Seven True Storytelling Principles:

1. You yourself must be true and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future

Authenticity and commitment to long-term sustainability are foundational to effective storytelling.

2. True storytelling makes spaces that respect the stories already there

Honor and acknowledge existing narratives and the contexts in which they exist.

3. You must create stories with a clear plot, creating direction and helping people prioritize

Provide narrative structure that guides understanding and action.

4. You must have timing

Recognize the importance of when stories are told and how they unfold temporally.

5. You must be able to help stories on their way and be open to experiment

Facilitate narrative development while remaining flexible and adaptive.

6. You must consider staging, including scenography and artefacts

Pay attention to the physical and symbolic context in which stories are presented.

7. You must reflect on the stories and how they create value

Engage in ongoing evaluation of narrative impact and meaning-making.

Experience Version 2.0

🌱 Beneath: Excavating Root Stories

Journey to the foundational narratives beneath your conscious awareness. Uncover family systems, cultural conditioning, and archetypal patterns that have been running your life on autopilot.

⏮️ Before: Understanding Historical Narratives

Examine the past not to dwell there, but to understand how it shapes your present. Identify patterns that no longer serve through strategic narrative archaeology.

🎲 Bets: Engaging Ante-narratives

This is where transformation happens. Learn to perceive and engage with the not-yet-formed stories, the possibilities still in motion. Shape your future before it crystallizes into fixed patterns.

🧘 Being: Presence and Embodiment

True transformation requires embodied presence. Through mindfulness practices and somatic awareness, learn to inhabit your life fully rather than being carried along by unconscious narratives.

🦋 Becoming: Future-Oriented Identity

Work with future-oriented narratives that pull you forward, creating coherence between who you are and who you're called to become. This includes vision work, purpose clarification, and identity evolution.

🤝 Between: Relational Narrative Practice

No story exists in isolation. Learn how your narratives interact with others in relationships, teams, organizations, and communities. Navigate narrative conflict and co-create shared stories.

✨ Beyond: Transcendent Meaning

Connect to something larger than yourself. How do your personal narratives participate in collective transformation? This includes spiritual practice, legacy work, and contribution to the greater good.

1. Maslow and the Blackfoot Inversion: Community Over Individual

In 1938, Maslow spent weeks with the Blackfoot (Siksika) Nation but filtered their worldview through Western individualism. He flipped their philosophy upside down: putting self-actualization at the top for the lone hero, shoving community to the base. The truth? Blackfoot thought centers community actualization, with individuals thriving only through contributions to collective wellbeing, deep ties to land, animals, seasons, and sustainability. Indigenous Canadian philosophies—Cree, Anishinaabe, and others—put relationality, reciprocity, and communal flourishing first.

2. North American Indigenous Roots Feeding Pragmatism

Scott Pratt's Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy maps an "Indigenous philosophical attitude" across Northeast nations like Haudenosaunee and Delaware: commitments to interaction, pluralism, community, and growth. These fed directly into American pragmatism via colonial encounters—treatymaking, federative governance, place-based reasoning—influencing Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Emerson, then Peirce's inquiry, James's pluralism, and Dewey's democratic experimentalism.

3. Animistic Pragmatism: More-Than-Human Knowledge

Algonquian and Haudenosaunee ontologies treat nonhuman beings as animate participants in social worlds, anticipating pragmatist rejections of rigid subject-object splits. Knowledge emerges from lived interaction in a more-than-human community. Alaska Native "animistic pragmatism" among Iñupiat frames subsistence as experimental inquiry guided by elders' narrative ecosophy—paralleling Dewey while rooted in humility, interdependence, and cooperative problem-solving.

4. Key Indigenous Voices Reclaiming Philosophy

• Scott L. Pratt — Landmark argument that American philosophy is unintelligible without Indigenous influences
• Brian Burkhart (Cherokee) — Indigenous "place-thought" reframes pragmatist community and experience through land-based epistemologies
• Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) — Revises Deweyan inquiry and habit for Indigenous environmental justice and climate ethics
• Dale Turner (Temagami First Nation) — Engages pragmatism while insisting on Indigenous intellectual sovereignty
• Gregory Cajete (Santa Clara Pueblo) — Native pedagogies of experience and story exceed pragmatist accounts of learning

These aren't add-ons; they expose how standard histories erased Indigenous precursors.

5. Down Under: Provincializing "American" Pragmatism

Australian and New Zealand Indigenous authors aren't adopting pragmatism—they're provincializing it. Their land-based, relational, decolonial practices unsettle and prefigure Peirce, James, Dewey, and Rorty. "American" pragmatism looks like a late, partial offshoot of older Oceanic ways.

6. Reframing Experience and Land-Based Inquiry

Dewey's transactional engagement with a precarious world resonates with being-in-relationship to land, waters, kin—but Indigenous theorists add explicit responsibilities to place. Pragmatist inquiry (problem-driven, practical, situated) finds analogues in Indigenous validation: Does it sustain community, land, intergenerational reciprocity? Not just predictive control.

7. Linda Tuhiwai Smith: Decolonizing Methodologies

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou) stands out in Decolonizing Methodologies. She exposes Western research—including pragmatist-flavored projects—as imperial. Kaupapa Māori research centers collective benefit, relational accountability, land. It flips Deweyan/Rortyan "inquiry" and "conversation": methods must ground in whakapapa, whenua, tino rangatiratanga.

8. Reworking the Canon with Indigenous Anchors

• Dewey's naturalism gets re-anchored in te ao Māori—language, marae relations, Treaty obligations
• James's pluralism extends to spiritual, ancestral, land-based agencies as real participants
• Rorty's solidarity? Indigenous critics show it can naturalize settler epistemic sovereignty; they reground it in Treaty relations, land claims, decolonial struggle—turning "conversation" into hui or wānanga with non-optional obligations to ancestors and future generations

9. Environmental Justice: Country as Agentic Kin

Australian Indigenous critiques of Deweyan schooling highlight anthropocentrism; they foreground Country as agentic kin. Environmental scholarship replaces extractive sustainability with Indigenous ontologies of kinship. This reverses genealogy: Peirce-James-Dewey-Rorty as "originators"? No—older Oceanic relational inquiry, communal verification, land-anchored ethics predate and exceed them.

10. Transgenerational Distributed Cognition: Elders as Living Supercomputers

Elders embody transgenerational distributed cognition: living "supercomputers" of collective memory, norms, knowledge, and adaptive strategies, passed through narrative moral testimony. This isn't abstract—it's pragmatic in the deepest sense: knowledge tested by how it sustains community and land.

11. Quantum Storytelling: Antenarrative Intervention

This braids into quantum storytelling work—antenarratives, before-bets-between, superposition of possibilities. Indigenous research as antenarrative intervention. Design labs: Superpose pragmatist concepts with Indigenous anchors; collapse toward sovereignty, land, community.

12. Living Praxis: Storying the World Otherwise

This isn't nostalgia—it's living praxis. Indigenous pragmatism, North and South, reclaims storytelling as experimental, relational, land-honoring ways to "go on together." In quantum view, it's about collapsing settler-Indigenous superpositions into futures that forecare for Mother Earth and all our relations.

Begin Version 3.0 Journey

1. Experiential Learning (Indigenous Grounding)

Knowledge comes through direct experience and relationship with the living world, not abstract theorizing. This reflects Indigenous pedagogy of learning through doing and being in relationship with land and community.

2. Consequences Matter (Seven Generations Thinking)

Truth is measured by its practical effects - not just immediate outcomes, but impacts across seven generations. This Indigenous principle of long-term responsibility informs pragmatist focus on consequences.

3. Pluralism and Multiplicity (Relational Ontology)

Reality is multi-perspectival. Just as Indigenous ontologies recognize multiple ways of being and knowing, pragmatism embraces pluralistic truths that work in different contexts.

4. Inquiry in Community (Council Practices)

Truth emerges through collective inquiry, not individual speculation. This reflects Indigenous council traditions where wisdom arises through respectful dialogue and collective discernment.

5. Fallibilism and Openness (Humility Before Mystery)

No knowledge is final or absolute. Indigenous respect for mystery and the unknown informs pragmatist humility about the limits of human understanding.

6. Growth and Change (Cyclical Renewal)

Reality is processual, not static. Indigenous understanding of seasonal cycles and constant renewal underpins pragmatist emphasis on growth, development, and transformation.

7. Action-Oriented (Sacred Reciprocity)

Philosophy must guide action and practice. Like Indigenous emphasis on reciprocal relationship and responsibility, pragmatism insists on translating ideas into lived reality and right action.

Begin Version 3.0 Journey