Storytelling as Gift, Storytelling as Currency

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 relati

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.”

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.