About Woniya and Buckskin Revolution
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Buckskin Revolution is the result of decades of devotion to practicing and teaching ancestral skills and other skills that support a wilder, more land based lifestyle. I am always striving to find the best balance between living a well-rounded primal human life and staying plugged in enough with the modern world to help teach and inspire folks toward skills and practices that will help them do the same.
I had the great fortune of being raised in the Sierra Nevada foothills by parents who were devoted to the outdoors. My weekends were spent hiking and looking at wild flowers with my mom, or walking with my dad on the trails he ran ultra-marathons on. An only child of divorced parents, I grew up pretty independent. The natural world was always my steadiest companion. I was also an avid reader. Most of my childhood games were myself as Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins harvesting wild foods (in the form of dirt clods and clover blossoms) to “see me through the winter”. My love of the natural world led me to study Biology and Environmental studies in college. In 1994 during a summer field course I found a shed mountain goat fleece in the Teton mountains, and taught myself to spin the fiber into yarn. The satisfaction of finding a material in the wild and turning it into something tangible I could use in daily life was unlike anything I had ever experienced. When I learned about the primitive skills gathering Rabbitstick Rendezvous through another backpacking field course the following summer, I knew I had to go. That gathering blew my sheltered little teenage mind and changed the course of my life. I devoted whatever time wasn’t necessary for college classes to studying ancestral skills. By 1998 I had graduated, done my first all stone age expedition, and was teaching at Rabbitstick and the other gatherings that were beginning to pop up as the modern “primitive skills movement” was gaining momentum. |
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Since then I have lived a variety of ways, from a more modern lifestyle while studying for my Masters degree in Environmental Science, to living largely off of wild food and game in northern Wisconsin, to growing my own food and raising meat animals on an off grid homestead in Northern Oregon. For years I ran programs on that land, long term residential intensives I called “Skills for Real Living” that focused on primitive skills, farming, natural building, off grid and homestead life skills, and shorter day and weekend courses. 
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I have taught a wide range of skills. Fiber arts, wild foods, living without refrigeration, food preservation, humane slaughter and animal processing, basketry, hide tanning and buckskin sewing have all been particular areas of focus for me.
For the past decade a lot of my teaching has been about buckskin sewing. It is a wonderful material work with and wear, but a big part of why I am so passionate about it is because of the powerful effect it has on the psyche. I have seen it call to people from all walks of life. I have had countless strangers walk up to me at the gas station or grocery store and ask if they can touch my clothing. All of us can trace our lineage back to ancestors who wore buckskin, or something very like it. It is an integral part of our evolutionary history. Wearing and interacting with it helps reminds us what it is to be human, to have the animals we hunt become our muscles and clothe our bodies, to spend nights staring into the glowing coals of the campfire instead of into a computer screen. |
While a lot of what I teach can be characterized as “Survival Skills”, what is most inspiring for me is teaching people the skills that they can use not just in extreme wilderness adventures, but also to help provide for their everyday needs: Food, Clothing, Shelter, Containers. The degree to which we can point to the things in our lives and know where they came from and whose hands crafted them is the degree to which we can begin to divorce ourselves from dependence on the industrial complex and global capitalism that are doing our world great harm.
I love making things with my hands. I love being out on the land harvesting food and raw materials. I love knowing that I have the capacity to provide for my needs from goods from the natural world. I love everything about these skills. But I don’t practice or teach them just for their own sake. I do them because they make a difference.
Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving into complex creatures with amazing capacity to understand, respond to and live in the natural world. We have spent the last few centuries becoming increasingly rapidly divorced from it. I see ancestral skills and other practices to connect to the living world around us as a way to find our way back to the sense of connection we evolved to have and long for.
I believe that these skills are important, powerful, and revolutionary.
After years of living and teaching in Oregon, I realized that there was something I was still missing- some of the deeper, less physical skills. After being a teacher in my field for 20 years, I left my homestead life to be a student in a nature connection, community building and mentoring program. Integrating these skills with my physical skills helped me reach new places in my teaching and in myself and gave me a greater sense of purpose, belonging and well being in the world.
In the last year I had the amazing opportunity to participate in the survival adventure of a lifetime on Season 6 of the History channel’s television show “Alone”, and it is hard to imagine a greater test of a lifetime of devotion to these life ways. The deeper connection practices felt every bit as important in this experience as the decades of honing physical survival skills.
Living the Buckskin Revolution is about making the things you need for your life with your own two hands, but it’s also about knowing what is happening in the woods around you by understanding the different voices of the birds. It’s about standing upright in your body and feeling the ground beneath your feet. It’s about sitting around a campfire catching the stories of your friends and family.
It is my passion to bring these skills into the world and to help inspire people toward their own revolutions in a variety of ways; through hands on classes, the books I am working on, the tools make and sell, and the educational videos I create.
Thanks for joining me. Viva la revolution!
In the last year I had the amazing opportunity to participate in the survival adventure of a lifetime on Season 6 of the History channel’s television show “Alone”, and it is hard to imagine a greater test of a lifetime of devotion to these life ways. The deeper connection practices felt every bit as important in this experience as the decades of honing physical survival skills.
Living the Buckskin Revolution is about making the things you need for your life with your own two hands, but it’s also about knowing what is happening in the woods around you by understanding the different voices of the birds. It’s about standing upright in your body and feeling the ground beneath your feet. It’s about sitting around a campfire catching the stories of your friends and family.
It is my passion to bring these skills into the world and to help inspire people toward their own revolutions in a variety of ways; through hands on classes, the books I am working on, the tools make and sell, and the educational videos I create.
Thanks for joining me. Viva la revolution!
