A Field Guide To Starting A Primitive Skills Group

 By Kevin Haney, Coordinator

Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills Group

  Published in the Bulletin of Primitive Technology, Spring, 2003, No. 25

 

You’ve always been enamored with the idea of being able to survive in the wild using just your own knowledge and ingenuity.  You’ve taken a few primitive skills classes and read a bunch of books on the subject.  You can start a friction fire (most of the time), build a passable shelter, and find enough food in the woods to prevent you from starving to death.  What now?  Where do you go from there?  How do you get beyond that wall that seems to come upon all of us sometime or other in the course of our primitive skills development? 

I’m a firm believer that no matter what you’ve managed to accomplish by yourself, a person’s proficiency in primitive skills really doesn’t start to come into it’s own until you are a part of a community, a group where everyone has skills that they do better than most, where everyone pushes everyone else to exceed their current skill limits, and where everyone supports everyone else in their efforts.  It can be said that no primitive skill was created or exists except within a community of practitioners.  How to find or create that community will be the subject of this article.

If you are lucky, a primitive skills community already exists close enough to you that you can become part of it.  It’s surprising how many such groups do in fact exist.  The best place to find a group is Andrew Koransky’s web page that lists over 40 such groups all over the country (see the online resource section at the end of the article for the address).  Another great place to seek out like-minded compatriots is the Bulletin Board section at the back of each issue of this Bulletin.  If you’ve taken classes from a school, it may have class lists available so students can contact each other.  There are also a number of Internet primitive skills email lists where you can meet people that have similar interests. 

However, if you are not lucky enough to find what you are looking for within easy traveling distance, you are faced with the prospect of creating your own group, more or less from scratch.  This prospect is not as daunting as it may sound.  However, certain ingredients are needed in order to create a group that will stand the test of time (countless groups come into existence and then fade away after a year or two).  On a practical level, the basic ingredients needed for a successful, sustainable group are a leader or coordinator, enough core people that are skilled enough to share their skills, a place to meet, and effective modes of communication.  On a conceptual level, you also need to have clear goals for the group, what it is trying to accomplish and where it is trying to get to.  We will deal with each of these areas in turn. 

Goals

Since it is necessary to have an idea of where you are going in order to know if you are there or not, we will first talk about group goals.  The most important point to remember here is that your goals are not static and unchanging—they are a moving target that evolves over time.  As the group membership changes and grows, its goals will naturally change and evolve as well.  Your group will of necessity be different after it has been around for a number of years than when it was first created.  A natural progression of goals might be as follows: 

1.  Trying to get enough core people to hold periodic meetings

2.  Trying to become large enough to be sustainable into the foreseeable future

3.  Trying to increase the base skill level of the group as a whole

4.  Reaching out to the general public to share skills

5.  Fulfilling some higher purpose by doing all of these things. 

Some personal history may serve to illustrate this succession of goals.  The Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills (MAPS) Group was created back in 1997 as a result of four people (Joe Schilling, Carl DeMarco, Cheryl Miller, and myself) talking on an Internet email list (yes, the irony of a primitive skills group getting started over the high-tech Internet has been pointed out to us).  At first, it was tough just to get a handful of people together regularly to share skills.  Over the course of the first several years, the group slowly grew to the point where that was no longer a problem.  Our problem then became getting enough teachers to share skills with all of us neophytes.  Eventually, enough experienced people became connected so this was less and less of a problem.  At that point, the goal became to raise the skill level of the group as a whole to the point where now, if someone requests a person to teach a certain skill or craft for an event, there are at least several MAPS folks that can step up to the plate.  Once your group reaches that point, it then becomes feasible to start doing programs for the general public by reaching out to outdoors, hiking, scouting and other nature-oriented groups.  You may even decide to do a big, multi-day primitive skills rendezvous.  However, it takes time and a lot of perseverance to get to that point. 

               

Making a fire at the MAPS primitive camp                            Jim Roaix teaching pottery

Coordination

Perhaps the first thing you must have to get your group going is a leader or coordinator.  You need one person who is willing to take on the organization of the group and just be the momentum that keeps it going.  It is less effective if this responsibility is shared, as then the multiple coordinators may not fully take ownership of the process.  Not that the coordinator shouldn’t seek out and get help, but ideally there should be one person willing to assume the ongoing responsibility of running the group.  The coordinator doesn’t necessarily have to be the person with the best primitive skills.  They should, however, be the person with the best organizational and communications skills  (and having good people skills doesn’t hurt either).  The coordinator must not be easily discouraged as there will be many times, especially in the beginning, when they will want to give up.  Perseverance is thus perhaps the most necessary quality. 

Passing it on to the next generation...

Even with all the perseverance in the world, however, events may intervene and you may need to designate a new coordinator at some point, maybe because the present one is moving away or just can no longer spend the time needed to keep your group going.  While you may not have any choice in the matter, I will warn you that your group is never more vulnerable than when passing on the mantle of leadership.  If the new coordinator can provide stability and keep the momentum going, then the change may indeed work out.  However, a lot of groups fold after a new person takes charge that is not really up to the task. 

In addition to a coordinator, you will also need a minimum number of folks that are skilled enough to share their skills with others.  If you don’t have at least a half dozen people like that, you will be handicapped from the beginning.  These experienced people will form the core of the group.  This core will change and hopefully grow over time as people move away and come in, but its size should be kept from decreasing if the group is not to atrophy.  If the group as a whole consists of less than about a dozen people, the normal fluctuations in attendance that occur will make it very difficult to sustain periodic meetings.  With regard to another issue you will have to address, MAPS encourages the participation of children in our activities because we believe that it is one of our highest duties to pass along these skills to the next generation.  However, if the children are younger than about 8 or 9, their attention span may be too short to really get much out of it and they may distract the older folks. 

Location

Of course you will need a place to meet.  Ideally, it should be a fairly large piece of private land that is wild enough where you can practice your skills without raising the eyebrows (or ear hairs) of your neighbors.  If you try to build a debris hut or make a fire in a local park, for instance, you may meet resistance from some of the less-than-sympathetic rangers out there.  However, it may be possible to work out an arrangement with local park officials, perhaps trading the right to meet in the park periodically for doing skills demonstrations for park programs.  While such an arrangement may work out in the short term, it is not the ideal situation. 

If you have more than one suitable location, rotating the meeting place spreads the responsibilities around a little, but something can be said for having a permanent location as well.  You will most likely at some point want to construct a primitive camp and long-term shelters and work areas, and if this is done on public land (no matter how remote), it is only a matter of time before they are found and destroyed.  MAPS has a primitive camp on six private acres in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland consisting of a tipi, a debris hut, various fire pits, a knapping pit, a pottery firing pit, a primitive cooking complex, and other work areas.  The area is secluded enough that the police have never shown up due to reports of noises or strange activities going on in the woods, even though we are in the shadow of Camp David! 

You will have more success attracting a sustainable number people if you are close to a major urban area.  If you live 100 miles from nowhere, even though you may have the ideal physical location, primitive skills practitioners within driving distance are going to be few and far between.  In short, the place does not really matter as long as it is readily accessible by your group and you can do what you want to do there.  

Communication

Having effective means of communications is one of the most important requirements of a viable primitive skills group.  And by “effective”, I mean electronic.  I will go so far as to say that if your group has to rely on the post office, stamps, pieces of paper, and other relics of a bygone era to communicate, you will ultimately fail.  MAPS does all of its communication electronically via email lists and a web site.  This is essential in order to pass on all the information on events and other things that come along on a daily basis.  It’s also necessary if you want to plan something on the spur of the moment, say go out for a survival outing next weekend.  Since probably 90-95% of people these days have access to a computer, hardly anyone is left out of the loop.  Even those few folks that don’t own a computer can go to the public library and get a free email account (e.g., Hotmail) and receive email. 

I would recommend that you have both a private, moderated email list and a public discussion-oriented list.  As the MAPS Coordinator, I maintain a private email list that functions as the main method of communication for MAPS and currently has almost 200 people on it (just try mailing out that many flyers or newsletters on a regular basis!).  Only I can send messages to this list, which is preferable because some level of moderation is needed in order to prevent spam, viruses, and just plain old inappropriate messages.  MAPS also has a public Yahoo discussion list that anyone can send a question or message to, or join in a discussion already in progress (see the online resource section below).  Anyone can create and use these free groups. 

The second most important method of communication is a web site.  Creating a site should be one of your first orders of business after your group is put together.  When MAPS created its own web site back in 2001, it greatly increased information dissemination and participation in events.  Besides posting a schedule of your events, a web site also provides a great venue for publishing articles and other writings, selling primitive items that your members have made, and posting pictures of past events, which helps generate interest for future events.  These days, you can easily set up a professional-looking web site for less than $100 per year (including domain name registration), even if you are not a computer expert.  When you do so, you’ll start getting contacted by people from all over the world and draw in many more local folks as well.  The only suggestion here is to keep the site, especially the main page, clean and simple with a clear navigation menu—too many sites try to cram too much information onto the main page with the result that the site is confusing and the information hard to find.  After you’ve created your site, you can become linked to all of the other primitive skills sites out there and thus further increase your public exposure.

Two things that help with the email lists, web sites, and communications in general are to have an easily remembered name and a good logo for your group.  The name should convey what you do and, although not absolutely necessary, it helps if it has a good acronym like “MAPS”.  After you choose a name, you should try to register for the corresponding domain name for your web site—even if you don’t create one in the beginning, you probably will later.  A good logo provides immediate identification of information from your group, makes a nice identifying feature for your web site, and provides other opportunities like letterheads, banners, and t-shirts. 

Another potentially effective, but much more labor intensive method of contacting interested people is by placing flyers for your group up at local outdoors and sporting goods stores, colleges, and other public places.  The flyers should clearly state who you are, what you do, and how to contact you.  It is also useful to print up and carry around some business cards with the contact information for your group so that you can give them to interested individuals you might meet.  You can easily print these yourself on a computer without having to go to a professional printer.  One last suggestion on publicity--it is very helpful to create a relationship with someone at your local newspaper.  The editor of the Outdoors and Recreation section would be a good place to start.  A story about your group or one of your events can generate significant local interest.  

Joe Schilling demonstrating the bow drill for the camera at a powwow

Planning Events

When you’ve decided what you want to do with your group, got a coordinator, a place to meet, and a way to communicate, you will of course want to start getting together and sharing your skills and having fun!  You shouldn’t do this on a willy-nilly basis, however.  There is something to be said for setting aside a regular meeting date, say the second Saturday of every month, but in my experience that rigidity soon becomes a weight that holds you back.  I would recommend scheduling a meeting whenever you can get a good number of folks together, as often as you would like to.  If you strive for monthly or more frequent meetings, that pace will be hard to sustain over the long run.  MAPS tried monthly meetings in the beginning and it soon became apparent that such a schedule would just be too hard to keep up, both on the event host and on the small number of skills teachers.  Consequently, we now meet every couple of months and as a result, our attendance went from 5-12 people per event to 15-30 people per event, drawn from a five-state area.  It is essential that you schedule your events far enough in advance so that people can work them into their own schedules.  One month before the event is a minimum and two months is even better.  Any less and you will be lucky to get even a few people to show up. 

Some groups choose to concentrate on a single skill or craft for each meeting.  However, that usually will work to reduce the attendance because there will inevitably be a number of folks that aren’t interested in that particular topic.  MAPS usually has a two-day event and we schedule 2-4 different people to share skills with us for several hours each over the course of the weekend.  That way, someone is more likely to find something they are interested in and attend.  In addition, we always cook a primitive dinner and have an evening campfire and work drumming, story telling, and blanket trading into the event.  Many of the best times are shared around the fire at night, after all of the more formal learning of the day is over (and then there are always the night stalking games!). 

We also try to intersperse these general events with more formal classes, especially for skills that require a longer period to really learn the basics.  If you have experienced people that would like to run a day or weekend class on a specific topic, that will provide more in depth experience than can be obtained from a brief introductory session.  Some of the classes we have had recently include primitive blacksmithing, moccasin making, hide tanning, flint knapping, and bow making.  These are areas for which you really need at least one or two whole days to produce a finished product. 

Speaking of classes, if there is a primitive skills school in your area, you should try and develop a good relationship with it (see the last section for a list of schools).  MAPS has such a relationship with Tim MacWelch’s excellent school called Earth Connection in Warrenton, Virginia.  The complimentary, symbiotic relationship is good for both parties as MAPS funnels students to school classes and many school students wish to participate in MAPS activities. 

Mac Maness teaching brain tanning

Public Programs

At some point, after you have been meeting for a while and your membership grows to a sustainable level, you will likely want to have a larger event open to the general public.  While a primitive skills rendezvous can be a very good thing, one word of warning--before you attempt a large public event, you need to have a group that is large enough so that the event would be successful with just your own members even if not many other people attended.  For MAPS, that point didn’t arrive until we had been in existence for five years.  When we reached the point where our regular meetings were attracting 20-30 folks, it began to seem feasible to attempt a larger public event.  Last year we took the plunge and organized the Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills (MAPS) Meet 2002.  The event turned out to be a huge success, drawing 100 participants and 30 instructors and staff from all around the country. 

Putting on such a big public event takes a lot of work but the rewards are great as well.  You should start planning at least six months in advance.  The key ingredients that went into making our 3-day rendezvous a success were the following: 

1)  we found a great, low-cost place to hold the event (a Quaker nature camp with excellent facilities)

2)  we lined up about 15 high quality instructors that committed to teaching at the event for not too much money

3)  volunteers stepped forward to handle the registration and event coordination responsibilities.  

Consequently, we were able to keep registration prices low (an important point for these kinds of events).  Based on last year’s success, we’ve decided to make this an annual event and expand it to four days (see the MAPS web site for information on MAPS Meet 2003).  If you do decide to host a large public event like this, advertising in this Bulletin and other related magazines like Wilderness Way and Primitive Archer would be recommended as they offer a pretty good bang for the buck.  However, you need to make sure that your event doesn’t overlap another similar event, either geographically or by being held at the same time.  Another issue you will have to address is the need for liability insurance; however, an adequate policy can be obtained for just a few hundred dollars if you shop around. 

Speaking of money, all groups must face this question sooner or later--Do you want to try to turn a profit with your activities?  While it would be nice to be able to get paid for doing what you love to do, the hard fact is that a given area can only support so many professional primitive skills instructors, and that number is pretty small.  The MAPS philosophy has been not to charge for anything unless we absolutely have to.  We do what we do because we love to do it, not because we want to collect pretty little pictures of dead presidents.  We only charge a fee if there are raw materials that need to be purchased beforehand, or if a professional skills instructor wants to do an intensive class in one of their areas of specialty, something for which they would ordinarily receive pay for.  It’s surprising that even what you may consider to be a low fee for an event will turn away a significant number of people (primitive skills practitioners seemed to be mysteriously grouped on the lower economic rungs for some reason). 

Once your group is firmly established, there are many ways that you can reach out and introduce primitive skills to the general public, if that is what you decide you want to do.  You can do knapping demonstrations at gem and mineral shows, do skills programs for scouting and school groups, build authentic aboriginal shelters for display purposes at parks and museums, do tracking and nature awareness programs for hiking clubs, and connect with local reenactors (which are a large community in themselves).  Volunteering for these types of events will serve the greater purpose of spreading a knowledge of primitive skills, but it will also serve the ancillary purpose of bringing people into your group as they discover that there are people out there with interests and beliefs like them. 

Another connection that you might want to try to make is with the Native American community in your area.  While it may be necessary to first build some bridges and establish trust, they may be receptive to what you are trying to do and you may be able to create a mutually beneficial relationship.  MAPS took its first step in this direction when we were invited by the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape to demonstrate primitive skills and crafts at a powwow on Assateague Island last year.  The demonstrations were well received and a number of beneficial connections made.  It might be worthwhile to reach out to powwow organizers in your own area and offer your services. 

There are many possible measures of success in these types of endeavors.  In the end, what it comes down to is that your group will be successful if it accomplishes what you want it to.  And for most of us, that includes helping as many people as possible become more proficient at the whole range of primitive skills and living in harmony with the Earth.  If we can serve as a constructive counterbalance to the destruction, misunderstanding, and non-appreciation of the natural world that is all around us, that’s a pretty good legacy to leave, and its also a pretty good reason to go out there and create your own group!

Online Resources

Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills Group web site – http://www.mapsgroup.org

Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills Group Yahoo site - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MAPS-meet/?yguid=120440611

Primitive Skills Groups/clubs - http://koransky.com/Trackers/TrackerClubs.html

Primitive Skills Schools listed by state - http://www.hollowtop.com/schools.htm

Earth Connection School - http://earth-connection.com/

Society of Primitive Technology - http://primitive.org/

Primitive Technology Home Page - http://ic.net/~tbailey/Primitive.html

Primitive Skills Listserv - http://pages.infinit.net/afb/priskar1.htm

Kevin Haney is one of the founders and the Coordinator of the Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills Group.  For more information about them or their activities, see their web site at www.mapsgroup.org or call Kevin at 301-271-5023.

 

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