Abstract
This ethnographic study of the ancestral skills movement focuses on the ways that participants use tools in practices such as fire making and bow hunting to ritualize relationships with the more-than-human natural world. Ethnographic methods were supplemented with Internet research on the websites of teachers, schools, and organizations of this movement that emerged in North America in the 1980s and has recently experienced rapid growth. At ancestral skills gatherings, ritual activities among attendees, as well as between people and plants, nonhuman animals, stone, clay, and fire helped create a sense of a common way of life. I place ancestral skills practitioners in the context of other antimodernist movements focusing on tools, crafts, self-reliance, and the pursuit of a simpler way of life. The ancestral skills movement has a clear message about what the good life should consist of: Deep knowledge about the places we live, the ability to make and use tools out of rocks, plants, and nonhuman animals, and the ability to use these tools to live a simpler life. Their vision of the future is one in which humans feel more at home in the wild and contribute to preserving wild places and the skills to live in them.
Highlights
At a morning circle at Earthskills 2014 Falling Leaves Rendezvous, Steven “Snow Bear” Taylor, co-founder of the gathering, told us that ancestral skills communities address a “poverty of the soul.”Throughout the week, participants addressed this poverty of the soul as they bonded over a shared interest in learning skills, acquiring knowledge from elders in the community, and connecting with what Snow Bear called their “collective ancestors.” Not long after the Fall Equinox, I traveled to the rural southeast corner of South Carolina to attend Falling Leaves
As ancestral skills practitioners would do in the late twentieth century, the Arts and Crafts movement looked to earlier ways of focusing on physical engagement with materials and honing skills, experiencing the world through the body’s sensibilities
Tom Brown, Jr. describes the nature of the relationship as an attentive care: “whenever you gather a plant, whenever you use a material, the Earth is put back as we found it but better.”
Summary
I attended, ritual activities that created relationships among the attendees, as well as between people and plants, nonhuman animals, stone, clay, and fire helped create a sense of a common way of life, not identified with a particular religious tradition This partial list of workshops at Falling Leaves and Winter Count gives a sense of the diverse interests served by these gatherings: Weaving Cattail Mats; Kudzu and Pine Needle Baskets; Moccasin Making; Rawhide Baskets; Stalking, Hunting, “Getting Closer to Animals”; Fishing with. Primitive skills gatherings aim to re-engage us, by drawing people together to make a fire from pieces of wood, or edible “ash cakes” from cattails gathered from a marsh and processed by hand All, it is relationships enacted through focal practices like fire making and with things like knives and stones that constitute ancestral skills practitioners’ way of life
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