**3. Teaching with Story**

## *3.1. Four Kinds of Stories*

How might we engage these iconic stories in ways that draw people into deeper and more grounded versions, that emphasize the love of which Palmer writes, and the humility of being part of, not owner or controller, of creation? Seeking to understand how to shift interpretation means seeking to understand engaging story, storying, storytelling. It demands that we understand the stance, the epistemologies, we wish to honor. Bell and her team, while working in the field of anti-racism education, have identified four categories of stories that help to illuminate this task of transformative interpretation and learning. They write of "dominant or stock", "concealed", "resistance", and "counter" stories (Bell et al. 2008).

"Dominant or stock" stories are those which are "the most public and ubiquitous in dominant, mainstream institutions". They are told by those who hold control in various discursive terrains, and who are able to embed their stories in public rituals, monuments, school curricula, and many other institutional and structural forms. They "tell us a lot about what a society considers important and meaningful".

"Concealed" stories, in contrast, while existing in the same spaces as so-called stock stories, "most often remain in the shadows, hidden from public view". These stories might be "told and retold by people in the margins whose experiences and aspirations they express and honor". Yet there is a seductive element to such stories because only "insiders" know them and in our current information ecology they can be drawn into conspiracy frameworks all too easily.

The third kind of story, "resistance" stories, are "both historical and contemporary, that tell about how people have resisted forms of oppression such as racism, challenged the stock stories that support it, and fought for more equal and inclusive social arrangements". Such stories can teach us about perspectives and practices that have existed throughout our history up to the present time, thus expanding our vision of what is possible in our own work for the kin-dom of God. Note that even a small shift—from "kingdom of God" to "kin-dom of "God"—invites resistance to dominance.

The final category of which they write, "counter stories", contains stories which "are new stories that are deliberately constructed to challenge the stock stories. They build on and amplify resistance stories, they offer ways to interrupt the status quo and work for change. These stories enact continuing critique and resistance to the stock stories and enable new possibilities for inclusive human community" (Bell et al. 2008, p. 19 and following).

#### *3.2. When Counter Stories Get Co-Opted into Stock Stories*

It is critical to grasp that indigenous epistemologies are counter stories within hegemonic cultural spaces. They may well offer resistance stories, and to some extent have been concealed from dominant view, but at their heart they are "new" stories, in the sense that they are from an entirely different frame than that which structures the stories of dominance within which I grew up (DeMars and Tait 2019).

Yet at the same time, it is also possible to perceive the ways in which a story that arose in a very specific context, within a very specific epistemology, can be drawn into one of these four categories (Ng 2020). We both know and understand how important context is, and ye<sup>t</sup> need to begin to grasp that context collapse is all around us. Context collapse is part of what occurs when stories from one specific people, told in a specific context and with a specific set of practices, ge<sup>t</sup> lifted up and floated on the global digital sea, losing most of that context (Hess 2019b, p. 215). This happens all too often with stories that arise from within indigenous communities. A very famous example might be the teary-eyed Indian commercial/PSA from the 1970s (https://youtu.be/8Suu84khNGY, accessed on 1 February 2022). In that commercial an Indian paddling his canoe down a highly polluted stream evokes a commitment to the land that is now almost past retrieving. His single tear, highlighted by the camera, has an accompanying narration in an ominously deep male voice saying "people start pollution, people can stop it". The "solution"? Write for a pamphlet on how to "Keep America Beautiful".

Here a thoroughly relational element between a person and the land which is characteristic of many indigenous epistemologies is being used to attempt to catalyze opposition to littering. Never mind that genocide and centuries of settler colonialism have erased these peoples from the very land they were connected to, here the native person is constructed wholly as a stereotype and used instrumentally in the service of the dominant story. To be blunt, individual litter was never the real environmental problem (a reality to which the smoke stacks belching smog in the background of the commercial make subtle allusion).

In 2022, a commercial aired selling a package of streaming media (Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN) starring the actor Dave Bautista as he paddled a canoe (https://youtu.be/C c6QxlXjvWU, accessed on 1 February 2022) down a quiet stream. The version airing within mobile games includes him trailing his hand in the water while saying "I love you, stream". Fifty years of advertising have developed from a native person at the heart of a PSA bemoaning littering, to an ad for streaming media with a person whose physical characteristics subliminally evoke native stereotypes (olive-toned skin, long hair pulled back in a single ponytail, actions which clearly relish the "outdoors") and which seeks to sell digital media streams.

Here a comprehensive connection to the land and its resources, understood within many native epistemologies as a relative, is trivialized and narrowed down to an excuse for staying hooked to a computer screen even while outdoors "in nature". This is an example of how counter stories arising from indigenous epistemologies have been drawn into dominant stories, perhaps identified as somewhat "concealed" or "minoritized"—but nonetheless understood only in relation to a dominant story.

#### *3.3. A Counter Story of Ecological Literacy*

In practical theological terms, the challenge is not simply to offer better interpretations of biblical stories, but also to deconstruct the racism and other oppressive dynamics structured into all of our stock representations through their underlying epistemological framing, through what is understood to be "knowledge" and what constitutes "knowing". Hearlson calls this "unmasking of idols" (Hearlson 2021, p. 138).

Scholars and teachers within the movement for environmental education have been seeking for decades to push back against dominant stories. Consider the basic assertions that David Orr (1994), a key figure in environmental education in the US, offered by identifying what he termed "key myths" of US culture.

3.3.1. Myths Which Prevent Ecological Literacy


The "US culture" he is writing of here is clearly a dominant story that encapsulates white supremacy, and in doing so removes human beings, at least those characterized as white, from connection to the land in deeply relational ways. He asserts, by way of contrast, that learning should be focused as follows.
