Talking Stick - Use in Talking Circles

Use in Talking Circles

Further information: Talking circle

Interest in native tribal culture has seen a revival of talking stick and its application spread widely. The use of the talking stick, organized as a talking circle, is a means of decision and discussion-making for the popular Rainbow Gathering movement where the talking stick's effectiveness has been proved in a current context. Groups of school children are said to also commonly use talking sticks in circles, as well as adult and corporate groups across many cultures.

Rainbow Gatherings use talking circles to resolve disputes, where all are given the benefit of the talking stick (or feather, or other chosen object). An especially useful feature of the talking stick strategy for dispute resolution is that it can be used to forestall dangerous decisions in the way a filibuster can be used in some modern law-making bodies; conversation can be continued until one party gives up or, in some cases, falls asleep. This was used at the 2010 Rainbow Gathering, when there was an attempt by a renegade "pro-alcohol" faction to burn a large cross.

Read more about this topic:  Talking Stick

Famous quotes containing the words talking and/or circles:

    ““Suppose they had saved up all my punishments?” she went on, talking more to herself than to the kitten. “What would they do at the end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or—let me see—suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn’t mind that much! I’d far rather go without them than eat them!””
    —Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)

    “Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
    —Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)