Escape to Dog Mountain: Developing Historical Narrative Devices Using Twine to Teach About 18th Century Indigenous Pathways

 

In 1791, a rebellion was brewing on the coast of California.

In August, a group of American Indians approached a mission outpost in the village of Pruristac, in a thriving valley famous for trade between coastal tribes and the limestone quarry supplying villages with ore. These were Coastanoans, one of two people groups who inhabited what is today known as the San Francisco Bay Area. They were curious about this new faith but also desired the goods the Spanish sold them in exchange for labor in fields and workshops. All they need do was become Christians and they would be granted extravagant clothing,[1] prestige among the metal-clad Spanish soldiers, titles, and property, and even marriage into the nobility of this wealthy kingdom[2].

However, not all Coastanoans were equal. Some men like Captain Lachi of the Oljon had a relative who married into the dazzling royalty of the Mission San Francisco de Asís, obtaining special privileges with the Spanish. However, Chief ‘Mateo’ Charquin, leader of the powerful Quiroste, held no such favor with the Spanish. After his baptism and the granting of his new “name,” he felt such shame and dishonor that after a week he took his men back into the mountains and began a crusade to topple the missionaries who so flagrantly abused their culture, traditions, and even names.[3]

Two years later, Charquin transformed his villages into sanctuaries for those fleeing from the mission, gathered an army, and prepared to strike the missionaries down.[4] Word reached the Spanish about a mountain Indian sheltering runaways who shirked their duties, sending soldiers who captured him and tossed him into the Santa Barbara Presidio.  Two years later he escaped and wasn’t caught again for an entire year. Eventually he was transferred to three different Presidios, until he died in 1798 still wrapped with chains, still fighting.[5]

Or did he?

Over the last two decades, prevalent trends emerged in the teaching of history. First, the rise of hidden histories, stories outside the structured historiographical narrative, enlightening learners into different facets of big events. Second, the inclusion of counterfactuals into historical interpretation, “what-if” scenarios based on the study of turning points.[6] Finally, the growth of digital history: online access to historical documents, historical studies, and technologies that transform written history into experiential learning in the digital medium.[7]

When guests visit the Sanchez Adobe House in Pacifica, California, they can interact with an interpretive center with Ohlone artifacts from the days of the Spanish mission, and then walk across the lawn to a renovated house, the chapel where Charquin and Lachi both baptized into the faith but diverged on different paths[8].

What if the Sanchez Adobe House was the first location for people to learn about the revolutionary Charquin? What if they followed his exploits in the mission, endured his eight shameful days, and then traveled with him into the mountains where he freed the minds of his tribesmen, built safe harbors deep in the redwoods, and fought for his people’s rights to practice the Old Ways? What if they felt the pounding of his heart as he assaulted the outpost and touched his sweat as he struggled against the soldiers threw him to the dark?

And what if he escaped?

Counterfactuals in history are a popular idea. However, counterfactuals dilute the historical mind and present historical space as a moral conundrum rather than as events in which people did things. Jeremiah McCall proposes the use of interactive fiction in the teaching of history, suggesting that interactive fiction when teaching history use counterfactuals not to promote ideologies but as a mechanism teaching how events lead to events, layered above actors in a time period who perform functions near or on their role in history.[9]

Rebecca Wilson speaks of the interactive fiction software program Twine’s ability to transform history, that it “offers an interactive and branching alternative to linear and spectatorial ways of exploring and presenting ideas (experienced through print and video forms of communication” and that it “does this through the combination of familiar words, images, video, and audio, blurring the lines between storytelling and the participatory experience of interactive with a reactive game system… occupying a liminal space between multiple media forms and the expectations of gaming, literacy, and filmic cultures of production and consumption.”[10]

Another advantage of Twine is the simplicity of the program, opposed to more complicated mediums of video game programming: Twine can be accessed simply through a browser with no required downloads or installed easily as an app on a personal device and for creators requires no knowledge of computing coding. Furthermore, using Twine (according to James H. Morris) doesn’t “drastically increase the time spent planning [a] class and preparing materials for it,”[11] but does in fact promote an engaging experience for learners seeking to connect with figures in the past.

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[1] Quincy D. Newell, “The Varieties of Religious Experience: Baptized Indians at Mission Francisco de Asís, 1776-1821,” American Indian Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Fall 2008):420.

[2] Randall Milliken, A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810, Ballena Press: Banning CA (2009): 134.

[3] Milliken, 115-122.

[4] Milliken, 276.

[5] Mark G. Hylkema and Rob Q. Cuthrell, “An Archeological and Historical View of Quiroste Tribal Genesis,” California Archeology 5, no. 2 (December 2013): 240.

[6] John Lukacs, “Problems for the Profession” in The Future of History, New Haven Press, New Haven, CT (2012): 46.

[7] T. Mills Kelly, “Introduction” in Teaching History in the Digital Age, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI (2013).

[8] Quincy D. Newell, “The Varieties of Religious Experience: Baptized Indians at Mission Francisco de Asís, 1776-1821,” American Indian Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 433-434.

[9] Jeremiah McCall, “Meaningful Choices in Twine, History & Counterfactual History,” Playthepast.org (March 23, 2017): https://www.playthepast.org/?p=5832 (accessed December 11^th, 2022).

[10] Rebecca Wilson, “Playful Lenses: Using Twine to Facilitate Open Social Scholarship through Game-based Inquiry, Research, and Scholarly Communication,” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 3, no. 1 (2019).

[11] James Harry Morris, “Historical Storytelling with Twine,” The Digital Orientalist (May 5, 2017): https://digitalorientalist.com/2019/05/27/historical-storytelling-with-twine/ (accessed December 11^th, 2022).