Once upon a time very long ago, there were three sisters who lived together in a field. These sisters were quite different from one another in their size and also in their way of dressing. One of the three was a little sister, so young that she could only crawl at first, and she was dressed in green. The second of the three wore a frock of bright yellow, and she had a way of running off by herself when the sun shone and the soft wind blew in her face. The third was the eldest sister, standing always very straight and tall above the other sisters and trying to guard them. She wore a pale green shawl, and she had long, yellow hair that tossed about her head in the breezes.

There was only one way in which the three sisters were alike. They loved one another very dearly, and they were never separated. They were sure that they would not be able to live apart.

After a while a stranger came to the field of the three sisters, a little Indian boy. He was as straight as an arrow and as fearless as the eagle that circled the sky above his head. He knew the way of talking to the birds and the small brothers of the earth, the shrew, the chipmunk, and the young foxes. And the three sisters, the one who was just able to crawl, the one in the yellow frock, and the one with the flowing hair, were very much interested in the little Indian boy. They watched him fit his arrow in his bow, saw him carve a bowl with his stone knife, and wondered where he went at night.

Late in the summer of the first coming of the Indian boy to their field, one of the three sisters disappeared. This was the youngest sister in green, the sister who could only creep. She was scarcely able to stand alone in the field unless she had a stick to which she clung. Her sisters mourned for her until the fall, but she did not return.

Once more the Indian boy came to the field of the three sisters. He came to gather reeds at the edge of a stream nearby to make arrow shafts. The two sisters who were left watched him and gazed with wonder at the prints of his moccasins in the earth that marked his trail.

That night the second of the sisters left, the one who was dressed in yellow and who always wanted to run away. She left no mark of her going, but it may have been that she set her feet in the moccasin tracks of the little Indian boy.

Now there was but one of the sisters left. Tall and straight she stood in the field not once bowing her head with sorrow, but it seemed to her that she could not live there alone. The days grew shorter and the nights were colder. Her green shawl faded and grew thin and old. Her hair, once long and golden, was tangled by the wind. Day and night she sighed for her sisters to return to her, but they did not hear her. Her voice when she tried to call to them was low and plaintive like the wind.

But one day when it was the season of the harvest, the little Indian boy heard the crying of the third sister who had been left to mourn there in the field. He felt sorry for her, and he took her in his arms and carried her to the lodge of his father and mother. Oh what a surprise awaited here there! Her two lost sisters were there in the lodge of the little Indian boy, safe and very glad to see her. They had been curious about the Indian boy, and they had gone home with him to see how and where he lived. They had liked his warm cave so well that they had decided now that winter was coming on to stay with him. And they were doing all they could to be useful.

The little sister in green, now quite grown up, was helping to keep the dinner pot full. The sister in yellow sat on the shelf drying herself, for she planned to fill the dinner pot later. The third sister joined them, ready to grind meal for the Indian boy. And the three were never separated again.

Every child of today knows these sisters and needs them just as much as the little Indian boy did. For the little sister in green is the bean. Her sister in yellow is the squash, and the elder sister with long flowing hair of yellow and the green shawl is the corn.

Citation:
Thomas, L. Cornwall Island, Canada. The three sisters legend. Recorded Oral Teaching. N.d. Retrieved November 15, 2022 from https://library.rrc.ca/c.php?g=709597&p=5055778 

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the different peoples. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to our Mother, the Earth. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the waters. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the varieties of fish. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the varieties of roots. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the varieties of grasses and green plants. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the varieties of insects. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the varieties of fruits and berries. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the different medicines. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to the life sustainers. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the free animals. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all of the trees and bushes. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the varieties of birds. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to the four winds. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to our grandfathers, the thunder beings. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to our elder brother the sun. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to our grandmother the moon. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to all the stars in the sky. And so it is in our minds.

Everyone, bring your minds together as one and send your greetings, love and gratitude to the one who finished our bodies. And so it is in our minds.

Now it is done. I have done my best but if there is anything I have forgotten, you can complete the words for yourself. These are all the words I have.

Citation:
Community Story Strategies. (2019, August 7). Words Before All Else [Video Transcript]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/B-fIkL2ps_U 

 

Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed editions.

 

Lyons, O., (2008). Chapter 8, A Democracy Based on Peace. In M. K. Nelson (Ed.) Original instructions: indigenous teachings for a sustainable future (pp. 59-65). Rochester, Vt.: Bear & Company.

Mohawk, J. (2008). Introduction, A Seneca Greeting – Relationship Requires Us to Be Thankful. In M. K. Nelson (Ed.) Original instructions: indigenous teachings for a sustainable future (pp. vi-viii). Rochester, Vt.: Bear & Company.

The resulting framework, Shantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”): Co-Constructing a Better World Through Storytelling and Arts Education, expands upon the Regenerated Freirean Literacy Through Empowering Techniques (Archer & Cottingham, 1996). Figure 2 features a tree, whose roots of planet, place, prosperity, peace, people, and partnerships[2], within a triangle of place, permanence, and persons (Lucas Seghezzo, 2009, in Schreiber-Barsch & Mauch, 2019: 527), are all affected by storytelling seeds, and wide-ranging weather patterns in three dimensions of structured power relations, communicative action and codes of values (Sumner, 2007: 74). Depending on these inputs, the roots of the tree may germinate into varied degrees of trunks or structures of learning, branches or processes of learning, and leaves or contents of learning – components of adult education as sustainability (Schreiber-Barsch & Mauch, 2019: 528). Gradually, the tree may also produce a diverse array of fruits or knowledges or changes. 

In other words, this framework incorporates an un-boxed theoretical model for practice of sustainability strategies (Sumner, 2007: 74), and a rhetoric-to-action model of adult learning as sustainability (Schreiber-Barsch, 2019: 528), inspired by principles of buen vivir (DeSousa Santos, 2014), uMunthu/Ubuntu (Mbiti, 1969, in Anderson et al., 2016: 8), and relationality (Lange et al., 2021: 27). Through knowledge democracy (Hall & Tandon, 2017: 13; Honey Bee Knowledge Network, n.d.), pedagogies of radical hope in praxis (Stradz, 2019) and arts/language as resistance to cultural hegemony (Clammer, 2016: 50), stories and art have the power to change the world from rhetoric-to-action (Schreiber-Barsch & Mauch, 2019), in response to global challenges. 

As an artist and educator, I see colour and beauty in the world. I see stories and art, storytelling and artistry, and storytellers and artists as the seeds of change. Once seeds are planted, through knowledge-sharing, they mutually flourish, creating trees, or even entire community gardens. These knowledges could transpire into cooperative actions that improve the here and now. If successful, these collaborative efforts and sustainable relationships would produce long-lasting changes in the world.

[1] A bundle is “made by bringing together of spiritual and material objects, elements, allies and energies that will be needed to sustain the spiritual life and secular outcomes of a ceremony or gathering that is being undertaken”, wherein these collections become “teaching bundles” that are the “curriculum” for educators (Nelson, 2008: 4)
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This story tells us that when we fail to lift each other up, we also fail to lift ourselves up. When one of us fails, we all fail. But when we collaborate, in a trustworthy and sincere way, and when share and honour our boldest visions, we become successful. So, what happens to the rat? We might ask. Because of the oral nature of folk storytelling, this is an open-ended conclusion, and is open to your interpretation. But I’ll tell you what my conclusion is. I picture the rat as being any one of us here today. You did your best to collaborate with others, but they had a fixed mindset about what their roles are: the cow was fixated on being the grazer, the goat was fixated on being second to the cow, and chicken had one role – he was the time-teller, he was the alarm clock – and that was that. Nobody wanted to expand and think differently. But the rat was so futuristic, and he was a disrupter. He disrupted the social norms, constantly shifting mindsets, and finding new ideas about how to survive and live together. The rat is the entrepreneur in all of us. I picture him or her migrating into a digital city, building new relationships with others, and learning new ways of improving his or her quality of life in a world that now includes this bunch of spaces we are all migrating toward. And this migration, to digital cities, is probably the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time, which nobody is really talking about. We all need to channel all our ubuntu, all our energy into making this space livable for everyone and everything. We will have to decide who lives, who dies, which ideas are picked and which ones are torched, which languages will survive and which ones will fade away, which cultural norms we will follow and which ones we won’t. And so, our key to survival, lies in our shared ubuntu – that was our ancestors’ wildest dreams. And, today, we are those future ancestors. And long after we exit this world, the generations that will come after us, will be fulfilling our wildest dreams. So, in conclusion, what I want to leave you with is this message: let’s collaborate. Let’s create the best analog and digital world that we can, together.