Ancestral skills have been my focus, my joy, my passion, for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains with parents who dragged me out hiking as often as possible. A fascination with and love for the natural world and for making things with my own two hands have always been a part of me, as has a longing for the lifestyles I read about from homestead and pre-colonization America. Discovering a community of people who practiced and taught primitive skills when I was a teenager changed my life and inspired me to devote myself to these skills. I have been studying, practicing and teaching them since the mid-1990s. With both a master’s degree in Environmental Science and a hands-on education in ancestral skills, I strive to combine knowledge of the natural world with the physical skills of our human ancestors.
I teach a wide range of topics, but I call my business Buckskin Revolution because helping people learn to sew beautiful, durable buckskin clothing from brain tanned buckskin has long been a specialty of mine. This is not only because it is an amazing and magical material, but because of what it does for the wearer and what it represents. It speaks to that place inside us that remembers what it feels like to know the world around us intimately, to shape the substance of our lives from the raw materials around us. Wearing it reminds us what it is to be human and to feel connected to the wild within and around us.
