world and the powers of nature itself? Could it set us on a path of our own destruction, perhaps secretly even hoping for death—for ourselves, for us all, perhaps even, in all our ungrieved-for pain, hoping that we might take the whole world with us?

Powerful magic lies in the expression of our grief, precisely because the world does respond to our cries, because it does not act in the cold, uncaring fashion that we imagine. Too many native stories turn on the moment when the protagonist cries out his grief, and the world takes pity on him. I cannot even begin to name them all. Arlie Upfront relates an anecdote about a young woman who asked an elder, “Auntie, why is it when Native people sing, they sound like they’re crying?”

Grandma responded, “Because it’s the universal language of all humankind. It’s the first language that we speak when we’re born onto this mother earth. And whoever hears this cry, and comes to us, and comforts us, and feeds us—through this first cry they begin to teach us about what it means to be a human being, about what it means to have a family, what it means to have relationships.” And she said, “You don’t even need words to explain what it means.”

And through our songs and our ceremonies we reach out. We reach out to our family; we reach out to all creation to establish relationships. To establish love.

Bibliography

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• Prechtel, M. (2005). The disobedience of the daughter of the sun: A Mayan tale of ecstasy, time, and finding one’s true form. North Atlantic Books.
• Santayana, G. (1923). Scepticism and animal faith: An introduction to a system of philosophy. Kessinger Publishing, LLC.
• Spencer, C. (1996). The heretic’s feast: A history of vegetarianism. University Press of New England.
• Wilson, R. (1991). Towards understanding E-Prime. In Bourland, D. & Johnston, P. (eds.) To be or not: An E-Prime anthology, pp. 23-26. International Society for General Semantics.

In fact, throughout most of history (even using “history” here in its narrowest sense, as the chronicle of events that someone wrote about), silent reading seems like the exception. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine wrote of Saint Ambrose, “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” While this does confirm that at least some people did read silently, it also clearly marks Ambrose off as possessing a special talent for doing so. We have some earlier accounts that seem to refer to silent readers, such as Demosthenes in Aristophanes’ play, The Knights, but they generally reinforce the idea that very few people ever did so.

For Saenger (2000), the innovation of spaces between words has everything to do with the advent of silent reading. In medieval and ancient script, words ran together. Since people would read them aloud, this posed less of a problem. The spaces separating words help distinguish words as individual units if you need to interpret the meaning of each word separately. As a stream of spoken sound, they serve somewhat less purpose. Yet, even into the nineteenth century, the scarcity of books meant that most people still experienced reading from someone reading aloud (Klinkenborg, 2009).

This realization seems to move reading almost into the realm of an involuntary reaction. We have, at least, trained ourselves to react with only subvocalizations, rather than reading aloud, but the sight of the written word carries a synaesthetic magic in it so powerful that we feel compelled to create the sound. Other magic once worked just as powerfully on us. Consider the story related by the great poet, Gary Snyder:

We were traveling by truck over dirt track west from Alice Springs in the company of a Pintupi elder named Jimmy Tjungurrayi. As we rolled along the dusty road, sitting back in the bed of a pickup, he began to speak very rapidly to me. He was talking about a mountain over there, telling me a story about some wallabies that came to that mountain in the dreamtime and got into some kind of mischief with some lizard girls. He had hardly finished that and he started in on another story about another hill over here and another story over there. I couldn’t keep up. I realized after about half an hour of this that these were tales to be told while walking, and that I was experiencing a speeded-up version of what might be leisurely told over several days of foot travel. Mr. Tjungurrayi felt graciously compelled to share a body of lore with me by virtue of the simple fact that I was there. (Snyder, 1990:82)

These sound like the stories sometimes referred to as “songlines.” These stories criss-cross Australia’s landscape, knitting together camp sites, watering holes, and sacred places. They delineate the rights and responsibilities of peoples, families, and individuals. “Not just anyone can sing any song, dance any dance, perform any action. … Only the person conceived or born in a particular place has the right and responsibility to sing that song or perform that ceremony.” (Harvey, 2006:72). When an individual aboriginal Australian walks across the landscape, the seemingly paradoxical relationship with the Dreamtime as simultaneously ancient past and imminent present comes into focus. He does not just re-enact the creative mission of his ancestor, in a very real way, he becomes the ancestor, undertaking the ongoing work of creation himself. Indeed, they will often tell the stories of the Dreaming in the first person. (Ingold, 2000:53)

I gained my own insight on this, appropriately enough, from a place. Feeling the impact of my feet on the trail, and seeing new tracks laid upon older ones, I felt a very immediate and physical corroboration of what I’d read from Tim Ingold: “…for every path or track shows up as the accumulated imprint of countless journeys that people have made… In this network [of paths and tracks] is sedimented the activity of an entire community, over many generations.” (2000:204) For Ingold, the veneration of ancestors has nothing whatsoever to do with superstitions or beliefs in the supernatural projected onto animists by Westerners keen to fit them into their own typology of development; rather, it has everything to do with their continuing felt presence in everyday life. Walking the trail, for instance, creates the trail anew. Only by walking it regularly does it remain a trail; otherwise, it will become overgrown and cease to exist as a trail. It seems a small realization, but I suspect that in it, we can perceive a germ of the logic behind the Australian Dreaming—or, for that matter, many of the native traditions about stories and place.

We might feel wonder that an aboriginal Australian might recite the story for a particular itinerary, a recitation that might rival or even eclipse the Iliad or the Odyssey, apparently from memory. In fact, they read it from the landscape as clearly as we might read a book. Like our own grandparents or great-grandparents might have once read aloud, Jimmy Tjungurrayi tried to read the landscape as quickly as he could, even as it past him by too quickly. “In the absence of any written analogue to speech,” David Abram writes (1997:140), “the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates.”

The Gods Must Be Crazy movies have more than their share of ethnographic problems, but I can think of few better examples than the beginning of the second film for putting tracking into its proper context. In both films, the San remark on the “illiteracy” of European people, because they do not know how to track. As two San men go looking at the tracks, the narrator says, “In the morning, they like to read the news. They can read that the hyena has a new girlfriend, that the cheetah has lost one of her babies, that the oryx has gone migrating to the west. The older children teach the younger ones all about how to read all the gossip about their neighbors, the animals, because everything that happens in the Kalahari gets printed out in the sand.” But rather than printing the next day’s gossip sheets on new paper, it gets printed out on the same canvas, as the old news slowly fades. Likewise, the sound of a spoken word, though it quickly dissipates below the level of any animal’s hearing, will actually continue to echo, quieter and quieter, forever. For traditional hunter-gatherers, reading the earth constitutes a basic survival skill. Ultimately, the landscape itself slowly forms from so many stories laid down, one upon the other, over generations.

Yet, even in the European tradition, we have remnants of this kind of tradition of reading a place. Classical orators, right up until the Renaissance, would memorize long speeches by imagining an elaborate palace, filled with rooms and halls. He would then imagine himself strolling through this palace, placing parts of his speech in its various nooks and crannies. To recite the speech, the orator would imagine taking that walk again, and pulling out each part of the speech. “Rather than striving to memorize the composed speech on its own, the orator found it much easier, and certainly much safer, to correlate the diverse parts of the speech to diverse places within an imaginary structure, within an envisioned topology through which he could imaginatively stroll. Yet while the classical orators had to construct and move through such topological matrices in their private imagination, the native peoples of Australia found themselves corporeally immersed in just such a linguistic-topological field, walking through a material landscape whose every feature was already resonant with speech and song!” (Abram, 1997:77)

For another native xample, we can look to Dishchii’bikoh (“Cibecue” in English), some 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, home to some of the Western Apache studied by anthropologists. There, natives tell stories called ‘agodzaahi (“that which has happened”) whenever someone acts improperly. These stories tell the consequences of breaking social norms, not in terms of punishment, but in terms of what those actions ultimately lead to. These stories always begin and end with a statement locating where the story took place. They call this “shooting” someone with an “arrow.” One elder said, “The place will keep stalking him … It doesn’t matter if you get old—that place will keep on stalking you like the one who shot you with the story. Maybe that person will die. Even so, that place will keep on stalking you. It’s like that person is still alive.” So, when the Western Apache walk the desert around Cibecue, they hear the lessons and admonishments of their grandfathers and grandmothers speaking to them in every place they go, as much as you hear me as you read these words. The land itself constantly tells you how to live your life, in the voices of your family. The same elder tells of his time in Los Angeles, and how he “start[ed] drinking, hang around bars all the time. I start getting into trouble with my wife, fight sometimes with her. It was bad. I forget about this country here around Cibecue. I forget all the names and stories. I don’t hear them anymore. I forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.” (Abram, 1997)

In his wonderful example of the richness of native oral tradition, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun Martín Prechtel talks about the layers of meaning “hidden” within the story. I think the story itself, and the layers of meaning he pulls from it, say otherwise: the story says what it has to say as plainly as it can. It hasn’t hidden anything. It cannot state it more plainly; to state it any more plainly would mean saying less, and then, by not giving the whole story, lying, in a way. I think the (often exasperated) experience of anthropologists trying to collect oral tales corroborates my point. Time and again, I read of anthropologists who ask a native elder what a story means. In response, the elder will patiently tell the story again.

Julie Cruikshank, for example, experienced precisely that. She spent several years among Yukon elders in the 1970s. They trusted her with their stories, insisting she write them in English and share them, hoping through her study to preserve their stories for their own grandchildren, whom they expected would no longer speak their native language. One of these elders, Angela Sidney, told her, “Well, I have no money to leave to my grandchildren. My stories are my wealth.” Since reading those words, they have stayed with me. They seem to say something more profound than just an old woman’s admission that she has no monetary inheritance to leave behind. “Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge,” David Abram writes (2009). “Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if the hunt was successful, as well as specific insights regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and—more generally—how to live well in this land without destroying the land’s wild vitality.”

In general, we do not value local knowledge; we honor generalized theorems and hypotheses that we can test and replicate in any environment. The Enlightenment began by dismissing Europe’s accumulated wisdom and oral tradition wholesale as superstition, and it has continued to discount and disrespect local knowledge everywhere to this day. “Because it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert—or coastal estuary, or mountain valley—this kind of intimate intelligence loses its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular persons and practices that are a part of its terrain.” (Abram, 2009) Yet, no one lives “in general.” We all live our lives in a particular place. The Enlightenment has often espoused a view of humanity’s ennoblement by reason, even to the point of apotheosis, so it seems only natural that would aspire to a god’s eye view of the world. But for those of us who dwell in the world, it seems that only the kind of local knowledge that oral traditions preserve really matters.

Yet such stories didn’t just recapitulate the usefulness of an encyclopedia for “pre-literate” people, either. It put all knowledge into a social context. Everything you learned, you learned in the context of a social encounter with another person. So, everything that happened, happened in a particular social context. In such a context, stories themselves seem like persons. In his studies of the Ojibwa, Irving Hallowell learned that they would only tell some stories at a specific time of the year. Like plants, different stories had a particular season, and you would no more want to tell a story out of season than eat an unripe fruit. Of course, the Ojibwa don’t treat all their stories like this. They joke, gossip, share news and anecdotes as freely as anyone else, but they treat certain stories as persons, as grandfathers. “Seasonal stories are named grandfathers not only because they are ‘traditional’ and therefore venerable. They are grandfathers like other grandfathers: persons deserving of respect who, if approached respectfully, communicate matters of significance. Grandfathers entertain as they educate, if they will, and may withhold words and therefore power, if they will.” (Harvey, 2006:42)

The stories of such oral traditions not only contain the knowledge of how to live in a particular place; they also create the bonds of kinship and relationship that bind us to a particular place. Like the rights and responsibilities of the Australian Dreaming, they let us in, and give us a sense of belonging. They tie together family and land into a single whole. They draw us into the place, making us native to it.

The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. The songs proper to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there—to the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bubbling up from the ground. In traditional Ireland, a country person might journey to one distant spring in order to cure her insomnia, to another for strengthening her ailing eyesight, and to yet another to receive insight and protection from thieves. For each spring has its own powers, its own blessings, and its own curses. Different gods dwell in different places, and different demons. Each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligence. (Abram, 1997:182)

I previously suggested that we might understand a great deal about our civilization by realizing that the Neolithic entailed a sudden die-off of elders, leaving us reeling and traumatized as we suddenly found ourselves cut off from the traditions that guided us. I have read accounts from other native people who echoed sentiments very much like Angela Sidney, who said, “my stories are my wealth.” When asked what gave them that crucial ability that our civilization seems to inherently lack—the ability to live sustainably—I have not heard a one refer to primitive skills, hunting and gathering, or anything like that. For a long time, we have looked for technical solutions to our problems, so it seems natural to look for the key difference in technology. But the people I have heard who live natively, and talk about what that life means, typically credit their success to their stories. It makes me think that we can tell precisely what lost tradition so traumatized us, that 10,000 years later we still reel from it: our oral tradition, the tradition that knits together family and land into a native whole, that helps us to hear when the land speaks.

Bibliography

• Abram, D. (2009). “http://www.wildethics.com/essays/storytelling_and_wonder.html”>Storytelling and wonder: On the rejuvenation of oral culture.” The Alliance for Wild Ethics.
• Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Vintage.
• Cruikshank, J. (2000). The social life of stories: Narrative and knowledge in the Yukon territory. University of Nebraska Press.
• Harvey, G. (2006). Animism: Respecting the living world. Columbia University Press.
• Ingold, T. (20000. The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge.
• Klinkenborg, V. (2009). Some thoughts on the lost art of reading aloud. The New York Times, 16 May 2009.
• Saenger, P. (2000). Space between words: The origins of silent reading. Stanford University Press.
• Snyder, G. (1990). Good, wild, sacred. In The practice of the wild: Essays by Gary Snyder. North Point Press.

Three years ago, I wrote about that very problem among elephants. Elephants have some of the most intense social lives observed among any animal. They teach their young, and mourn and bury their dead. Elders teach young elephants how to behave, but poachers target big, old bulls for their tusks, and government culling programs eliminate elephant elders. “The result is the unraveling of elephant society. Without elders to show them how to live as elephants, the social bonds they rely on so intensely break. The whole species becomes poised on the brink of madness.” Young males, without guidance, seem to go insane from the trauma of their family’s murder, showing many of the same signs of PTSD as a human would. These traumatized elephants attack humans, even in whole villages; they rape and kill rhinoceroses.

In Calvin Luther Martin’s first book, Keepers of the Game, he describes the tragedy of early, post-contact North America. Eastern woodland Indians understood disease as a symptom of a larger imbalance—usually, a greedy hunter who took too much meat. The apocalyptic smallpox epidemics that burned across North America, killing as much as 90% of the population, must have seemed like the end of the world. The animals had betrayed their ancient pact with human communities, visiting untold death upon them, and for what? What crime had they committed? They felt like the end of the world had come (and in many ways, it had). Europeans have often painted the speed with which Indians handed over beaver pelts in those early years as a sign that no ecological “Noble Savage” ever existed. Luther looks beyond that, to the way the Indians themselves experienced the affair, to find a different story. The feeling of despair and betrayal led to a general malaise—and many who wanted revenge. They conspired with Europeans to destroy so much of the native beaver population precisely because they wanted to destroy the world. They knew their world had ended, but before they faced complete annihilation, they wanted revenge against the other-than-human persons who betrayed them. Faced with their own extinction, they wanted to see the whole world die with them.

Those native people lived on, though; and, so did the beaver. Despite a conflagration of mistrust and betrayal, both survived the calamity, albeit in much reduced numbers, in communities now torn by the experience. Throughout his other books, Luther traces the trauma of North America through such experiences. Eastern woodland Indians, like native people everywhere, revere their elders. They have spent many years becoming native to their place, and know it better than any others could. They have the most important knowledge of all: the practical knowledge of living in a particular place, its patterns and rhythms. They know the traditions better than any, not just because they have practiced them throughout a long lifetime, but because they have learned the patterns and rhythms of that place well enough to understand where those traditions come from. The guidance of such elders keeps a community from losing itself in an orgy of vengeance and hatred; but our story began with the smallpox epidemics that killed the majority of the people, including the elders.

The Agricultural Revolution brought with it the Neolithic Mortality Crisis. Jared Diamond describes it succinctly in his 1987 article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” (PDF): “Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor.” Life expectancy at birth dropped from 26 to 19. As Mark Nathan Cohen details in his book, Health & the Rise of Civilization, the Agricultural Revolution brought with it a sharp drop in life expectancy, followed by a recovery, but not entirely regaining the ground lost until the past century, and only then among the privileged classes of the First World. Cohen points out that even for Neolithic data, the skeletons of the wealthy seem to skew the result. As horrifying as the Neolithic data seems, the reality probably looked much worse.

Imagine such a world, where thirty years makes you an old man. In a shockingly short window of time—perhaps as little as a single generation—life expectancy dropped so completely that elders simply didn’t exist anymore. We lost our elders, and with them, our traditions. While discussing this data, Giuli asked an incredibly astute and important question: what if that explains the pathology of civilization? What if that trauma, the sudden cutting off from our elders and tradition, drove us insane—just like the elephants? What if it threw us into a post-apocalyptic world—just like the eastern woodland Indians? What if, for 10,000 years, we’ve struggled with how to handle that trauma, but never succeeded, because we never had any elders to guide us—like the lost, abandoned children from The Lord of the Flies?