Beth Brant (1994), an Indigenous writer from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario, supplies both title and inspiration for my exploration of as in the public records of participatory learning and research. My approach challenges practitioners and researchers to a contemporary spirituality that does justice to participants' testimony. Participation, dialogue and are the spiritual principles of social in Paulo Freire's (2002/1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. exist, humanly, to name the world, to change it ... Saying that word not the privilege of some few persons, but the right of everyone (p. 88). This quotation strikes at the nub of a vexed question which relates to the often taken-for-granted privilege of writing that word. I have experienced a culture of silence around these spiritual principles of social in the case of the writer as witness. It often a person in the privileged position of researcher, teacher and policymaker who gets to write the word of participants and learners and who selects and deselects from an abundance of testimony [transcripts]. I hope to interrupt this silence by posing questions about what witnesses mean before putting it in writing, it be reports, articles or research summaries. Beth Brant, an Indigenous writer, tells the story of Anna May, a Native woman and the protagonist of Swimming Upstream. The gift of and the privilege of holds a responsibility to be a to my people. To be a to the natural world, to be a to Salmon, to Anna May, to her son, to the sometimes unbearable circumstances of our lives. (p. 70) This reference to the natural world takes me back to Clare Graves' (1974) metaphor of the existential spiral staircase of learning, which framed my own entry to adult education in the 1970s. Graves' spiral of learning aspires to global holism and the delicate balance of interlocking forces as the essence of spiritual connectivity (see www.spiraldynamics.com). Writing in The Futurist in 1974, Graves was predicting that adult learning programs would be evaluated on the basis of whether the education leads to movement up the existential staircase ... [and that] unity with Nature will replace unity with God (p. 82). Yet, the same language of freedom, liberation, transformation, faith, justice, hope and love shapes writings that are expressions of Christian faith (Paulo Freire and bell hooks) and expressions of Native and ecologically based spirituality (Brant). 1994 Writing in the 21st century, I am drawn to a theory-practice of human existence that refuses oppositional spiritualities and instead calls us to attune our writing, teaching, and learning practices to a holistic and life-affirming spirituality. As a writer, Brant seeks to do justice to her people's testimony by creating characters such as Anna May [She] is not just a protagonist in a story, she a real being in my life (p. 70). Through Anna May, Brant bears to the interlocking forces of nature, native lives and history. Brant's animates Bean's (2000) six spiritual principles of learning in community: ecological base; social justice; the dignity of the human person; community based; for liberation; and combined and reflection (pp. 73-74). Participation as the unifying spiritual principle in Bean's examples and applications and Freire's (2002/1972) essential elements of do not vary historically (p. 176). as Theory Style as theory covers the spiritual principles of participation and witnessing applied to the act of writing. Paulo Freire (2002) combines the and practice of witnessing in his writing. His statement that witness not an abstract gesture, but an action a reminder that as also an action--a confrontation with the world and with people--it not static (p. …