Teaching “Anthropology for Liberation” in 2025 with “The Good Ancestor Game” by Tina Ngata and Tāwhana Chadwick

This is the final post in a three-part series reflecting on changes I made to my undergraduate course Anthropology for Liberation at Te Herenga Waka in 2025. Part I focuses on the work that reading lists do in a course, and Part 2 discusses changes I made to the course assessments. Here I reflect on what I learnt from bringing “The Good Ancestor Game” by Tina Ngata and Tāwhana Chadwick into the class. This post incorporates content from “The Good Ancestor Game,” a role-playing game licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. This post is shared under the same license.

Why “The Good Ancestor Game”?

We played this game during a two-hour seminar in Week 5 of the 12 week course, when we were in the middle of reading Ranginui Walker’s Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou. The previous week had discussed the first ‘era’ of the book, where Walker discusses how Māori became tangata whenua of Aotearoa, the arrival of Pākehā and tauiwi settlers, and the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. When Tina Ngata shared “The Good Ancestor Game” earlier in the year, I immediately thought to put it into conversation with Walker’s chapters on power and resistance, and this is how I introduced it to the class. I argued that “The Good Ancestor Game” is an example of survivance, and that playing this game in class allowed us to experience Māori storytelling and collective problem-solving through Māori values.

Survivance (and thrivance)

Survivance, a term coined by Gerald Vizenor, offers a theoretical framework for understanding Indigenous experiences that moves beyond deficit narratives of victimhood and tragedy. Instead of viewing Indigenous peoples as passive recipients of historical trauma, survivance recognises the active, ongoing resistance and cultural vitality that characterizes Indigenous peoples worldwide.

“Theories of survivance are elusive and imprecise by definition and in translation. The practices of survivance, however, are obvious and unmistakable in native stories. The nature of survivance creates a sense of narrative resistance to absence, literary tragedy, nihility, and victimry. Native survivance is an active sense of presence over historical absence, the dominance of cultural simulations, and manifest manners. Native survivance is a continuation of stories.”

Vizenor, Gerald. 2009. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Page 1. 

Survivance as theorised by Vizenor is specifically for Native American and other Indigenous contexts, and doesn’t automatically travel to all experiences of colonisation and oppression. It is important not to collapse different experiences of oppression or assume one theoretical framework fits all contexts of resistance, and to think carefully and critically about the concepts we use. Even though Walker himself never used the term, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou is, to me, a clear example of survivance in practice. “The Good Ancestor Game” is as well, with its stories of navigating crisis through community, tikanga, and collective resourcefulness. When I teach with the game in a future iteration of the course I’ll add “thrivance” to the theoretical mix:

The concept of thrivance handily picks up where survivance leaves off: both are valuable analytical tools, yet different chapters of the ongoing story of Indigeneity. A thrivance focus is important as it moves beyond the survival statement of “we are still here” to “we remain productive, successful, and vibrant contributors in today’s world” (Baumann, 2019, p. 19).”

Baumann, Dianne F. 2023. “Thrivance is My Identity: Moving Beyond Survival.” Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 10(4), 1–12.

Indigenous Futurisms

As Ngata explains in her Substack post, she and Tāwhana Chadwick developed “The Good Ancestor Game” in 2025, as part of their “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery” training programme. In a Facebook post describing the game, Ngata describes it as a cross of “Indigenous Futurism, DnD Style Roleplay Games, SolarPunk, Matariki and Decolonisation” (Ngata, 23 April 2025).

Indigenous futurisms is a term coined by Grace Dillon, who developed it in relation to Afrofuturism and Vizenor’s concept of survivance to capture Indigenous perspectives on science fiction, speculative storytelling, and world-building that can be seen in all kinds of creative works. I introduced Dillon to my class here partly to bring her into the citational lineage we were building across the course, and partly because I knew some of my students, being interested in science fiction, would want to look her up themselves.

I also connected Indigenous futurisms to a whakataukī that Ngata shared in her Facebook post announcing the game: “Te pae tawhiti, whāia kia tata – te pae tata, whakamaua kia tina!” I found more than one translation of this in looking up its meaning: Professor John Moorefield translates it as “Strive for long-term goals while ensuring that short-term goals are also achieved” in his 2001 inaugural professorial lecture; the Ministry of Social Development’s website translates it as “Seek out the distant horizons, while cherishing those achievements at hand”; and Sport New Zealand Ihi Aotearoa translates it as “The potential for tomorrow depends on what we do today”. For me, this whakataukī expresses both the decolonised, Tiriti-centric future that “The Good Ancestor Game” envisions, and the immediate, practical steps we can take now toward that transformation.

Playing “The Good Ancestor Game”

The game is free to download and use so I printed everything out beforehand and made different coloured decks for the five different categories of cards: role cards, value cards, challenge cards, tool cards, and curveball cards. Before we started playing, I invited students to practise cultural anthropology’s hallmark research method, participant-observation, by participating in the game while observing both how they were participating, and how the game itself unfolded. I asked them to pay attention to how they could bring course themes into the game; how collective storytelling differed from individual analysis and what that might suggest about different ways of knowing; what survivance looked and felt like in the game; how their own cultural background shaped their approach to the game; and how easy or difficult they found playing it in class.

I’d read through the guidebook carefully and rather than hand that out to the class, I created a set of PowerPoint slides to introduce the game’s mechanics. I talked the class through how the game will work (see slide above), then we followed the guidelines to discuss kawa and tikanga and modified consensus decision-making as foundations for our game.

“Community members should discuss kawa and tikanga at the beginning of the celebration.

Kawa are hard boundaries around themes or ideas that we do not cross. Breaking kawa may mean redrawing a challenge card. E.g. we do not attack, or belittle each others’ ancestors, we do not weaponise colonial harm (like war or prisons) to “solve” curveballs.

Tikanga requires further discussion and help to guide the game but are not the focus of the story i.e. violence can be alluded to but not described in detail.

Kawa and tikanga can be introduced for discussion at any point in the game, by any member, and are passed by consensus of the group, i.e. they can be passed unless there is a good reason not to.

Remember, respecting human dignity is more important than the outcome of any given scenario” (Ngata and Chadwick, 2025).

Since we were working in a large group, I made two decks of Ancestor (role) cards, distributed them to the class, then asked everyone to find the classmate with the matching Ancestor card so they could develop their character together. Once they had done that, they drew one Value card per Ancestor and prepared a short introduction to share with the class, giving their Ancestor a name and explaining how their background connected to their value – the guidebook’s example was very helpful for this. Pairing up worked well because we had some experienced gamers in the class whose enthusiasm and knowledge quickly put those new to role-playing games at ease, facilitating good discussions and creative character-building. I had been a bit anxious about introducing a role-playing game to the class but those present committed to the experience and we moved through the rest of the game’s phases (the Challenge, Dismantling, Collective Victory, Curveball, and Hūrō) with lots of discussion. One of the students (an avid gamer) shared the character notes they had developed with their classmates – reproduced here with permission – which give a good sense of the depth of engagement the game generated:

Playing this game in class was the highlight of my 2025 teaching year. Several students stayed afterwards to continue discussing the game, saying that the experience reminded them of what they enjoyed about high school – the imagination and creativity, collaborating with me and one another, and having fun in the process. It also gave them a practical feel for the kind of game they were invited to develop for their final research projects (which I discussed in Part 2 of this series). “The Good Ancestor Game” is very playable and an excellent fit for the themes of Anthropology for Liberation, and I’ll definitely bring it into future classes.