So I’ve spent a long time trying to develop a culture of storytelling amongst friends, students, family, and so on. Recently I’ve stumbled across a whole little movement, the world of small press and independently published, owner-created role-playing games. I blame Jason Godesky.

I’ve gotten excited about them enough to start having playtest days, where we see what makes these games tick, use them to work our storytelling muscles, and possibly develop our own games.

WHAT: Indie role playing game day, where we playtest games that work our storytelling muscles in new and exciting ways.
WHO: You or someone like you. Including people you know who would really enjoy it.
WHEN: Sunday Jan 13th at 1pm
WHERE: The Scout Pit, 5040 SE Milwaukie, around back next to the parking lot.
WHY: To explore new tools for stretching our storytelling muscles, to innovate methods of teaching these skills, to help design possible tracker and animist-oriented story games.

COST: Free, but we welcome donations for sustaining the Scout Pit, a community center on the lip of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.

You’ll find SHIFT on or near the baseball field of Irvington Park, NE 7th and Fremont. 12pm, as usual. Gear up for rain!

Google map.

See TrackersNW for more. Don’t forget to check out his workshop this weekend at TryonLife Farm.

Collegiates will help out at the Jon Young workshop this weekend instead! We encourage you to attend…the workshop still has space available.

Check EVENT CALENDAR for SHIFT cancellation this Saturday.

Come join us for SHIFT at Whitaker Ponds:

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/finder/index.cfm?ShowResults=yes&SearchText=whitaker+ponds

Saturdays at 12 noon, next to the north baseball field.

Dress for cold, wet, and muddy! Woo hoo!

No SHIFT on Saturday, November 25th, owing to the Thanksgiving Holiday. Last session went great…it hurts to take a day off, I know.

To the people in the world, making our daily lives possible, I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Mother the Earth, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Waters, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Plants, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Animals, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Trees, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Birds, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Four Winds and the Air, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Clouds and the Rain, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Father the Sun, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Grandmother the Moon, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Stars, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Unseen and Eternal, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Ancestors, Elders, and Children, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To the Unnamed, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

Our minds now sit as one.

The Thanksgiving Address has nothing to do with the holiday of thanksgiving, though perhaps it directly relates to the source of that holiday…Native American traditions of gratitude.

This tradition comes to us via Jake Swamp, sub-chief of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, member of the 6 Nations Confederacy, original mentors of the (ill-fated) US Constitution.

Jake Swamp acts as a cultural ambassador, mentoring other cultures and governments in how to have a sustainable way of life, as his people have done for the past 1000 years (or so).

For more information on the Great Law of Peace, and the history of the 6 Nations Confederacy/Iroquois/Haudenosaunee, check out White Roots of Peace, Basic Call to Consciousness, or the Tree of Peace Society (specifically run with the help of Jake Swamp).

Above I started with one of many versions of the Thanksgiving Address that we do here at the College and in our daily lives. We’ve modified it from the one handed to us by Jake Swamp (per his request - he doesn’t want any more Mohawks in the world, he has plenty to handle already, apparently).

You’ll notice many things about the Thanksgiving Address, but the most important:

…it runs from the ground, upwards and outwards.
…it singles out beings to appreciate.
…it asks for affirmation for every statement.

Pretty simple. Have fun with it, and make it your own. Perhaps soon I’ll post a spoken version so you can hear what it can sound like.

If you live in the bioregion of Cascadia (and possibly even if you don’t), you need to learn Chinuk Jargon! I really encourage you to learn your local pidgin, if you can discover it; all the reasons below most likely apply to your area of North America (sorry if you hail from outside of Turtle Island…you’ll have to explore on your own).

Not only do place-names across the region suddenly illuminate themselves once you’ve learned the trade language of Chinuk Jargon, but the language has always served as a cross-cultural talk for those living and working in this area.

Working people here, from northern California to Alaska, and east to Montana, for hundreds of years have spoken this language. If you fished, hunted, crafted, or harvested in any way, and traded, you most likely spoke some form of the Jargon.

As many forms of the Jargon existed as did cultures speaking it; now it contains influences of French, English, Hawaiian, and more, along with the original indigenous foundations of the language.

So learn and play with it; allow your culture to shape it, and allow it to shape your culture.

A good beginning place to start:

The Chinook Book.

I’ve thought a lot about this step I plan to take (which I’ll explain in a bit), here on this blog, and I think I plan to go for it. As Derrick Jensen quoted someone else, in his book Walking on Water,

Charles Johnson ­the writer, not the catcher ­said this in an interview: ‘I think a real writer simply has to think in other terms.

Not, ‘Will I get in this magazine? Will I get this NEA next year?’ but whether or not this work is something he would do if a gun was held to his head and somebody was going to pull the trigger as soon as the last word of the last paragraph of the last page was finished. Now if you can write out of the sense that you’re going to die as soon as the work is done, then you will write with urgency, honesty, courage, and without flinching at all, as if this were the last testament in language, the last utterance you could ever make to anybody. If a work is written like that, then I want to read it. If somebody’s writing out of that sense, then I’ll say, “This is serious. This person is not fooling around. This work is not a means to some other end, the work is not just intended for some silly superficial goal, this work is the writer saying something because he or she feels that if it isn’t said, it will never be said.

I have a lot of living to do, that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer…and I don’t want to waste your time either. Let’s get honest, we have lives to save, our own not the least of them. Our families, our land, if we dare pull out the psychic ear-plugs we’ve installed in our heads, we better have a plan for when the raucous din of weeping immediately hits us.

So let’s talk about having fun.

I’ve noticed the parallel evolution of the work done by the Anthropik crew on the Fifth World (where they explore the North American Afterculture through the milieu of role-playing games), and that encourages me to open up a bit more about what other purposes the College serves, rather in hints and roundabout.

The idea, that games can change us (or maintain what we have), that games in fact (however innocently) create our reality. Not to get too serious, for that would short-circuit just the effect we want: a care-free, child-like exploration of other ways of interacting, but kids can play serious too. So let’s have some serious, no-holds barred fun.

I call Culture, “the games we play, by the rules that we’ve all agreed to”. If we play the boardgame Monopoly, at minimum we can expect a winner and many losers (along with a host of other behaviors). If we play the Human Knot, at minimum, we can expect that everyone will win or lose together. Think about that. As easily as changing the rules of the game, we’ve changed everything about how the players interact. Of course, right?

Well, we can generalize this ability. Theater Games comprise an entire class of games which everyone wins or loses together (in fact, win/lose becomes an obsolete concept, as with the Human Knot). I mentioned them before, in the Lost and the Found.

Let’s talk about them some more. Follow this line of thinking: animism and the idea of belonging to the world, demands you live right now, not tomorrow, not through some future collapse, but right now, today. So what does the world of Today ask of us, as livers of Life, parents, children, and two-leggeds of all kinds? I see in this world, a natural landscape mostly transformed into human flesh. Forests, coyotes, plantlife, rivers, converted (if only temporarily) into literal human form…human bodies, and their dwellings. So we need to learn how to dance elegantly with this human world, to make a living, and to shepherd our families through the social holocaust that looks like modern-day corporate America. Along with this, we have a tool box with skills that posit a future (or rather, a future-present!) without the epidemic human overpopulation.

Back to Theater Games. Depression, despair, distraction from what matters, loneliness - these demons constantly knock at our door, in this urban world. So how do we transcend them, change the rules of the games we play? Screw the rules - let’s change the games themselves. And let’s share our experiences…what games work? What cultures work? What life-giving cultural traditions can we translate into games? I spend all my time thinking about this. I don’t want to become Rom, or Lakota, or Cibecue Apache, or Miqmaq, or Mohawk…I want to know what they do (or did) that makes their lives worth living. And then I want to translate it into something new, something that belongs to us, the refugees from long-ago-annihilated indigenous cultures. Perhaps we can save each other, the surviving indigenous cultures, and us, the new native (small “n”) North Americans, members of the Afterculture that rose from the ashes of a dying civilization.

A Broken Continuum

In the September 15th, 2006 episode of the public radio show, This American Life, titled “Unconditional Love” you’ll find this story:

Act One. Love is a Battlefield. Alix Spiegel tells the story of a couple, Heidi and Rick Solomon, who adopt a son who was raised in terrible circumstances in a Romanian orphanage, unable to feel attachments to anyone, and what they do about it.

What do they do about it? They rebuild part of the continuum, as expressed by Jean Liedloff in the Continuum Concept. They spend countless hours recreating the in-arms phase that the orphan missed in the abusive orphanage environment. Keep in mind; their son towers above the mom, so it takes some logistical wrangling to get an enormous teenage boy into some semblance of an infant’s experience in the arms of his mother. But they do it. And you’ll have to hear the story to believe the results.

Culture Means the Games We Play, By the Rules To Which We’ve Agreed

Part of my exploration, in teaching animal tracking, mythic cartography, and spoken tradition skills, goes in the direction of teaching them the original way. Nowadays you can find plenty of field guides on animal tracking, plenty of teachers willing to tell you when to whip out your notebook and tape measure. Few of these teachers have any conception of the enormous richness that exists in the indigenous tradition of animal tracking. Even fewer know how to tap that tradition, or to rebirth it.

My fellow forest-miscreants and I have begun experimenting with eloquence, thanksgiving, and familial traditions through the practice of games. Games put us in a place of child-like openness, they re-establish a capacity for superlearning and whole-being involvement, and they allow us to experiment with new “rules” for interacting.

How do you begin to learn how to place the economic/utilitarian dimension below the social one, except by doing it? But how do you cross that awkward social boundary of feelings of awkwardness and insincerity?

My friend Lisa has a long history of facilitating Spolin Theater Games, games that crack open the human psyche to rawness, realness, authenticity, and powerful intuitive modes. But not simply as individuals…the theater games reach their full power in groups, as humans interacting with each other, and getting to a wordless communication of others in the theater troupe.

Through these games we see a possibility dawning, of a way towards real cultural creation, of playful experimentation with rules and traditions as easily created as tossed out the window, but keeping the ones that work. A high-powered process of co-creation emerges, a re-birthing of culture and family. And what happens when you involve the land in these theater games?

Magic

The world wakes up, in the human heart. Plants start speaking, the sky whispers in your ear, the animals nod and wink, as simply as the act of listening and watching for such things. Getting there can take some doing, but once there the earth seems to sigh in relief at your arrival.

Now comes the part where you learn to explore staying there, and adapting to the relentless tug-of-war across the border that separates civilized awareness from a free and familial one.

Whence comes the word Court, and its relatives: courtliness, courtesy, courtier, to court, a curtsy, and courteously? All point to a certain way of relating. Can you see the Royal Blood in the person next to you, even if their clothes look torn and dirty? Can you elevate every day life by offering dignity and respect usually reserved for those of the highest station?

In the space of the Queen’s and King’s Court, all Nobles (the players), in consenting to their new elevated status, also consent to a higher level of speech.

How the Nobles do this remains up to them and the Host of the Court. For inspiration, they may read famous rhetorical works; whether political (like the Declaration of Independence), literary (as in the works of Shakespeare), or poetical and multilayered (like the Tzutujil Maya’s  spoken traditions as recorded in Martin Prechtel’s Long Life, Honey in the Heart). Wherever they find a style to key off of, they can run with it, as long as it sounds regal (or at least aims to sound regal). If you fear to fail, don’t worry; aim (in the words of Martin Prechtel) to Fail Magnificently!

Owing to that, the Host and the assembly all encourage one-upmanship and over-the-top speechifying, learning from each other and keeping the stuff that they like the best for the next session of Court.

All the Queen’s and King’s Courts run on a consensus-based system. This does not necessarily mean everyone must agree.

The Form of Royal Consensus

Any player may have three reactions to a proposed decision. They may agree fully, signalling this with a thumb’s-up. They may not agree fully, but feel willing to go along with the will of the group, signalling this with a thumb’s-sideways. Finally, they may disagree, block the proposal, and request to speak, signalling this with a thumb’s-down. A thumb’s-down signal requires the player to speak; they cannot block a proposal and remain silent.

If it looks like a majority, or even a substantial minority of the group has a thumb’s sideways, going forward with the proposal will probably not deliver good results. Asking for more information from the thumb’s-sideways players will usually clear up confusions and make workable consensus happen.

The Lifetime Quota of Thumb’s-Down

Each player in a Queen’s Court gets only one thumb’s-down allotted to them, for the duration of the Court. Players can also decide to minimize the quota even more, including multiple sessions of the Queen’s Court, or over a certain timeframe. In any case, players should treat the thumb’s-down as a last resort, rather relying on opening up conversations and discussions with thumb’s-sideways as a guideline.

This game concerns the deliberation over the remedy of disagreements and conflict amongst the group of players. A King’s Court can only take place in a session of a Queen’s Court.

Convening the King’s Court

Any player in a Queen’s Court can propose a King’s Court, by simply saying “If it please the Court, I have a question for the King.” If the consensus of the other players accepts the King’s Court, the Host announces “The Queen accepts. Welcome to the [say the date, moon, and/or location]session of the King’s Court. If they deny it, the Host says, “The Queen Denies it”.

Assuming the group consents, you then move onto the issues at hand.

Deliberations of the King’s Court

You can invent complaints, but the players will enjoy themselves far more if they can dig up some unresolved tensions, conflicts, injustice, etc., that concerns only those present. The players must make fair efforts to include everyone in on the King’s Court that the deliberations concern; but purposefully avoiding a King’s Court gives others permission to deliberate without you. The players decide whether or not they perceive this occurring.

The player who proposed the King’s Court has the first right to speak until finished, without questions. They name all those directly involved, and describe the situation as regally as possible, overplaying the importance of all parties involved as much as they can. Then any other voices may speak, but first among them, if relevant, the other party to the complaint.

All present, except for those directly involved in the dispute, deliberate on a remedy for the dispute.

When the Court has reached consensus on a solution, they then pronounce it. All decisions of the Court rely on the honor of those present to carry through the judgement.

The King’s Court stays open until all players feel they have spoken on whatever complaints they need to resolve. At the consent of all those present, the Host then adjourns the King’s Court.

Anyone can start this game, as long as it takes place in the space of either a Queen’s Court, or a King’s Court.

The one starting this game, often (but not necessarily!) the Host of the Court, signals it by announcing “If it please the Court, Introductions!”. Those present affirm their consent by nodding. The first one to put their hand on their heart performs the first Introduction. In this manner, as the game proceeds, others announce their intentions to perform an Introduction.

The Introduction

The Introducer chooses one other person in the circle, and in as regal a manner as possible, the Introducer asks those present to formally meet this person of their choosing. The Introducer proceeds to satisfy the following points of introduction, not necessarily in this order, in as laudatory a fashion as possible:

Name

The name consists of an relevant nickname first, chosen on the spot by the Introducer, or inherited by past Introductions. They then say their heritage name (if they have one), and explain its origins. Named after who? Why? If the name on their birth certificate belies their true origins (as in the case of slave names, etc.), explain this tragic and curious wrinkle in their ancestry.

Lineage

Continuing the theme of ancestry, begin the long count of (staying to male ancestors if male, and female when female) parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, with the goal of at least seven generations back of naming.

Place

Now speak of the places they have lived, from the point of view of the Land itself. What rivers, what valleys, what strange living beings grew and walked in those spaces? What fruits could one eat?

Personal Heroics

Speak of the most amazing feats this one has accomplished, the things that impress you the most. Make it Epic!

The Wrap-Up

“With that my Introduction ends, but not my gratitude for you as an audience, nor my affection for [insert their nickname, heritage name, lineage name, or tax name here]. The very next person to put their hand on their heart after this, performs the next Introduction.

None of these categories fall in any particular order, except the Wrap-Up of course comes last. You can also mix categories to play them up.

Ending The Game

If you have an odd number players, someone must volunteer to Introduce two people; once begun, the game cannot end until everyone has had someone Introduce them, and the Host of the space declares, “Well Spoken!”. If the Host declares the assembly “Well Spoken!” before all Introductions have occurred, the responsibility lies with the other players to make sure the game finishes honorably by saying “Introductions!” to signal the error and keep the ball rolling.

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