the Earth and Spirit Council
Presents
The Natural Way:  Indigenous Voices
Native American Student and Community Center
SW Broadway and Jackson, Portland, Oregon
7:00 - 9:00 pm

Tyler Williams    Friday, December 14, 2007

A UNIQUE JOURNEY
Tyler Williams, born of the Dit ti dhat Nation, will appear at The Natural Way: Indigenous Voices to share stories of his life’s journey. The Creator has gifted Tyler with a unique and positive perspective on life, and a special ability to communicate that to others.

Tyler was raised in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. His people are traditionally hunters, fisherman, totem pole carvers and canoe builders. Like many of his peers, Tyler attended a government boarding
school which educated him in the ways of the dominant culture, not allowing him to learn the ways and traditions of his own people.  As an adult, he spent time in Portland and Seattle.

At age 30, Tyler began to spend time with Brave Buffalo, a Lakota teacher. From this experience he learned and adopted Lakota traditions, and has followed Lakota spiritual ways for more than 30 years. Tyler is valued in his community as a speaker, teacher, and spiritual advisor.
$10-20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium

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Natural Way: Indigenous Voices is Honored to Present

The Iroquois Great Law of Peace:

A Millennium of Continuous Democracy

What are the indigenous roots of our democracy? Are there other traditions

that point the way to a satisfying and sustainable future of peace and consensus?
Lecture: Friday, October 12, 2007, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Jake Swamp, ‘Tekaronianeken’, will appear at the Natural Way-Indigenous Voices on Friday evening, October 12, to discuss the traditions of peace and democracy originating amongst his people, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. As the role models for the Founding Fathers in the writing of the US Constitution, the Haudenosaunee have much experience to share with younger, struggling democracies.

Jake Swamp has been a Mohawk Sub-Chief and representative on the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and is an internationally renowned speaker on indigenous, environmental and social issues. He was directly involved in the creation of the Akwesasne Freedom School - a Mohawk language immersion school of critical acclaim that has been an inspiration to many First Nation peoples in the United States and Canada.

He is the author of the children’s book Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message, which has been translated into five languages and was featured on the PBS television show Reading Rainbow. Other projects include The Peacemaker’s Journey audiocassette produced by Parabola Magazine (1996), The U.S. Constitution & The Great Law of Peace: A Comparison (2004) and the film Dreamkeeper by Hallmark Entertainment (2003), for which he was a consultant.

Location: Native American Student and Community Center at Portland State University, SW Broadway and Jackson, Portland, Oregon

Cost: $10-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium
Workshop: Saturday, October 13, 2007, 12:00 to 2:00 p.m.

Jake Swamp will preside over a ‘Tree of Peace’ Planting Ceremony. Over a thousand years ago, the Peacemaker and Aiionwatha (Hiawatha) brought the Great Law of Peace (Kaianerekowa) to the warring Indian nations of what is now New York State. The message of Peace, Power, and the Good Mind resulted in the forming of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois Confederacy. These nations were instructed to bury their weapons of war under the Great Tree of Peace. The Tree Planting Ceremony that Chief Swamp shares is an effort to bring awareness to environmental and social concerns. A potluck feast will follow the ceremony.

Location: Fawnwood at Deer Island (near St. Helens).

Directions: Take Highway 30 West towards St. Helens,
Apx. 45 minutes or less from downtown Portland you will come to the
town of Deer Island. Deer Island is about five miles past St. Helens.
As you pass the Deer Island Store on your left, reset mileage gage.
Continue on hwy 30 west 1.6 miles
Take left up Butterfield Road towards rust colored house.
(DO NOT TAKE SHARP LEFT UP STEEP DRIVEWAY THAT SAYS NO TRESPASSING)
Continue up gravel road past rust colored house, GO SLOW PLEASE
In 100 yards or so you will come to a modular home on left.
At modular home, turn left and pass through their driveway to gate.
(If you miss this turn you will come to a gate and have to turn
around. You will note the Yurt in the distance on your left. That is
where we are.)
GO EXTRA SLOW PLEASE
Go through gate and continue up driveway.
Travel time is approximately one 45 minutes or less from Portland.

What to Bring: Dress for outdoors and weather, folding chair, non-alcoholic beverages/water, picnic plate and eating utensils, and a potluck dish with serving utensil for the feast.

Cost: $5-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium. Registration is on-site.
Co-sponsors: Earth & Spirit Council at www.earthandspirit.org, The College of Mythic Cartography at www.mythic-cartography.org and Deerdance at www.deerdance.org. Contact: contactus@earthandspirit.org

Aikido, a martial-art based on shinto (japanese animism) principles of peace and nature-based harmony, has always inspired me. The founder has an amazing history rooted in mythic cartography.

One of his students, later a well-known adept of Aikido, tells a story about how the founder, O-Sensei, resolved a conflict over thievery in his dojo (martial-arts training hall).

O-Sensei had more than his fair share of animist Royal Blood.

Native American Student and Community Center

SW Broadway and Jackson, Portland, Oregon

7:00 - 9:00 pm

Rod McAfee Friday, February 9, 2007

Spirituality is Being Real

Rod McAfee speaks from his own experience on the meaning of spirituality in our lives. His words go beyond cultural traditions, race, or creed to the fundamental experience of being a human being on this planet today. He encourages people to develop a spiritual practice that is grounded in the teachings of the natural world, a practice that connects Earth and Spirit.

Rod is an Akimel O’odham (Pima) elder. Raised “by the desert” on his Arizona reservation, he witnessed the assimilation of most of his family by Western religions, education, and culture, and still managed to retain his native language and beliefs.

For fifteen years Rod led ceremonies for Native inmates in prisons in Oregon and Washington. A former drug and alcohol counselor for the Native American Rehabilitation Association, he is active in ceremonies throughout the Northwest. Rod is the lead singer for the Spirit Learning Drum, and is intimately connected to the original medicine of water.

$10-20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium

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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.

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.

In Spell of the Sensuous (a book celebrating and explaining the animist perspective), David Abram quotes extensively from the French philosopher of phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty experienced the world as a living medium, i.e. the world weaves itself entirely out of sensing, living, acting subjects, whether or not we scientifically classify them as such. The air, the rocks, the colors, the smells, other beings, whether (in the words of Tom Brown, Jr.) “living, growing” or just “living”, all these entities act, feel, and relate.

He called this reality, “the Flesh”. Merleau-Ponty affected me profoundly by his notion of “the Flesh”, and made me more aware of what I experience when I experience the aliveness of reality. We have many cultural taboos against a world whose value originates fundamentally in a fleshy experience, certainly. Phrases such as “sins of the flesh” spring to mind.

Ironically, Tom Brown, someone who I respect and cherish as a teacher, has used just such notions to contrast a deeper experience in nature. In his books, he speaks of “the false gods of the flesh”. I at once know exactly what he means, and also feel uncomfortable with that articulation. “The false gods of the flesh” has always felt like something that a fundamentalist christian would lecture me about, as he wagged his finger. Yet I know the destructiveness of greed and materialism, the falseness of their claim to satisfy.

When I think of greed, however, I think of a disease of the mind, not the flesh. “Wanting” something that I don’t have, takes me out of my body, takes me out of the moment, deeper into my head, not deeper into my flesh.

It seems to me calling them “the false gods of the flesh” misdirects one’s attention from the source of the problem: the mind.

Would it clarify the challenge that the modern age presents us, to call greed, materialism, distraction, “the false gods of the mind”, instead?

Doesn’t the gratitude of each breath, each moment, take us deeper into our bodies, into our flesh, connecting us deeper with the actions and experiences that truly satisfy, rather than the doping substitutes of TV, drugs, abusive relationships, houses, 72 F central heating, etc., which take us deeper into our fevered brains?

I think so. I think the only gods that will not lead us astray, the only gods without falseness, we will find in the gods of the flesh.

The very ground we walk on, many (all?) indigenous people consider it the flesh of mother earth. Does this not make the air, the flesh of the sky? The waters, the liquid flesh, blood? The stones, the mineral flesh, the bones? Lightning and electricity, one of many energetic fleshes, the same as the ones that light up and spark within our own flesh? All living, feeling, sensitive tissues, one pressed upon another, all dancing, relating, speaking together.

What magic happens when we open our bodies to such a world? The oneness of our flesh, nestled in with that of our vast mother, we small moving beings in an immense cooperating body, a vast landscape of living flesh, all celebrating together the community of life.

Upon reflection, I want to add something about the most effective ways I’ve found for dealing with a conversation that misses that “generosity of spirit”.

I’ve found the ultimate strategy for myself, in what I term “walking away”.

When I struggle in a situation, realize that it has ceased to create life for me or any other, that it in fact has taken on a vampiric nature, I simply walk away. Sometimes this feels particularly difficult, sometime it feels easy as turning my back.

But always, always, implied in the act of walking away, I go to rest, regroup, reflect, and possibly (if relevant) return.

In friendships that I wish to maintain, I return as a matter of course; I actually keep them alive by this periodic withdrawal. It can become so second nature that it begins to take no time at all, for some relationships. I don’t even have to leave the room, it occurs entirely in my head. For others, with more intense feelings that I have difficulty sorting out, it takes longer, and requires a physical absence that may take a while.

But in any case, I never censure myself for any failure, for not rising to some fixed standard. Fundamentally, I want to understand others, and have them understand me. I know this. With this intent, I simply do what I need to do to make this happen. No divine beings sit in judgement of me; only I know if I live a life worth living.

Anybody who knows me, will tell you that I like to talk. Scratch that; I love to talk. My adult life has really consisted of learning what talk actually does; where it goes; what it heals; and when talk becomes unhelpful, or even damaging.

One aspect of this I’ve thought about and discussed with others, involves conversations with people who don’t really want to understand you. Whether consciously, or unconsciously, they see you as a tool to get their message out; they see you as a sounding board; they see you as someone to educate. But they don’t see you.

I know this phenomena exists, not the least because I endure it, but also because I perpetrate it myself. Yes. Sometimes I have conversations with people and stop including their humanity in the exchange. They become someone to educate, someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to act as a foil to get a message out.

Lately I’ve begun to work harder and harder to walk away from this. I’ve begun realizing that when I have blindspots, I rely on others to see them. When I see others with (what I perceive as) blindspots, I also have an obligation, if I care about them, to share.

But not everybody wants to know about their blindspots. And I perform a peculiar kind of violence when I insist on “doing what I think best for them”, as if disciplining a foolish child.

Last night, I heard Danita Washington say: “Elders hold space, so that the younger people can make all the mistakes they need to.”

But wait - nobody needs to make mistakes? Do they?

As a mentor to younger folks, I know the answer: of course they do. We all do. We learn most purely and powerfully when we do. Besides; do I judge when someone makes mistakes? Do I really have such a perfect track record that I know what to call foolish, and what to call wise?

Yeah…not quite.

To get back to the original point: what I’ve learned to look for, in my conversations, I call a Generosity of Spirit. This makes a real conversation possible. What signs point to this Generosity?

A curiosity about my point of view.
A “generous interpretation” of my message, meaning they see in what ways what I’ve said makes sense, rather than first going to poke holes.
A willingness to paraphrase my message to check that they really get it.
A fundamental desire to understand, and perhaps discover blindspots they didn’t know they had.

I’ve just listed a lot of standards for the other person, huh? This would look quite one-sided, if I didn’t use these standards as a measure for myself to see whether I’ve lost that same Generosity of Spirit.

When I lose that curiosity about their point of view, begin to skim their message to pick just the points I can easily rebutt, begun to privately build resentment against them (and thus lose interest in understanding them), I know I’ve lost that Generosity of Spirit.

Iroquois teachers of mine call this, from another angle, the Place of Peace, the Good Message, and the Principle of Unity.

I have a lot more reflecting to do, but I begin to see ever more clearly how some conversations have died before they ever begun, and to indulge those conversations, I then dehumanize both myself and my conversation partner.

Why even open one’s mouth, unless it creates Life? For oneself, for others, we build a world from our words, from our conversations. We determine the richness of our life, through the cultivation of our relationships.

Within the past month I’ve really felt something hit home for me…funny, because I’ve known about the idea for quite a while. It concerns Cascadia, the name for the Pacific Northwest Bioregion that starts in Northern California and extends up to Alaska.

Now I’ve even bought a flag (not cheap!). Why? Not for political purposes, certainly. I have no plans to push for secession, writing a new constitution, or anything of the sort.

I’ve become so alienated from this country and the values it stands for, that I’ve begun to identify more and more with the land, and with others who connect with the land, that a little Cascadian Revolution has begun in my heart. I belong to none of the First Nations…I don’t consider myself Native American in any conventional sense. But I do feel native, in some new sense, that has to do with belonging to a place. Not owning it. Belonging to it. Not having rights to it, or deserving political recognition, but taking care of it, celebrating it, crying for it.

I grew up in Brookings and Coos Bay, small towns on the Oregon Coast. They ruined me in a beautiful way, with their krummholz pines, salmon berries, and salt-tanged aire. The modern world has always run at odds with my sensibility. I didn’t camp, or go on wilderness treks, or even join the Boy Scouts as a child (though I did want to join the Boy Scouts - my father had acquired strong feelings about the organization as a youth. I assume so anyway - he refers to them as “paramilitary pedarasts”. Does that sound like strong feelings?). I did, however, get to know my green neighborhoods and the close coastlines, from the time I could walk. I’ve heard the stories a thousand times, about the police returning two-year old me from trying to cross the highway, or on some expedition that makes sense in a toddler’s mind.

Cascadia’s coast shaped me from the beginning. From the coast to the Willamette Valley at the cusp of puberty.

I know this place, the city of Portland, much less than I know the place of my birth and childhood, though I have lived here for twice as long. Twenty years, as opposed to ten years on the south coast of Oregon, in the neighborhood of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.

I recently found out that the Willamette River, that runs through the middle of Portland, sometimes runs upriver. Insane. I have just begun to really know this place, though as a naturalist I have more of a conscious knowing of the names of wildlife and habitat here.

In the sense of the Wandering Free Families, and as I mentioned before, I have no political ambitions for Cascadia. My cultural ambitions for her, however, have no bounds. A great tribe-of-tribes, family-of-families, lies at the horizon of my consciousness. Someday, one living room at a time, one hearth at a time, I see a whole new world replacing a dying old one. Cascadia and her people; the Land and her children.

How to improve your ability to grieve openly and cleanly, and put the “fun” back in Funerals!

If you wonder why this would matter at all…um, well…

A) The wild green world actually likes crybabies. Vulcans, robots, and techpriests really scare it. So learn how to cry like a baby, fer cry’s - sake

C) Get some emotional range, people! [pause while I decide to start taking my own advice]

Pick someone who died, whose funeral you missed, or in which you didn’t really cry well. Get some pictures of them (as many as you can find). Any possessions of theirs you’ve got, or others have (and don’t need anymore), grab ‘em.

Get some friends together - the ones you can trust to get a bit nutty. Maybe even a musician or two.

Make a little shrine out of the pictures and objects. Enjoy it - take some time at it. Make it pretty. Serve lots of water.

Circle up around the shrine. Get into mood. Grab a glass of water, dip your thumb into it. Let a drop fall of the end of your thumb onto your little shrine. You’ve just let water shed the first tear.

Now your turn has arrived! Start talking about the dead one - introduce them. If necessary, lie about how much they rocked. Tell amazing stories, whether you remember them or not. Make stories up. Paint them as heroic and beautiful as possible. Make up poems about them. Sing songs that tear your heart up. Take turns, bouncing around the circle, everyone trying their hand at beautiful lies, and heart rending expression. Make weeping noises. Really imitate someone in the throes of grief, to the point where you may even begin to lose it yourself. Think about other things that make you sad. Grab your hair and thrash around. Fall on your knees. Get into it! Beat your chest. Cry!

Coaching point: you can kick start the grief maelstrom sometimes by imitating the universal sound of grief, a strange moaning sound, somewhat like “ehhhhhhhhuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”, with a kind of raspy sound in your throat, and rocking back and forth. Fun!

C’mon! Really get into it!

Egg each other on. See who can get the most into it, the most over-the-top. The game ends when you all feel exhausted.

Extra points for:
Awkwardness
Inappropriateness
Embarrassing moments
Frazzled appearance
Soiled clothing.
Running mascara.
Burning and/or burying photos and possessions of the dead

I watched the movie the New World the other day; it concerns the story of the woman we call ‘Pocahontas’, her people, and the Jamestown colony.

While watching the story unfold, something really hit me; something so fundamentally different between the two cultures, something so at the root of everything that matters to me, as a human on a path of cultural healing.

This ’something’ addresses the fundamental spiritual poverty of the modern world. I use the word ’spiritual’ because we have no better word (that I can think of right now) for the nourishment that comes from humans holding each other, telling each other stories, playing music together, attending to each other’s bumps and bruises, enriching lives by enjoying each other’s company. Other languages have a word for exactly this…but more on that later.

In the movie, I saw the colonists, all men; sailors, soldiers, an invasion force hungry for fabled gold.

I then saw Chief Powhatan’s people; brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, children, mothers and fathers.

We now call their descendents members of the Powhatan Nation. In this age, in order to honor what we can of their cultural sovereignty, we must call them a nation. To do otherwise would deny them the protection they need. Ironically though, this also masks the profound treasure of the Powhatan people, and indeed the vast majority of Native American peoples…their original freedom from the need for a political state.

Imagine this: you, your parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, second cousins, your whole extended family, has lived the life of a year-round summer camp for as long as you remember. You live together, resolve conflicts, and support one another as best you can, as a family. Your in-jokes have become the stuff of legend, your artistic styles have inspired each other, for countless generations you have collaborated on a vital and celebratory family culture that you enjoy. You make decisions as a community, relying on the wisdom of those you trust. The smallest child contributes to voice of the community as a whole. No police, no bureaucracy, no institutions…instead you have taboos, family consensus processes, and traditions. A Free Family, living your life on the land.

This stands in such stark contrast to the Jamestown colonists: prisoners of a culture they could not escape, compelled by their hollowed out hearts to chase wealth that will never satisfy, obedient to a power uninterested in the simple needs of a human…ease, affection, creativity, peace.

Before the Europeans, most Native American peoples lived as roaming Free Families, connected and rooted to their landscape. Wealthy beyond measure in human relationship. What would many of us give today for an extended family that supports without questioning, provides comfort and connection as often as we need it?

So often I’ve read and heard Native elders say what matters most to them: family and land. The Lakota say: “All my relations”, and when you call the earth your mother, the sky your father, the animals brothers and sisters, your sense of family does extend to the land your people walk on. Native Hawai’ians have a well-known word “‘ohana” that describes the importance and closeness of family.

In the modern world, we have some expressions that honor family connection…”blood is thicker than water”, for example. I know of none that get to the heart of the fundamental indigenous belief, that family holds all the roots of wealth (referring to its etymology): wholeness, wellness, health, and holiness.

Keep your eyes open, and you’ll observe where the modern world diverges, again and again, from the indigenous value of feeding family. Ancient initiations and vision quests served to show the seeker how they fit into their community, what role they would grow into, what unique gift their spirit would provide the tribe. In the modern world? The seeking adolescent hunts for a college in a distant land, a career in a distant city. Co-opting the vision quest and initiation for today’s children, the questors dream of apprenticing with a shaman in an Amazonian jungle, or studying leopards on a faraway continent. What happened to family, in the self-absorbed adolescent quest for a purpose? Will they receive postcards, perhaps? Will they someday get photos of their unknown grandchildren? When a native teenage “walkabout” ends, you return home, and find your place at last. When will we return home?

With hollowed-out hearts we keep the great gears of this modern world going. What have we given up in exchange for all its amusements? What misunderstood hungers rack our bodies, fed by false substitutes, bought by the fruits of our impersonal labors? What if a return to family sated these hungers, once and for all (though I don’t imply this a simple or obvious path…recovering from the loss of family, and returning to the heart of it, requires a substantial amount of work).

Thinking deeply on all of this, I dream of a return to a world of Wandering Free Families. A world where humans can finally come home again.

Many versions of this game exist.

Host vs. Guest

Pick two sides, randomly or let them self-organize. You want the sides to number roughly the same.

If no intrinsic Host/Guest role exists in your situation, flip a coin to determine which role goes to which side.

Pick a team name, corresponding to a natural element of creation…animals, weather, landscape, etc.

Guests knock on the imaginary door.

Hosts open it, and begin the harangue, starting Round 1.

Round 1
First Hosts speak, Guests listen. Then they trade.

Round 2
Same, raising the eloquence stakes.

Round 3
Hosts concede, Guests listen. Guests accept, Hosts listen.

Goals:

Goal for Host: Play down the Host’s home, hospitality, wealth. Play up the Guest’s importance, fineness, and too-high of station for the Host’s home. Convince the Guests that they won’t feel satisfied with the Host’s home, only capitulating in Round 3 if the Guests persist.

Goal for Guest: Play down the Guest’s station, importance, fineness. Play up the Host’s. Convince the Host team that the Guest team will feel satisfied with the Host’s home, only capitulating in Round 3 if the Hosts won’t back down.

Options:
“Mentors” - Pick one Speaker and one Coach for each side. The Speaker only says what the Coach whispers into the Speaker’s ear.

Styles - Pick a style for the sides to emulate. “Rhetorical”, “Musical”, “Rhyming”, etc.