Ancestral Skills

You will find the Ancestral Skills Village in the main meadow around the central hearth fire. It is here you will find folks sharing skills such as pit fired pottery, rattle & drum making, natural dying, leather shoe making, hide tanning, broom making, spoon carving, animal processing, and more.

The instructors sharing their skills within this space have spent many years cultivating their relationship to these lineages and carry their work with shared reverence.  All are welcome to visit the Ancestral Skills Village to share stories and deepen our relationship to these skills of past, present, and future.  

Tamara Wilder

Tamara Wilder became fascinated by ancient living skills in at age 19 when she attended an Ancient Living Skills gathering. She was “hooked” and quickly began incorporating the practice of skills into her daily experience. Ever since, she has been dedicating her life to enjoying, learning, researching, experimenting with, writing about and teaching Paleo Technologies through a variety of programs, workshops & demonstrations on a range of skill topics at a plethora of locations through her company Paleotechnics.

Now, over 30 years later, she runs programs in stringmaking, firemaking, rope making & hunting technology and other fiber arts for grade school students all around Northern California as well as adult workshops in the Pacific Northwest and is co-author of the book Buckskin: The Ancient Art of Braintanning, a series of Paleotechnics Handbooks and numerous chapters in other books.

More info can be found at her website https://www.paleotechnics.com

Hosanna White

Hosanna is a pigment forager, earthenware potter, and earth artist of Northern European-American descent living on Kalapuya land in the foothills of the Cascades in Western Oregon.

Through working closely with the clays and stones of the landscape where she is a guest, she has been drawn into their geological narratives. These ancient and recent history reflected in the rocky landscape, roadsides, and deposits of the valley connect her to the enoughness and beauty of nature’s limits. Facing compulsive consumption, feeling the grief for the land, and challenging complacency have become the inner foundations of her work and purpose, among relationship building and magic making with her materials.

Hosanna has been dedicated to working with wild clays for eight years, since first learning about pit fire pottery at Spirit Weavers in 2016. The unique personalities of each clay, their feel in the hands, and the elemental magic of working with the earth to create beautiful forms has completely captivated her.