Storytelling as Gift, Storytelling as Currency

This is an excerpted transcript from the third episode of Are.na Radio, an audio experiment with Montez Press Radio where four people share their Are.na channels, describe what’s been collected, and reveal the threads of thought therein.

My life-force has always been stories. Not just what they are made of, but what they are, or simply that they are. Beyond my love for all the shapes a story can take, beyond the language and world-building of literature and cinema — the pure intention; the ritual form. What does it mean to be a messenger, to have a message?

More recently I have tried putting a name to this: I am captivated by storytelling as a technology, as a practice, as an economy, as a tradition, as a field of study. 

This is something that I have been exploring and cultivating on Are.na, under the name “storytelling as gift; storytelling as currency.” This channel is a story about stories. 

I’ve always had an unwavering belief that everything is made of stories: that we can break down our world into stories we tell ourselves and each other. For meaning, for belonging, for purpose, for faith. In stories, we find something to hold onto. Stories are what bind and make us. How we form relationships, yes, but also the essence of our relationships themselves. Our very gestures, our possessions, our conversations — we tell stories through which to see our world, which in turn creates our world.

Last week, the words of poet Muriel Rukeyzer found me online —

I created my channel three years ago, when I was around 21. I recognized that storytelling is an exchange — hearing stories trigger feelings and stories of our own within us. Are we not so often compelled to reciprocate? To relate? To trade? I recognized a network of stories all around us, each with tellers and recipients, but what each gains and gives seemed more complicated than their named roles, and I was curious about how one point of exchange might be dissected. At the time, the channel was called “storytelling as currency; transactional storytelling,” and for the first year it remained empty, perhaps limited by the framework of the latter part of its title that I have since dropped. While the nature of the process is a trade, to quote from a block I wrote, I would prefer to think of telling a story as “an open-ended contract, just like a promise or a gift,” rather than an unrippling transaction or commodity. 

Later, introduced to gift economies, I understood a clearer vision of what may be a storytelling economy.

In one block, an excerpt from the book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein explains,

In her essay “The Serviceberry,” Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer lovingly explains that unlike our market economy that competes over manufactured scarcity, the gift economies that predate it are networks of abundance. But they are not altruistic — they invoke responsibilities in us as the receiver. Kimmerer writes, “gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.”

These are economies of interdependence and indirect reciprocity, where the giving and receiving of a gift creates and strengthens an ongoing, mutual relationship. There is a responsibility to pass it on, a responsibility to practice appreciation, and a responsibility for reciprocity, which in turn continually strengthens our bonds. Wealth comes from sharing as opposed to accumulation, so the entire system is cyclical rather than linear.

The Seneca-Cayuga artist and scholar Amelia Winger-Bearskin explains, “economies form in collective spaces when people define what they value as a group. Economies are an indication that a community has not only defined values but also the means of interacting with one another via exchange.” 

What if what we value the most are stories? 

We rely on them for sense-making, meaning-making, and relationship-forging. We give them to each other. In a way, stories are gifts, and gifts are stories. In a network of stories, each thread is a symbiotic relationship. Between storyteller and audience, and between ourselves and each story. The existence of communal stories depends on all of us. Our own capacity for faith and grounding depend on communal stories.

Another excerpt from Sacred Economics, in which gifts can be synonymous with stories:

Our stories transcend us, alive and ever-shifting. We are part of collective stories, and they are a part of us. 

In my eyes, a recipient is never a passive or static role. We also give — we form a relationship with the storyteller, and we create our interpretation of the story, both of which we are responsible for. We can even form a relationship with other listeners at our side. There is a diagram in my channel comparing lectures and sermons, with participants represented by small particles. A lecturer will address audience members as a collection of individuals, each attached with a line to only the lecturer. Meanwhile, a sermon views the audience as a community, each with their own relationships to each other, which listening can transform — so that the particles are all attached to each other in a web.

Even literature and cinema can be multidimensional. We always retain a degree of interactivity — to quote my own block,

And, just as Kimmerer describes how the gift is multiplied with every giving — with the gift of energy passing from berry to bird, to berry again, so that each may live — so is a story.

These invisible strings of transmissions are made more visible by tracing the sediments of the oral history tradition.

Patrick Nunn has authored books about ancient memories and fact-bearing stories, dismissed as simply myths. One block outlines how knowledge of volcanic eruptions and land-bridge submergence events 7 millennia ago lived on through stories. Nunn proposes that these oral societies and their methods of remembering practical wisdom are the root of all art today. 

In another block, he says, “In those times, listening to the stories of your elders was mandatory… If you didn’t listen, you couldn’t learn. And if you didn’t learn, you wouldn’t likely survive.”

To prevent this, spectacle was born. 

“Good storytellers don’t just tell stories. They do whatever they can to engage their listeners, something that applied as much thousands of years ago as it does today. Storytellers perform, they sing and dance, they mimic and entertain.”

While now we can also have art derived from this for broader entertainment, “[art then] provided memory aids for knowledge-holders.”

Amelia Winger-Bearskin would call this phenomenon a prehistoric example of “decentralized storytelling” — a term I first encountered in my friend Rachel’s Are.na channel on Indigenous technologies. In her piece “Before Everyone Was Talking About Decentralization, Decentralization Was Talking to Everyone,” Winger-Bearskin asks the question: “can the story last for seven generations?” — this is at the heart of her theory. 

In an interview, Winger-Bearskin says,

To embed meaning and stories in everything. We extract the purest essence of an idea, value or lesson and then tell it through as many means as possible so it lives on with possibility of endless continuation, in collaboration with the past and future. Decentralized storytelling is peer-to-peer, often using handicrafts as emissaries. In Seneca-Cayuga Nation tradition, this is done through weavings, songs, customs, performances. But our current world presents more questions of how to distill and carry our message.

Winger-Bearskin writes, “today the stories we tell are embedded in networks and pixels instead of wampum and rivers, but they may still have the power to last through seven generations, to influence the lives of my great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, for the people I do not yet know, and those I have only met in dreams.”

We weave information through the non-linearity of video games, and even through song sampling in music production. Our participation is important, just like how Nunn’s storytellers add their own perspective to best reach and engage their current audience. In modern times, we repurpose online platforms and games creating new structures outside intention. We see a meme, reduce it to its essence, and edit our own version with this as its foundation. Are.na channels themselves are an example of decentralized storytelling; each block a smaller story in a larger quilt, each block carrying meanings and narratives we are co-creating. 

I also added blocks on the research field of nuclear semiotics as an example of decentralized storytelling — an endeavor to communicate warning messages to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories more than 10,000 years from now, reaching beyond the next 7 generations, beyond the next 7 millennia, beyond the grasp of our current language, which future civilizations may not share. There was even a suggestion of forming an “atomic priesthood,” a panel of experts to preserve the message about locations and dangers of radioactive waste through myth and ritual. Just as our own ancestors were the architects for our reality today, we will be the architects of our distant futures.

In Reel to Real, the documentarian Camille Billops says to bell hooks about her art:

In its own way, this is also a form of decentralized storytelling, in which the message that will survive you is the love you have for the ones you care about the most.

And at the end of the day, this emotional core is what I’ll come back to again and again.  My reverence for storytelling most of all comes from its ability for resonance. A network of stories is a network of compassion. Every story has at least one part that is true, because even the most abstracted lie, the most epic fantasy, contains within it real sentiments. I think of this as an emotional truth. One we all recognize, within our personal interpretations and experiences of a story. One we can relate to, when nothing in the story itself is familiar. A block with words from Hannah Arendt reads:

Stories are a question — in his 2017 acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature, Kazuo Ishiguro says:

But stories are also an answer — in 1964,  James Baldwin recalled of his childhood: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive."