No thanks. I need my brian. 
It’s the only organ that will tell you how fucking important it is…
always remember, every critter has enough brains to tan it’s own hide
that includes you & me, too
not quite. try tanning a deer with that Mcnugget.
Yeah, the only animal that actually has enough brains to tan it’s own hide is humans. That’s cause of our big heads and thin skins.
wow, i’m disappointed
(i thought) i had that on good authority…
jhereg is correct. At least as far as deer go. The reason most of us moderns haven’t found that to be true, is we are tanning using ONLY the brain. If you were to use other fatty parts of the deer mixed with the brain, you could indeed tan a deer hide with one brain.
If it’s a thin hide and you have really done your preparation of the hide well, you could even tan a deer using ONLY it’s brain.
This is definitely a tangent though, in relation to “self sufficient primitivist villages in N. America”
Back on topic for this thread, I know of quite a few “primitivists” who are actively and holistically involved in the process of learning to live primitively.
The two main things that stand in folks way are #1. Their cultural conditioning as civilized citizens and #2. The fact that living primitively requires a community, so folks have to come together to engage the process.
We should also remember that it takes around 13 years for a fully functional primitive band of hunter-gatherers to raise up a child into a self-sufficient and contributing member of their community, and that’s for a child who learns faster than any adult and has no civilized adult baggage to unlearn along the way.
For myself, I’ve spent nearly four years out of the last seven living as primitively as possible together with a community of people doing the same. One of those years was spent in the woods with a small group of folks doing the Teaching Drum Outdoor School’s year-long immersion course. Personally, I think four years is just the beginning when it comes to learning what needs to be understood and embodied before one could contribute to a fully functional rewilded band of people.
Anyway, here are the folks I know of who are doing it and can be found on the web:
And I’ll post some insights from these folks next.
Here’s a website where the writings of Teaching Drum alumni can be found.
http://thedrum.hubraincor.net/
And here’s an article from the founder of the Teaching Drum on what stands in our way:
Someone recently asked, "How long does it take from knowing nothing about the wilderness to going off and living in it, and when do you know when you are ready? I basically just have a few books I haven't started reading about it."This is a profound question, and I see it is the main theme in various group discussions lately. Not a day goes by that someone does not ask me the same thing, or else a related question, such as, “What are the top skills I need to know?” “Learning the Old Ways should be free, like it used to be; why do I have to pay money?” “Where can I find an elder to teach me?” “Is it even possible anymore, with all the hunting and fishing regulations?” “All the land is private or restricted, and I can’t afford to buy any, is there anywhere can I go to live primitively?” “I want to learn on my own, what steps should I take?”
I’m going to give you all some straight talk, in hopes that it will help to steer you on to a track might get you somewhere. The reality of the situation is that I have not met, or heard of, a single person in the past 40 years who has used the approaches that we have been talking about, who has been able to return to primitive living. This includes the authors of the popular books. Yeah, they might talk a good talk, but look at what they’ve actually done – a month in the mountains, a solo year in the woods, some time in Alaska – is that really living the Old Way? Where is the clan? Where are the elders? The children? Where is the example and clan memories to learn from?
Why didn’t it work for them, and why won’t it work for you? Because they carried civilization with them into the wilderness, and you likely will as well. You can learn all the skills you want, and The Mother will spit you back out just about as fast as you went in. The more stubborn individuals will last a few months or maybe a year, but rest assured, they’ll be back.
Why? Because they didn’t do their work. We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools – few and crude, and their craftwork – basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills – how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you’ll go back to the life that shuns these skills.
Will a book teach you these qualitative skills? Will a class or a workshop? Is learning firemaking or edible plants going to give them to you? They actually take you further away from what you need to know, because focusing on them reinforces the technological approach, and that 95% of your brain which you don’t use, shrivels up even more. We become what we surround ourselves with; the way to learn Truthspeaking is to share with other truthspeakers, the way to bring life back to our dormant brain is to immerse ourselves in the full spectrum of life in which our brain evolved, the way to elder wisdom is to be with wise elders. There are patterns to break – crippling, blinding patterns that take continual, unrelenting attention if we are ever going to see, hear, smell, and feel as fully as we are intended.
That takes guidance, a supportive environment, and example. Otherwise, it’s just another exercise, another class, another walk in the woods, and then it’s back to life as usual, with no end in sight.
Roughly 80% of what a Native person eats is not affected by hunting and fishing regulations. There are vast tracts of public and unregulated private land that are available to a hunter-gatherer, with virtually no human competition. If you think there are a lot of people at your favorite state park or national forest just step a few paces off the trail, and they all disappear. Very few people really go “out” in the woods anymore. I know a dozen ways to live legally on or adjacent to foraging lands without having to pay big bucks. I can grow fat by living primitively in a farmer’s woodlot or city park. It doesn’t take Alaska or the Grand Tetons. It takes shaking off the old preconceptions of what primitive living is and rebecoming the Native person you already are.
It simply can’t be done alone. We evolved as social beings, and we literally start going crazy when we spend too much time without company of our fellow creatures. Learning skills alone, buying land alone, is feeding a pipe dream, a romantic fantasy, that will likely only lead to frustration and disillusionment. Virtually everyone I know who has tried it for any period of time, has given up and bought back into the system. Try to look up some of the older people who once had dreams as you do now. You’ll see – they now have mortgages and jobs with benefits they can’t let go of, and kids’ educations they have to worry about. Yeah, they might still be talking about their dreams, and they might practice their skills and head out in the woods now and then, but realistically, when is that dream ever going to become reality?
And then there’s the cost of your rewilding. Yes, I said cost, because nothing is free. Money is the least of what you are going to be asked to give. There is a world of difference between something for free and something that is freely given. On a stay with one of my elders in Canada, I built her a cabin. 15 years ago another elder asked me to literally lay my life on the line for him. I would gladly give my last dollar, and much more, for the privilege of walking in my ancestor’s footsteps.
The alternative? Sit in the city, whining about how things used to be and ought to be. Or look at the cost of NOT rewilding, and come to realize that one has to give before they can receive. Then you’ll be ready to throw away your books, turn your back on the “experts,” and turn your face to the wind. You’ll start hearing voices that help you walk rather than give you sweet talk. There waiting to greet you will be your clan, your teachers, and your real self. You’ll leave survival behind and walk into the Beauty Way.
–Tamarack Song
And here’s my own account of the year-long at the Teaching Drum.
http://www.rewild.info/conversations/index.php?topic=22.0
(Sorry about the tripple post, btw.)
Cause? What cause?
Thinking in these terms fails to even see what ‘rewilding’ is.
Exactly. There is no cause. There is nothing to change. We wait for somthing that will happen on its own, without recruits. Probably enough people are on bord now to have someone survive in every major ecosystem. But, many may die in with the crash anyway. The only thing we try to do is get the information out, so whoever has the inclination, can be given a chance (and so we dont die either, from lack of good information).
Our cause is life. Simply Life. We share common cause with every human, every being, every spirit on Earth. Which is to say, yeah, we have no “cause”.
To quote ol’ Hank David:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear…”
this is tranny granny i am not so available as others i spend much of my time on the hoop in efforts to replant native bioms and rewilding people on the hoop.i have found friends that work dilegently to connect me to the larger community and i want to thank them .i am hopeful in finding like minded people who can see the difference between those who would go to the way now rather than waiting for a failure of civilization. i wonder if you can see that you might see that to go now requires a different sort of person than that one who is waiting for afall to bust a move. ifyoufall upon this stone you will be broken if this stone falls upon you ,you will be ground to powder.i am hoping to find those who see themselves as that returning rainbow warrior. i would like to hear from that one and i want to build community with those ones now because we can and should not latter because we have to .check it out at pullingforwildflowers.org lets support each other in this come out of her (babylon) my people
Shemaw Shicheen
this is the tranny granny. i have done and seen done all that the nasayers say is impossable . i would like to take away all of those excuses they are so fond of. i can see no reason in waiting for civilization to fall to bust a move. in fact i see the need to return now to highgrade the human element . who would you be, those who move out now in spite of impires threats andits comforts in the culture of death, or those who will only go when those threats are removed and trhe option of civilization has evaporated? when i am in the way none of you are there to show this to when i am available to you in your world and even in this format you say i have to be a poser with you and i have no credebility. to answer this delema i have been helped to bridge this gap by many of my friends both native and nonnative. let me show you. then do it yourself and build your own clan in it. shemaw shicheen
I think this is well-said. However, there are a lot of people on the Earth right now who are actively involved in killing off life (200 species going extinct every day!) - and thus are diametrically opposed to us, and all life on earth. So we do have a “cause”, in the sense of protecting life against those who would destroy it.
I just don’t see how rewilding jives with standing by and watching the beloved forest where one lives be clearcut, for example.
If the wild Earth is gone (which the destruction is rapidly leading to), how far will all of us even be ABLE to rewild? And how much more difficult is it to live in harmony with the land when the forest has been turned into a tree farm because of logging, reducing the understory flora and wildlife to a few species, eliminating the richness of herbs, berries, critters, etc that would sustain us and keep us healthy? The more we rewild and reconnect with the real world, the more we are affected (in more direct ways) from the local and planetwide extinction of living things.
The more I travel down the rewilding path, the more compelled I become to ACT to stop the destruction of the wild. To me this is a fundamental part of the rewilding process.
I echo your feelings bereal. For me, rewilding calls me to a three-fold purpose:
-Protection : Stopping destruction of our beloved homes, because this is all we have
-Re-membering : Rediscovering how to live as a wild, communal human (primitive skills, social “skills”, etc) in the midst of a grand world
-Healing : Working to nurture, aid, and facilitate the re-establishment of ecologies in places that have been destroyed or suppressed by civilization
[quote=“wildeyes, post:45, topic:272”]I echo your feelings bereal. For me, rewilding calls me to a three-fold purpose:
-Protection : Stopping destruction of our beloved homes, because this is all we have
-Re-membering : Rediscovering how to live as a wild, communal human (primitive skills, social “skills”, etc) in the midst of a grand world
-Healing : Working to nurture, aid, and facilitate the re-establishment of ecologies in places that have been destroyed or suppressed by civilization[/quote]
Too right, just how it is for me…
[quote=“wildeyes, post:45, topic:272”]I echo your feelings bereal. For me, rewilding calls me to a three-fold purpose:
-Protection : Stopping destruction of our beloved homes, because this is all we have
-Re-membering : Rediscovering how to live as a wild, communal human (primitive skills, social “skills”, etc) in the midst of a grand world
-Healing : Working to nurture, aid, and facilitate the re-establishment of ecologies in places that have been destroyed or suppressed by civilization[/quote]
Well said! 
if you were to look under green forrest and finisia medrano for replies on this site this would be our response