Last year, I made the trip across Ohio to attend the Second Annual Eastern Woodland Native American Gathering and Pre-1840 Encampment. Admittedly, I had a distinct focus on the former. It distinguishes itself from a pow-wow because they don’t dance competitively. The year before, people had looked up to see a pair of bald eagles in the sky, seeming to join in to dance with them. I made the trip almost like an animist pilgrimage, looking for some kind of profound experience like that. I danced with them, though to my shame, my much-abused body wouldn’t take so much activity and I left the circle early. An announcement came later, asking people not to do that. I think they meant me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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