Up the River
For me, there has always been one way in which I have wanted to reclaim a part of Portland which has always been only scenery to me, and that is kayaking the Willamette. Portland’s river is, for many of us, something beautiful to stare at on the way across a bridge or something to avoid at all costs lest we birth hermaphroditic children like the fish who dwell within it. Taking the time (five days to be exact) to learn the river at its own eye level provided an entirely different perspective than the one I was used to from driving above it. Looking up at the world from the water is a privilege every Portlander should know, if only once. Thaddeus, Kilii, David, Justin and myself had the astute privilege for 64 miles of upstream paddling, often times all to ourselves.
Umiak on Paper
Willamette Week - Best Lifeboat
Some kids have farewell dances or pizza parties, but the eighth-grade class at Portland Waldorf School built an Inuit whaling boat to celebrate their graduation. With the help of local wilderness organization TrackersNW and the Ancestral Lifeways Community , the 30-student class spent four days on a permaculture farm outside of […]
The Class(y) Umiak
On Saturday, June 2nd my teacher Francine Adams, myself and 29 other eighth graders from the Portland Waldorf School (PWS) as well as seven staff from Trackers NW arrived at Cedar Grove Farm, a permaculture farm outside of Port Orford, Oregon. One of our tasks was to build an umiak, a traditional Inuit whaling […]
Pirates of San Juan
Six of us arrived on Shaw Island last Thursday evening after just barely making it on the 6:30 ferry from Anacortes, Washington. We still needed to pick up tide charts and so drove around for about a half hour in search of a store but soon realized that the only store was the one next […]
Cone-Cone-Chweee!
The song of Red-Winged Blackbirds trills the morning air as we walk along the shores of the marsh. Suddenly, a flock of thousands explodes off the water, honking and darkening the sky. The geese are heading north again!
We had ventured to Eugene ostensibly to harvest cattails, though we spent a great deal of time […]
Freezing Rivers of Molten Rock
In our continuing series of adventures-until-we-drop-dead, the Ancestral Lifeways group arrived at the old volcano in Central Oregon, Glass Buttes, to collect obsidian and dacite stone for making stone tools (also known as flintknapping).
Here elder Goode Jones works on one of the enormous boulders we dug out of the earth, spalling out large flat […]
Jon Young, Seven Generations, and Beyond
Jon Young gave a great lecture on Friday, speaking to the group about the importance of cultural mentoring, the system that he has evolved over time side by side with native elders from the Akamba of Kenya, San of the Kalahari, Haudenosaunee of the Northeast and Polynesians of Hawa’i’i.
So what is this cultural mentoring thing […]
Molasses? I don’t eat any part of the mole.
When the Wild Foods Potluck first began, noone could have imagined the sheer creativity of those involved. In the six months since it began, Portland has been able to sit down to dinner with wild plants, wild game, garden greens, and dumpster gleans.
I personally might have to say the last Wild Foods Potluck was the […]