I have refined a ridiculous theory based on pure speculation, concerning the development of language.

I believe humans belong to that group of animals that we call “mimics”; the australian Lyre bird, the Parrot, the Mynah bird, Corvids (Jays, Crows, Ravens, Whiskey Jacks, Magpies), Octopi, Cuttlefish, Chameleons, Coyotes, all these animals specialize in a specific kind of intelligence that involves mimicry of sound, behavior, or of color and visual patterns.

These animals think about the world in a special way. They reflect the world back, with great delicacy. For some of them, they experiment with different strategies and lifeways even, borrowed from other animals.

I believe humans emerged as a primate specializing in this kind of mimicking intelligence, and when we first told stories, when we first really began to tell complex stories to each other, we did it with imitative sound and movement. We danced and sang what we heard and saw. Why did we do this? Because, as we began to experiment with team hunting, communicating to our team-mates both to stay in accord, and to bring back intelligence of animal movements, exponentially increased our success. Tracking made us mimics; Story made us mimics; collaboration made us mimics.

Our first words, then, sounded like what we described; either literally, as in whistling a birdsong,  or more figuratively, as in using sound to imitate the pattern of movement, much like saying “boink! boink! boink!” when describing a stotting deer.

Over time these sounds became more symbolic, more abbreviated, so that we could layer even more complexity into our language. At this time I believe we moved to polysynthetic language; language composed of a one or more root ideas, bookended by prefixes and suffixes that qualify relationships and characteristics of that root idea.

A good example of a polysynthetic word, and just darn entertaining, comes from Mohawk. First a couple examples; in a polysynthetic language, specifically an intact indigenous one, a word like “teacher” will translate thus:

shakorihonnyennis: “he teaches them”

How about a policeman?

shakoyenahs: “he catches them”

This theme continues with places. For example, kitchen:

tsi yekhonnyatha: “the place where one cooks”

Or, store-

tsi yontaterihonnyennitha: “the place where one sells”

The best example of polysynthesis in Mohawk, comes in the lowly form of stove polish:

yontenonhsa’tariha’tahkwatsherahon’tsihstatsherahstara’the’tahkwa: “the stuff that makes shiney that one puts on the thing that is used to heat the house”

Okay, you get the picture. Polysynthesis allows you to have a self-sufficient language with an infinitely expandable vocabulary, something we have lost somewhat. English borrows heavily from other languages to create new words, languages with more capacity for polysynthesis (like Latin and Greek, with their plethora of prefixes and suffixes).

In polysynthesis, you build concepts piece by piece, syllable by syllable, and a word can run as long as a sentence, and give more information more compactly. I imagine this makes you more aware of the meaning of each part of your language too; how many everyday English-speaking folks can really explain what “dis-” means, or “trans-”, or “tele-”? A polysynthetic speaker has an intimate knowledge of how speakers put words together.

So I believe all languages, in an intact indigenous culture, really fully form and mature into a polysynthetic stage, and additionally, have no nouns. Because, if you think about it, up till this point we just “mimicked” the pattern and sound of the world, and then tightened things up a bit to support a more complex and layered language. But we didn’t need nouns yet (I should add that Mohawk does have two classes of nouns, one of which corresponds more to the idea of a “verb phrase”, and the other more in accord with how we think of nouns. They have relatively few of these “formal nouns”. I’ll address this later).

I believe as we began to experiment with sedentary Village lifestyles, that our language began to reflect this. I believe that the first long-term settlements partnered with the emergence of nouns. Nouns mean stability. Nouns mean firm foundation. Nouns justify themselves, by meaning themselves. Nothing connotes that, to me, like a Village. Nomadic hunter-gatherer life takes advantage of dynamic flux. In a Village, you put down stakes, start having more and more specific roles for Village members. Village life can actually offer much more work (I almost would say “toil”, but let’s wait for the emergence of cities and civilization to call it that) than a more flexible semi- or fully nomadic life, but for the members to continue it, they must see the life as its own justificaiton. And, honestly, Village cultures produce amazing aesthetic worlds that still inspire me. The life does have it’s temptations! Certainly I don’t consider Villages as better or worse than nomadic life. Just different.

Hopi, Mohawk, Chinuk Wawa, these kinds of Village-based native languages have an emerging class of nouns, some to a greater extent than others, and none as extremely as modern languages of civilization. The peoples speaking them had begun to heavily invest in the Village lifestyle. It makes sense that their language would reflect the rhythms of such a lifestyle; but this lifestyle still heavily accomdated the dynamic flux of the community of life to which they belonged. I want to accent this. A few nouns doesn’t mean they’ve taken up civilized modes. A language that worships nouny-ness, factuality, and the logic of linear cause-effect rests a long way from these cultures.

So, as the power structures of emerging civilized cultures need more efficiency from their social networks in the adventure of pyramid building and agriculture, they need a language that could encourage culture members to view themselves in ever more rigid roles and relationships.

This endeavor progressed until we have the extreme situation of today, where few modern people truly know how to talk, listen, converse, collaborate, or decide in accord with another human being. We have a poverty of social technology and thought when it comes to really nourishing relationships, and this impacts our work, family, land, and village.

So. My rampant unfounded speculation has ended. I have little proof for this, but I see it in a similar way to the spherical-planetary model of an hydrogen atom. It doesn’t really look like that, but thinking about it in that way produces useful things.

This I believe about this progression of language. More to come - next, Pattern Languages!

I’d like to keep the podcasts coming out, but I’ve already run up against the archiving limit at liberated syndication, the podcast hosting service I use. I downgraded the archive size over the winter, due to me thinking I wouldn’t put out more podcasts. Now I don’t have the funds to up the hosting again for the recent revitalization of the College.

Additionally, I have far more ambitious plans than even the old plan would cover.

If you really love the podcasts, and get a lot out of them, help me keep them coming and making them even better (perhaps getting a second microphone for interviews…but first things first, archiving!).

I’ve started a new fundable.com account so I can keep putting podcasts up, and to secure storage for the next year. Contribute at:

The College of Mythic Cartography’s Podcast Nest Egg

-If a part Two to Evan Gardnener’s interview excites you…

-If you look forward to regular Riddling segments…

-If you look forward to hearing more real-time Dream Interview examples…

-If you look forward to more on Storyjamming and communal storytelling…

-If you want to hear more about emerging social technologies that support the Learning Revolution and the Rewilding Renaissance, such as “Where are Your Keys?”, Open Space Technolgy, and Clarity Skills…

Please Contribute today!

The only way back to life-affirming Story, lies in taking back the responsibility to tell it.

I coined the word Storyjamming to refer to a specific style of collaborative storytelling. When jamming Story, the performers fill the role of the audience as they weave a story together, using one of very many story games to structure and guide their participation.

This doesn’t differ much, if at all, from musical jamming, 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.

Storyjamming has some very specific techniques to pull a group together and warm them up for the challenging and thrilling exercise of their intuition and surrender to group creativity; Viola Spolin’s Theater Games method inspired the use of most of these games. For the actual structure of the story, we often pick up the work of indie story game designers, a culture that includes many creators with ‘zine’ style sensibilities.

When we jam story, we, the tale tellers, share a vivid waking dream, and participate by each representing a character in that story, and drive it with these characters’ wants, needs, hopes, and fears. Sometimes we jam epic Myths, sometimes Horror, sometimes we jam everyday Soap Opera. But always the stories that come from skilled players carry a great meaning and potential for healing for their daily lives.

Storyjamming roots itself in many great oral traditions. It owes a lot to Flyting, the scottish poetic contest of boasts and insults. It owes a lot to the story-bards of India, who heal sick cattle with the just right story. Pick the culture, and you’ll find storyjamming occurring somewhere, in some unique form.

We storyjammers see this as the revival of a folk tradition long in need of a dusting off. We’ve just begun to relearn the licks - and we have lots of room in the circle!

We belong to a culture founded on enslavement, even into the present day, even into our own workplaces, neighborhoods, and living rooms.

I don’t refer to just the every-day third world enslavement of sweatshop workers and cash crop laborers of all kinds that make cheap goods and food possible; I also mean the modern first-world wage slavery that remains invisible to most people ensnared in it (though they most certainly feel it in their guts).

Marshall Rosenberg, developer of Compassionate (aka Nonviolent) Communication, mentioned once that he saw English itself as a language of Masters and Slaves, and built a whole methodology to explore sidestepping the impulses of such a language world. What do Masters and Slaves think about constantly?

“Is he Good? Am I Bad? Am I Right? Is he Wrong?”

Slaves think about whether or not they deserve a punishment; Masters think about whether or not the Slaves deserve more. These ideas of approval/disapproval interdepend on punishment to such an extent that you cannot separate them. Masters (or at least the meme of having a Master, if the subtlely matters to you) want to get inside your head, make you think that their thought belongs to you; that you in fact thought it yourself, when you didn’t. For the Slave, they always want to “get away” with things, and “work the system”. For the Master they always want to increase control, and work the Slaves harder. Keep in mind too, that no Master in our culture escapes enslavement to a Master greater than them. Anyone who plays the game of Masters and Slaves will play both roles in their lifetime, will play them both in many different places and at different times. A Father enslaves the child; the child Masters a younger sibling; the Foreman Masters the Father.

Does anybody still remain blissfully ignorant that the oppressed learn the tools of oppression most thoroughly of all, since they know more than anyone how the harsh command sounds, and the bite of the whip feels?

For many people in our culture, they carry a lingering guilt that they participate in a culture of  this same enslavement. But many of these people don’t realize that they have Masters too, and that the reason they can’t step outside of choices which enslave others, the reason why each decision they make to act ethically only leads to more hypocritical dead ends, the reason that drives this impossible chase through the labyrinth of the devouring Minotaur with sinews woven of our own culture’s dark side, this reason lays hidden behind our illusion of freedom and “first-world” status. Abandoning the labyrinth would in fact mean abandoning everything good, and right, and true. Get it? By doing Right, you’ve done Wrong, and you’ll have to get back in line.

How do you deal with such heartsickness, and the impossible tangled web of hypocrisy which you can’t escape? For me, you begin with burying the dead.

Once we admit that Right and Wrong have died to us, as useful companions, we can start burying their many masks. Owing to the ghost-stuff of which this culture made them, we can’t actually put them in the ground, but their Masks…! Ah, their Masks. We have lots of those. For some, old Report Cards mask these companions; for others, awards and certificates. For some their profession itself masks the attempt to stay one step ahead of the Minotaur of shame and guilt. For others, the watch on their wrist. For others, makeup, clothes, cars, gadgets. He who dies with the most toys wins, you know.

Whatever the Mask, you can hold a funeral for Right and Wrong, just as you would for anyone else with whom you’d had a bittersweet relationship. Certainly it felt so sweet to be Right. But of course, that meant too you had to often feel the harsh smallness of being Wrong. Right sounded like fanfare and felt like falling confetti; but Wrong felt quite different, like abandonment, loss, exclusion. Sometimes Right feels like justified Anger, wrathful and condemning. Sometimes Wrong felt like failure, self-hate, depression. Together these two took you on a wild bipolar ride of addiction. You can’t just throw dust on the place of Wrong; you have to also leave flowers on the Grave of Right. The same pale face lies behind all the masks - look now. The same face, both Wrong, and Right. The same person.

The exact same haunting ghost, now caught on the wind of your goodbye prayers, just as you begin to speak them…

Every year and every day, at this time, this ghost, this pale face both Right and Wrong will ask you about the new Spring. Will you shed hot tears, remember how good indeed Right felt, but decline the companionship, as you bury more Masks of this faithful, footstep-dogging companion?

Who in this culture escapes the trap of addiction? At the very base of it all, no one escapes the need to constantly rebury Right and Wrong. Certainly not me.

What does that leave us with? How do we then measure and adapt to the feedback of the world? We’ve only ever used Right and Wrong to measure these things.

Everytime I bury a Right or a Wrong, I reaffirm my commitment to a new measure: that which creates life, and liveliness.

I learn more and more what this means, all the time. The path to recovery can start with an edge of narcissism, but only because someone interrupted the years specially set aside for our narcissism (childhood) with harsh appraisals of Right and Wrong. Once we recalibrate, we learn how social and compassionate “life and liveliness” looks, no matter where we stand. But don’t overthink the trip; you’ll only learn by walking there.

[For those of you not in the know, a reference to Evan T. Pritchard’s book, and to the fact that no intact indigenous languages have a word that corresponds to the word ‘time’ in modern languages. Also check out my podcast EPISODE 20: The Ceaselessly Latering Day].

The mind, along with the body’s needs, chooses and directs attention. I think we can start there. Our culture, our idiom, our language, all direct our attention. Questions direct our attention.

How we move our attention, either supports or distracts us from our intentions. Our ability to talk about a task easily, makes it easier to finish it, and finish it in line with our intentions.

Every field of endeavor has its own jargon for this reason. Different fields of science may have their own grammar; some even involve entirely different languages than English (such as algebra). Think of David Bohm’s quest to create the English-based “rheomode” (verb-only English) so he could easily talk about quantum phenomena.

Building pyramids, as I’ve mentioned oft before, required the innovation of professional classes. Societies without strict roles simply don’t build pyramids. What do wandering free families need with a pyramid?

If you want to accomplish something in a sustainable fashion (i.e. with grace and ease), you need to learn its language. To hunt a deer, you must learn Deer language. To navigate the ocean in a kayak, you must learn Ocean language. To revivify traditions of Family, Village, and Land, you must learn the languages of these organisms. Speaking the language used for building pyramids,  in the context of building family, will make this work harder, sow confusion and distraction, and constantly drag against a task for which it has no functional language to talk about.

An example - if you descend from a long line of English speakers, does anyone in your family ever talk about “frith”? Frith comes from Old English, and indicates the deep peace and security that comes from healthy social and kin companionship.

Trick question, sorry. Frith died out in use as Middle English emerged. But let me reask that - do you even have a word for such a thing? Do any heavily acculturated modern peoples even think about such things? Perhaps the lucky ones. For most of us, we lost the word as we lost the value for this peace that we feel in the secure bonds of a joyful gathering of kin, blood or not.

What you have no words for, you will rarely think about; and when you do think about it, you will have long-winded attempts to encapsulate your meaning. I haven’t even really plumbed the depths of “frith” - I regard my above definition as a rather shallow and brief one. These long-winded attempts to talk about something mean that you can’t easily do anything about it.

Idiom can impact this too. You don’t always need words, sometimes you just need idiom to keep an idea alive. Our replacement idiom for frith, however, pales in comparision: “blood is thicker than water”. I don’t entirely know what that means, actually. However, think of the Gypsy Roma and their animate idiom towards killer cars, water, alcohol and electricity.

To reviviy traditions and technologies, we must create the language tools to speak of them: idioms, words, and grammar. We can start anywhere, though.

Sometimes it only takes a word - like “frith”.

Rewilding means different things to different people. To a scientist, it may mean the reintroduction of a wild species into its former habitat. To an anarchist, it may mean the political and personal freedom achieved by abandoning modern values and habits.

I, and others, have adopted the term to describe a large part of what we do, because we never before had a good word for what exactly we do.

And what do we do? We don’t practice primitive skills, because although we enjoy starting campfires with a wooden bow-drill, building wilderness shelters, tracking animals, we neither see these skills as  “primitive”, nor as the beginning and end of what we do.

We don’t practice Native American spirituality, because although we endeavor to grow roots in our  bioregion, and choose animist relationships with the world around us (and receive further mentoring from native Indian mentors on how to explore this choice), we don’t see root-growing and animist choices as exclusively Native American activities, nor do they simply fit under the label of “spirituality”.

We don’t practice permaculture, because although we do continue to learn from and implement how indigenous peoples cared for the land under our feet to maximize food production, we pursue a far deeper and more committed relationship to the Land than an agricultural one.

We don’t pursue green anarchism, because although we do see the unsustainable nature of civilization in all its historical forms, we see a need for more than just political and social change.

We don’t pursue end-times survivalism, because although we can see the ongoing collapse of modern civilization and all its many institutions, we don’t await its end with stockpiled food and exit strategies, but rather see it as the best excuse ever to choose a life worth living today.

So, we don’t do a lot of things, apparently. But still, what exactly do we do?

Rewilding, in the sense that mythic cartographers and animist folks of varying background use it, means a constant renaissance and return to values and technologies of Family, Village, and Land.

To me, this truly means living the Good Life. It means enjoying and prioritizing food, family, ethical work, partnerships with the wild. It means taking responsibility for our ancestry, it means taking time to grieve for what we’ve got, and praise for what we’ve lost. It means no more “move on, get over it”. It means walking away from the life we no longer want to live, and choosing now the life we want to live. It means following our hearts.

The Rewilding Renaissance describes the ever-growing commitment of so many people to recreating and reinventing lost traditions of Family, Village, and Land. We don’t see an end-point to this process; human beings have always had to renew their commitment to living in a beautiful way that works.

It only matters that we begin.

Honestly, we haven’t stopped talking about ‘widening conversation scope’. It just has a lot of parts to it. I make no guarantees how far we’ll get.

So, where did I leave off?

Family. Now, we have tools, modern social technologies (soon you’ll recognize these as the most valuable of all technologies, once you realize what we’ve lost and have to reinvent), that have begun to address our cultural, familial, and social poverty. You can throw ’spiritual’ in there too, if you like. We can use these tools to start rebuilding and reinspiring our Family and Village culture.

Let’s start with one of my favorite tools, Open Space Technology.

OST, or Open Space, names a specific kind of gathering, familiar to most indigenous people, though modified for the needs of average modern folks. I’ve written a lot about Open Space here, you can do a search of the blog if you want more info, and it has lots of adherents on the internet in general. I should note that the ‘creator’ of OST, Harrison Owen, claims he developed its structure inspired by his experiences in a West African village during his time in the Peace Corps.

Coincidences don’t exist, folks. At least not random ones.

Open Spaces, by their nature, widen the scope of the conversation, by allowing the attendees to set the agenda in the first hour of the event, by offering a billboard-style ‘marketplace’ schedule, usually on a wall, for folks to place meeting announcements on. Any meeting, by any one, with any number of attendees, in any available time slot. A nicely widened scope, yes? But in order to work, Open Space must narrow its scope somehow.

OST does this by having a specific theme, and an invitation, that will attract the appropriate participants. But this still doesn’t narrow the scope all that much.

OST, as commonly used, errs on the side of inclusion. I think this colors the kind of results you can expect. Now we’ve entered the realm of speculation, but I have a bet, from looking at the success of tribal models:

The more unified the identity of the group, the powerful the impact of the Open Space Gathering.

This doesn’t necessarily mean small. This doesn’t mean ‘like-minded’, either. I use the word ‘identity’ very carefully. In so far as Open Space serves a group that (like the Gypsies) can only profit from outsiders, speaks the same language, and has intimate knowledge of each other’s lives (along with intermarriage, geographic proximity, etc.).

What does all that mean? To me, it speaks about passion, and responsibility, the two watchwords of the OST process. Open Space runs on passion, and responsibility. To increase the impact of an Open Space, you support the increase of the passion and responsibility of the participants. How do you do that? I believe identity holds a key here.

I’ve noticed that in teaching and working with foreign languages, the politics of identity always lurk in the shadows, periodically pushing hot buttons. Your own language, your own ethnic food, your traditions, all these things inspire great passion and responsibility in ordinary members of cultures with strong identities.

I think I just managed to get through a whole ‘nother blog post still without getting to the center of the tootsie roll pop. How many licks will this take?

Well, we’ll get there together.

I’ve rambled on and on about the Tzutujil and the Roma because I want to underscore that all this has to do with now, today, here. Not ancient traditions from the dawn of time, but what we have the ability and response-ability to attend to in our own lifetime, in our own families, amongst our friends, at work and home.

This points to how we make a living, how we resolve disputes, and what dangers we cannot resolve, but simply must adapt to.

To the extent we try to make ourselves ‘all one’, we disperse our energies to the wind in a naive quest to ‘think globally’. Thinking globally got us into this mess to begin with (they call it ‘globalization’).

Rather than scattering over the earth, and across the internet, as individuals talking to other individuals, what if you represented an entire extended family, as their ambassador, you could in fact speak for them, because you had in fact listened to them.  Your words, your presence, as a representative of this family, would carry far more weight and meaning…because you would, in fact, have something meaningful to say. Something that had to do with what a family needed.

This doesn’t have to do with prestige, this points to purpose and mission. If you truly make the world better for your family, you will make it better for everyone else. It has worked this way since the human origin. Species come and go, but the community of life has remained rich, full of grief and joy, whatever face it wears in any particular moment.

But a culture (several cultures at once, actually) emerged that started talking about what the city needed, and then what the city-state needed, and then what the nation needed. Things have gotten pretty grim with this kind of thinking.

The ‘needs’ of abstract political entities (much like corporations) don’t come before people, if they even have true needs as we know it. America’s needs simply do not come before your family’s needs. If this sounds like total chaos, secession, and anarchy to you, then you’ve never met a family belonging to an intact indigenous culture. I’ve spent a lot of work making the case for human needs and feelings not as impediments to a happy life, but as pointers toward a happy life (check out the podcasts Needs and Feelings of the Human Animal, and Clarity and Peacemaking, both pretty short, and other similar podcasts for more on this). Family needs don’t differ from individual needs, in their ability to create life. They call us a social animal, right? Pod needs don’t harm whale needs, and Pack needs don’t harm individual wolf needs. Stepping back, whatever this or that individual struggles with, their social group exists because it has created a beautiful and successful life for its members, and for its neighbors too.

Village (or Tribe) needs don’t differ from Family needs, either. I don’t mean to say that the boundaries between individual, family, and village don’t have their own  natural points of friction, but that (as Martín Prechtel wrote in Long Life, Honey in the Heart) this friction signifies a healthy human community.

Once you get bigger than Village or Tribe, you’ve started entering a world that no longer sizes to a human scale. It took great minds with great wisdom to give birth and carry the Iroquoian Great Law of Peace, to address the extreme hazards of conflict at such a scale.

So, for now, unless you want to call up someone at Akwesasne in Upstate New York and get yourself a Mohawk Haudenosaunee mentor in the Great Law of Peace, I recommend you stay small. Let’s stick with yourself, then Family, then Village, then Tribe. One step at a time.

I offer the Gypsy Roma and Tzutujil examples to how how Family and Village relationships to peace, community, collaboration, still work even in the modern climate of the predatory mass media culture. Tribal peoples today deal with this culture and retaining their identity constantly. Some more successfully than others, sure, so all the more reason to pay attention to those successfully navigating the boiling waters of this modern cultural melting pot.

Now we get to the part that got me chomping at the bit to write this to begin with. In a moment, I’ll probably say something that you won’t like at all.  It will seem at odds with every modern value of diversity, political correctness, and equity. You may actually hate me for saying this:

You cannot widen the scope of a conversation, without narrowing some other factor. The Roma have retained their community precisely because they have excluded the non-community. The Roma in fact see the entire non-Gypsy world (culturally speaking, of course - I don’t mean individuals here) as members of a kind of ‘untouchable’ caste, possibly a hold-over from their days in India proper, before journeying west in a series of great migrations. For the Tzutujil, a sedentary village people, they have the same sense of highly developed local identity.

Successful tribal cultures create an in-group, by acknowledging and holding the boundary against the out-group. Where tribal cultures still survive (and, at times, thrive) in the modern world, you will see this acknowledgement. The romaniya (Gypsy law) goes so far as to forbid profiting economically from fellow Gypsies.

Trade economies, in these contexts, tend to occur between cultural groups, not within. Within the cultural group, you often see a Gift economy. Depending on pressure from the modern world, this can shift, but I see this as a common core. Having an in-group doesn’t have to mean you treat the other group as less than you, but rather that the legal and economic realities between groups must differ from those within. That which works between two distinct cultural groups, will have different priorities than one within. They may both seek the ‘re-establishment of peace’, but they cannot use the same methods, because they don’t have the same tribal values to rely on. ‘Peace’ then, will mean something different to both parties.

The Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace addresses exactly this issue, intertribal conflict. Carriers of the Great Law of Peace inspired and helped frame the US Constitution. Of course, the Founding Fathers left out a couple vital pieces (and added in a President against the  counsel of the Iroquois), but the core purpose remains, defining a common ground for intertribal dispute.

As far as I can tell, the Gypsies and the Tzutujil seem to skip this extra legal system, because intertribal dispute really only becomes a problem when they have the option of violent conflict. The Tzutujil, under the control of the Guatemalan government, will no more go to war against the village across the lake, than the Gypsy Roma will go to war against Portland. The Iroquois Great Law of Peace explains why the Iroquois sit on their sovereign homeland to this day (a little known fact - they have passports and everything!), while the Tzutujil no longer own the ground under their own village.

Now, remembering that Culture Means the Means the Game We Play Together, and knowing that we can choose which game, and even design that game, according to the kind of play we want, where do we go from here?

For me, these inspiring and vital peoples tell me to look to my own house first. I long ago lost my land, and my ancestors fled as refugees from one bioregion to the next until it has become a way of life across half the globe for modern people (fleeing, I mean).

So here I stop, here in Cascadia, and put down what roots I can. The smallest place I can ‘widen the scope of conversation’ I find within myself, hence the importance of clarity tools and understanding one’s own needs and feelings.

The second place I turn to, I see close friends and family. How can we create an in-group together, and acknowledge and create a boundary between us and the out-group? How can we widen the scope of our conversation, while narrowing other important factors (such as participation, knowledge of tradition, and skill)? How can we come to resolutions over our in-group struggles, that receive support and enforcement by the people in the group, not by the state?

I feel like I haven’t gotten hardly anywhere with this. Stay tuned for ‘widening the scope: even more making your own meaty bits’, I guess. Whew!

Author, speaker, and teacher Martín Prechtel writes on this from the perspective of the Tzutujil Mayans of Highland Guatemala. In their village of Santiago Atitlan, they have a similar proceeding to the kris romaniya (excerpted from Long Life, Honey in the Heart, pages 168-170):

…On regular [Sundays] we repaired outside the church to the old stone benches where we held court. Here decisions were made, arguments were settled, problems discussed, and whatever had to be done to keep the Earth alive was considered and put into action…The Tzutujil elders weren’t undemocratic. They listed to each villager’s complaint or questions one at a time. A large part of what the [spiritual elders] did with their time…was simply to listen…they listened a great deal more than they spoke because they knew that most people’s problems were just part of life and would never be finished or solved by human invention…By trying to fix or remedy what people envisioned as the injustices and setbacks in their lives, they usually compounded the situation, making a bigger problem for somebody else in the future…there was no cure for the unfairness and hardship in any human’s life…people were not put into this world to have a good time; they were put here to be beautiful…our happiness fed the Gods, but our suffering did as well…the zany old people [did] have ways of dealing with village problems…whatever they came up with was masterfully engineered to keep suffering from escalating into mass depression and violence by making sure the village grieved for any person’s difficulties. Being heard by the elders and the village at large didn’t fix anything, but it made life bearable because we were together, in love with the adventure of our tiny collective relevance to the hungry universe…

Now you’ve heard Tzutujil legal theory expressed about as succinctly as humanly possible. As it widens the scope once again, I don’t see it differing substantively from the romaniya, except as an expression of the particular uniqueness of the Tzutujil.

Now time to narrow the scope!

However, when people had a serious difficulty that threatened the safety of the village as a whole, then all the council would leap to their feet, blankets flapping, eyeballs rolling…Everyone had an opinion, and they all talked at once to everybody they could see to the front, side, back, or far away. Miraculously, everyone listened to everybody else simultaneously, pointing and gesticulating…yelling, laughing, or preaching in a low oratory. Amazing and insane, the roar fo such a meeting was like a plane taking off. Just as quickly as it began, it stopped, everyone having understood and been heard simultaneously. And in the second of silence it took everybody to sit back down, and calmly go back to smoking and waiting for the next issue, the headman would state matter-of-factly, “That’s decided then,” and the royal crowd would grunt in affirmation. then the next issue would be presented.

At first I couldn’t understand how anything got heard or what plan had adopted…Gradually, however, I too became a participant in the word orgy of the decision making and learned to hear as I was being heard…Those who didn’t understand soon did, as the policy passed into action.

There was an inner-sanctum aspect to this form of decision making, and anyone not initiated into it could not hope to participate, though the meetings were open to the village…

Whammo! The scope narrows. Keep in mind too, that you needed to speak Tzutujil Mayan (one of countless ornate Mayan dialects) in order to even experience exclusion from the decision making. To me, the ‘word orgy’ compares well to the ornate version of Romany spoken by the folk attorneys and krisnitorya.

I offer up the Tzutujil version to show you that indigenous peoples work this way, quite similarly all over the world. Village law, tribal law, family law, in indigenous cultures, aims for the re-establishment of peace, narrows scope naturally due to cultural identity and language, widens scope to garner the support of the community and get the Big Story of where the community stands.

[cont’d from Widening Conversational Scope: the Preamble]

Let’s look at a description of the kris, according to authors Walter Weyrauch and  Maureen Anne Bell:

…In all cases, it is the aggrieved party that must request the kris…the elders of the tribes then hold a meeting and select one or more men to act as judges…the senior judge is surrounded by the members of the kris council, who act as associate judges…Generally, five or more men from both sids, usually the elders, form the council. In the United States, the council may have as many as twenty-five members…It is now acceptable, if unusual, to have the entire family present for support…When members of the audience think the witness is not being truthful or responsive, they hiss or make jokes. In some delicate matters, such as adultery, the public and witnesses can be excluded. At a kris, only Romany may be spoken, and participants discourage lapses into English by shouting and hissing…

The scope narrows!

…Furthermore, arguments are often presented in a special oratory that differs grammatically from ordinary Romany and resembles a legal jargon…

The scope narrows even more! Learning a special oratory presents a major speedbump to participation.

…Witnesses may speak freely about the case, for the Gypsies believe there can be no justice without hearing the matter out to its fullest. Exaggerated claims and ornate stories referring to folktales and mythology are common….

Of course my ears perk up at that part. Also notice that suddenly, the scope has begun to widen.

…the parties or their spokesmen may speak freely and at length about their grievances. Similarly, the witnesses may present their testimony colorfully and expansively. In short, they may refer to past events, use exaggerations, and try to gain the favor of the judges and the audience. The presentation of facts does not focus on clarifying a single issue…the gypsies appear to be concerned primarily with the presntation of a complete picture of events and evidence, even at the expense of what non-Gypsies might call due process and the rights of the individual. The litigants air their grievances before representatives of a tightly knit group who will most likely be very familiar with every aspect of their lives. Audience members come from the same community as the parties, and thus follow the proceedings with an intense sense of  participation and a strong desire that jsutice be done. This attitude may lead to spontaneous offers of testimony, as well as expressions of approval or disapproval from the audience…Participation by the audience is expected and encouraged by custom. Members of the audience, although not formally called as witnesses, may feel justified in expressing views. Whether their contribution to the proceedings is based on personal observation or opinion does not matter…

And it widens some more!

Because the Roma narrow the scope of partipants (who may attend the proceedings), they can then widen the scope of information exchange. They can create a community conversation that works:

…The vindication of individuals’ rights, as understood in a non-Gypsy context, is not of the utmost significance in a Gypsy kris. Instead, the reestablishment of peace in the group is the proceeding’s prime objective…Individuals will view themslves as members of a larger group that has been treated in accordance with the law, even if they lose the case. A feeling that justice has prevailed pervades…

Of course, if ‘losing a case’ means you come into accord with your neighbors, then you have actually won it, from a systems/community point of view. You may not have gotten what you wanted to begin with, but you got what you needed in the end.

In the articles A Community of Rewilding Means Adults Maintaining Accord, and When the State Assigns Blame, I started a line of inquiry I want to continue here. Using the examples of the Gypsy Roma, as studied by the essayists in Gypsy Law, edited by Walter Weyrauch, I saw that an intact, relatively animist, tribal people successfully retained their identity and cultural vitality amidst the constant daily horrors of civilization’s growth economy. How do they keep their connection to Family, to Tribe, in the face of the commodifying machine who sees them as yet unapportioned human resources?

I have identified a contributing factor to this survival (and thrival!), in the kris romaniya. The kris works as a community hearing in which respected and experienced folk ‘judges’, after hearing wide-ranging testimony, essentially brainstorm a resolution that their community will support. The judgement has no other enforcement than the willingness and social pressure of the community itself, hence the importance of experienced and wise judges who can find these kinds of resolutions.

At the kris romaniya, participants can speak (according to Gypsy Law, also known as the romaniya) only in Romany, the Roma language related to Sanskrit. The audience and community will shout down any use of English. Pay attention to this: the kris has narrowed scope here. If you cannot speak Romany, the laws do not apply to you, and yet you also cannot apply to the laws. No non-Roma can attend a kris.

The Roma in fact accommodate the legal system of the state as best they can, for crimes between Gypsies and non-Gypsies. They also have a fair amount of cultural skepticism toward’s the state’s legal system, not seeming to particularly expect fairness or benefits from engaging it. They probably see it more as a natural predator, or a storm, a force which they must accomodate and adroitly bystep to survive, but one which they cannot ’stop’ or ask for fair treatment as they would from a Roma. They simply  adapt.

I say all of this so we can get to the meaty bits, namely: how the community and the krisnatori (folk judges) use the kris to accomplish all kinds of goals, goals that a court of the state (say, an average American court of law) would find way beyond their scope.

Animism means choosing to see the personhood and kinship in all things.

I use the word Animism a lot, so it makes sense to clarify the meaning it carries for me. Though originally coined by Christian anthropologists to describe the ‘nature worshipping’ behavior of indigenous peoples (with the further common clueless addition ‘they believe everything - animals, rocks, sky - has a ’soul”), a community of thinkers, authors, activists, scientists, artists and philosophers (including myself) have embraced it and invested it with deeper meaning.

Animism, essentially, means acknowledging the personhood and kinship of all Life, human, non-human, animate and ‘inanimate’. In the words of the Lakota, Mitakuye Oyasin, “We Are All Related”.

Personhood, therefore, means person-ing, the behavior, feelings, and values of a person. All people value the sanctity of their borders. All people want appreciation and respect.

Kinship indicates the inescapable interrelatedness of all things. Where does breath end, and the body begin? Where does stone end, and my body begin? Does the fire in all the cells of my body, differ from the sun that put that fire here to burn? An interdependence of Personhood means nothing else but Family. This means breath, stone, fire, all people and my kin.

Animism essentially means animating, a way of relating to the world that fully experiences and acknowledges the personhood and kinship of all things. This has nothing to do with belief; this has to do with attitude. I don’t have to ‘believe’ something ‘is’ [sic] a person, I only need treat that other as I would treat a person, and then I watch what happens. You animate by making a choice; the term animist simply indicates a person who often makes this choice.

We became beautiful, successful, grieving and praising human beings, by seeing the world this way. We didn’t get confused for a couple million years, only now to figure out that in fact the world ‘was’ [sic] dead after all. The community of life selected us to survive, helped us, cooperated with us, over and over, because of how we saw the world. Because of how we treated the world.

Now we have a choice. The community of life has received great injury from how the culture of modern civilization has seen it. Even now this living community makes natural selections that determine our fate. Perhaps, from a perspective of enlightened self-interest, we can choose to appreciate and respect the personhood and kinship in all things once more?

It saddens me that modern humans would need a metaphorical gun pointed at their head, in order to offer the basic courtesy of a relationship founded on acknowledging the other’s personhood. I actually hope that if you do choose Animism, if you do choose to treat the living world in a beautiful, grieving, and praising way, you do it not from fear, but from a love of Beauty.

It only takes a choice.

Now we have a paradox to wrestle.  The mindset that sees a verb ‘to be’-based reality, itself sees simply removing ‘to be’ as the course of action. In the ‘to be’-based mind, if I cut out ‘to be’, then it will no longer ‘be’. Problem solved, right?

I think Albert Einstein called this trying to “solve the problem at the level of thinking in which it was created”.

Recently I discovered something that made me see these issues in a whole new light. But we’ll have to tackle this from a couple different angles.

I found a new voice articulating these same issues in Calvin Luther Martin’s The Way of the Human Being. He refreshes the fundamental point:

The reality of non-locality: the physicists discovered the truth of this only within my lifetime; the Yup’ik Eskimos and other Native Americans have known its truth for millennia. When I lectured on quantum theory at the seminary, Sarah Owens confided afterward that her grandparents had told her as much.

And then proceeds to articulate another aspect of that point:

I am reminded of eastern woodland Indians in colonial times, blaming Europeans for their drunkenness, since it was they who furnished it after all. Or even blaming the beverage itself.

Oscar illustrated with a curious analogy. He said that when a man fires up his steamhouse (which is like a sauna) and invites the other men over, and they arrive and he begins pouring buckets of water on the fire, they accuse him of “throwing them out.” No! Oscar protested. “He’s not grabbing them and tossing them out! It’s not his fault! Think about it.” His voice is earnest. “It’s not that man’s fault they’re running out of the steam; it’s the steam’s fault! The steam is sending them running out the door.”…With alcohol, the western mind fingers the imbiber, Yupiit blame the vendor (or the drink).

So, the Yupiit, inheritors of animist language and logical systems, a non-’to be’ verb culture, observing the world in that quintessential animist way; focusing on animating relationships, on clear observation, on active verbs.

For a long time I’ve seen in the Gypsy Roma a still somewhat intact, relatively animist culture. They speak Romani, a language related to Sanskrit, and thus one of the family of modern, Indo-European languages, the classic (though not sole) perpetrators of Aristotelian  errors of “isness”. Their language possesses the verb ‘to be’, the linguistic tool that aids the conceptions of these errors making them easier to say and think, thus easier to embody and spread.

However!

Animist cultures clearly exist on a continuum. You don’t wake up one day, as a people, and discover you’ve all started following the teachings of Aristotle. Even for indigenous communities that have adopted Christianity, they can continue to see that faith through an animist lens; this almost surely fades over time.

So I offer up the Gypsy Roma as a culture of people who, though possessing the ‘to be’ verb (which made participation in the caste-based and highly stratified society of India possible), still continue to keep animating thought alive, in the form of their cultural idiom, even if not in the structure of their language itself. From Gypsy Law, edited by Walter Weyrauch, Ronald Lee writes:

While the Rom accept the dangers of drug abuse and forbid the use of illegal drugs, they generally do not consider alcoholism to be a problem. This results in situations where alcoholic Rom get into fights and other situations at group gatherings where acts are committed or words said which lead to problems that must be settled at the kris. If the guilty party committed the offense during a blackout, he then cannot remember what offense he committed or is accused of committing. His defense is then to admit his guilt and say Lya ma e rakiya — “The whiskey took me.” This will be acceptable as a defense since the Rom believe that visible or invisible forces can act on their own to influence actions of people. The action is not described in the passive, as it is in English. For example, if a Rom falls into the river and drowns, they will say: Mudardya les o pani — “The water killed him.” If he is accidently electrocuted, Mudardya les o ilektriko — “The electricity killed him.” Thus a Rom does not get drunk; the whiskey takes control of him and compels him to commit some act he would not commit if he were sober…thus the force, not the subject, is guilty. This can be seen in the following: If a Rom is killed in an automobile accident but the vehicle is still in good shape, it will immediately be sold to a non-Gypsy. The car, in the eyes of the Rom, has become a mudarimasko mobili (killer car) and has become bi-baxtaló (a bringer of bad karma). It was thus not the Rom’s careless driving or the fact that he had been drinking before the accident that caused the accident, but the car which has killed him.

The challenge for a modern mind lies in seeing that the Roma, the Yup’ik, and all intact indigenous peoples, as animist systems-thinkers who exist because of their ability to think ecologically, have identified relationships as the priority. Whereas the modern mind sees this as ignorant and childish, prioritizing a truly naive cause and effect paradigm, arguing over ‘facts’ (that even scientists, the faithkeepers of this modern world, know as a fallible notion - modern scientific exploration and thought, from statistics to quantum theory, continues to reveal this).

I think, if you’ve made it this far, you can handle the next idea. Martín Prechtel, author and speaker on intact indigenous cultures (having grown up with a foot in both worlds himself), asked an audience recently what they considered the opposite of the verb ‘to be’. The lack of the verb ‘to be’ doesn’t really count as its opposite, so he had pointed at some deeper truth there. “‘Description’,” I suggested to him, opposed ‘to be’.

“Sure,” he replied. “To de-scribe, to bring writing to life, rehydrate language and take it away from the page. Sure. But what, even more than that?”

Silence in the room…

“Story?” I offered.

“Yes. I believe Story is the opposite of the verb ‘to be’,” he said, grinning.

If Story opposes the verb ‘to be’, as Martín proposes, and not the simple and linear-minded excision of the offending verb itself, how does that change our attitudes toward English, and modern languages? What lies next for someone who, with informed consent, wants to speak a language that creates life and liveliness, that frees their natural identity, that allows them to walk away from hierarchical and civilized modes of enslaving thought, into the embrace of Village, Family, Land?

I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together - perhaps we’ll start by jamming Story, and see where it takes us. What do you think?