"A Return to Wild Life-The Journey from 'Civilized' to 'Primitive' Living"
or
"How to Become a Godless Savage in Three Easy Steps"

by RedWolfReturns 
RedWolfReturns@hotmail.com

"When I enter the Forest in my buckskins, supplied with the knowledge of where to find water and food and shelter, I have crossed a bridge and entered the world of the wildlings. I'm there, on their level, feeling the same feelings, having the same needs, extending the same trust in our common Earth Mother to provide. If I'm not awake and aware, I'm forced to become so in order to remain there, to have my needs met. I blend in and move with, rather than walking about and observing. I have crossed the threshold from camping to communing."
-- Tamarack Song

I have been involved in the "primitive skills movement" for a little over three years now. For me, this involvement just seemed to flow naturally from my encounters with radical environmentalism, indigenous- rights activism, and anarcho-primitivism. I wanted more than just an intellectual philosophy or a distant revolutionary objective--I wanted a real-world, in-the-dirt experience of what these various lines of thought were aiming at. I wanted to learn what it might mean to become "indigenous" to the land-not as a concept or ideal, but as a living experience.

To that end, I spent a good amount of time traveling around North-America studying skills & philosophy with various individuals and attending various gatherings until I finally ended up in a year-long immersion course at the Teaching Drum Outdoor School's primitive camp (called "Nishnajida" which is Algonquin for "where the Old-Ways return") in the North-Woods of Wisconsin. The program here works toward healing the wounds of civilization and attempting to reclaim a life-way consistent with the ancient ecological wisdom of hunter-gatherer indigenous peoples. We don't try to "play Indian" or superficially mimic Native-American cultural forms, but rather re-connect with the core of what it means to live as Earth-People again- regardless of race or ethnicity-since the Ancestral lineage for all of us eventually begins with Old-Way peoples. Daily life involves learning & practicing such skills as building earth-lodges for shelter, tanning hides & furs for clothing, making fire without matches, basket-weaving and other crafts, predicting the weather, tracking wild animals and wild-crafting edible & medicinal plants. We slowly integrate into the skills and awareness's necessary to become more independent of the cash-economy and more intimately interdependent on both our face-to-face community and the nurturing care of our Bioregion.

The first week out here (with one's food & shelter already provided by the school) is a lot like camping. This is basically as it should be, because if one were to get dumped cold-turkey-style out of civilization and into the wilderness with no modern technology and no prior primitive experience, their first week would be the beginning of a life and death struggle for survival with very slim chances for success beyond a month or two at most. This is not because nature is a nasty, brutish, or even mildly unfriendly place, rather it is because those of us who have been raised in civilization have been raised to be highly technology-dependent, unresourceful and unobservant, in a word-stupid, or more politely-domesticated. This domestication not only makes us easily controllable and exploitable, it also creates a powerful division between us and nature -between our perspective and that of our wild kin. If you throw a poodle into the wilderness it will soon become coyote bait, and the situation for most of us raised in "modern society" is little better. The one difference between the poodle and us, however, is that the poodle has been bred (genetically manipulated) to be pathetic and dependent, whereas we have been educated (psychologically conditioned) to be so. While that poodle cannot change its genetic makeup, we can change our psychological conditioning-even though it may take considerable time and effort.

Sometime around the first month or so out here is when one begins to face some of that psychological conditioning and realize the level of personal healing that needs to take place before one can feel at home in the natural world. For me, this first became obvious when I started feeling overwhelming compulsions to bike into town to binge on junk food and "buy stuff" I thought I needed. I also started smoking again, even though I had quit over a year before. My dreams became troubled-I was fighting against myself. I began to see just how much the outer violence & greed I had been struggling with as an urban activist had obscured my vision from the inner violence & greed that I carried with me wherever I went. I was, in fact, an intimate part of the problem, and carried within me the hollow and manipulative heart of a first-world consumer.

I learned that struggles like these (or other such responses-some more dramatic, some less-depending on the individual) are to be expected when one attempts to break free from long-term, entrenched conditioning. This is because psychological & emotional comfort is largely based on maintaining familiar circumstances and habits. Also, the clear mirror of the natural world will reflect on the self in ways most of us are simply not used to when we are acclimated to the near-constant alienation of technological existence. Because of this, facing one's self (& others) honestly can be a frightening experience-as we carry and pass on the trauma acquired throughout our lives inside the cages of institutional society.

Around three months into the year, I began to fully realize the importance of inter-personal & inter-political relationship skills as absolutely crucial survival skills within the primitive life-way. Humans evolved to be communal beings-much like wolves, and a lone individual living off the land will have a very difficult time compared to a tightly knit group that can flow well together to get things done. Traditional indigenous peoples devote a great deal of their cultural energy to this process (much more than to their material culture), with considerable success. For our community out at Nishnajida, this means dealing with individual and group conflicts immediately as they come up. It also means not having anyone with enforcement authority to appeal to when conflicts arise. And finally, it means operating by consensus-not just in a few areas-but in nearly every area of decision-making and daily living. We use the tool of the "talking circle" to create a forum for sacred speech and deep listening while we learn, as best we can, to be in-the-moment truth-speakers with each-other. When one lives with the same people, sharing nearly all aspects of life together and depending on one-another for the long-term, conflicts & misunderstandings will often arise. If those conflicts are not faced honestly and resolved in a consensual way for all those involved, then the festering resentment that follows will undermine the group's flow and simply make life hard for everyone.

When it comes to the material matters of the primitive life-way, I've been shown that intimacy and respect are again the key lessons to be learned, while the various technical aspects are more peripheral and flow from these first two ingredients. Certainly the issue of hunting can be controversial, but I'd like to touch on it because I think it illustrates best the differences between primitive approaches vs. more technological ones. Hunting in a primitive manner is really a matter of being deeply attuned to the wild communities of one's Bioregion and it is nearly impossible to be successful for long otherwise. At Nishnajida we take a considerable amount of time (perhaps many years) to prepare for our first hunt, since it is a powerful and sacred act. This preparation entails getting to know our fellow animal peoples in a similar way as we know our human relations-i.e. through direct encounter & the sharing of needs. In this way, we might be aware that, for instance, the old buck that we have seen mature & become an elder these past years has recently injured his leg and will be unlikely to survive the coming winter. Or possibly that one of our neighboring does gave birth to a second fawn that is too weak to mature into adulthood. With this level of attunement, the equipment needed for hunting that crippled buck or weak fawn might be as simple as a rawhide snare and a stout club. Also, one can then be sure that he is taking what is being offered by his relations rather than disregarding their needs and weakening them (like such practices as when high-tech sport-hunters kill "trophy bucks" and deplete the deer-peoples of their most capable young warriors each year). In the Old- Way respect is engendered because, as hunter-gatherers, our needs and well-being really are intertwined with theirs-they are not "pests" who eat "our" crops or just "pretty animals" that we like to view-they ARE us, and we are them in the circle of life.

Gathering wild plants is a similar issue. Very few greens are edible and/or available all year long, so a hunter- gatherer's success comes from knowing a large number of plant communities very intimately-what parts are edible at what times of the year and in what quantity she can gather them without damaging the overall population (which might cause her people to go hungry next year). For instance, wild leek greens are an excellent food source here in the North Woods and can be gathered in great quantity-but they only grow in specific places (you might have to travel miles to get them) and only send up their leaves for a few weeks during the entire year.

Fishing works similarly. One can drop a line in any of the lakes around here and catch a few days worth of food. However, if one wants to lay up winter stores for her community, then the way to do this is to catch the Suckerfish during their spring spawning run. This usually lasts less than a week (and what week it is varies depending on how the seasons change each year), but during that time, hundreds of fish can be caught to then be dried and stored for later.

Basically, what all this boils down to is that life for a hunter-gatherer without the "benefits" of modern technology & agriculture is easy if one is attuned and aware in his or her environment, but is difficult if one is out of touch. The Mother will care for Her children lovingly, as She has done for countless millennia prior to the advent of, and outside the parameters of industrial "civilization", but only on Her terms-not ours. One can only learn so much of this through books, most of it must be learned through personal lived experience. That is why it is called "wisdom" rather than just "knowledge", and why indigenous peoples respect their elders & their oral traditions.

This way of being "in-touch" (I am learning) is the key to making primitive living work. One needs to be in- touch at all levels of his or her existence-with one's own self, with one's human circle, and with one's non- human relations (i.e. one's "environment"). This being "in-touch" is (I now think) what indigenous peoples primarily mean when they talk about "Walking in Balance" with "All Our Relations". When it comes right down to it, this isn't just some rhetorical flourish or new-agey bullshit-it is a base-line and completely practical "survival skill" that makes the difference between whether one views the Earth as a nurturing and caring Mother or one views life in the "wilderness" as being "nasty, brutish, & short". It seems to me, at least, that being "in-touch" in such a manner may be essential to our perspective if we are to understand what is required of us to live in perpetual harmony with the Earth.

Anyone interested in learning more about this life-way can contact me at redwolfreturns@hotmail.com with any questions or comments.

"...give me a wildness who's glance no civilization can endure..." --Thoreau