Instructors

Barron has been making object his whole life. He started forging, casting and carving around 1970 and hasn’t stopped since. Earlier than that he started helping his granddad with simple timber frames and other homesteading skills.

Classes Barron typically teaches include wood bowl and wood spoon carving.

Joan made her first tipi made in 1992 – a 14’ tipi made to instructions sent her by Darry Wood, a master tipi maker. She and her husband used it for many years, going to the Earthskills workshops/Rivercane Rendezvous, PowWow’s, and Living History Pre-1840 Rendezvous. When they moved to North Carolina, to the same town where Darry lived, she was invited to look over his shoulder while he was sewing. She has been making and selling high quality, custom canvas tipis for nearly 30 years!

A potter since 1990, her work has evolved as functional stoneware pottery with a combination of glazes that break and flow in blues and greens, over patterns inspired by ancient peoples.

Learn more about Joan here

James Clinkscales resides in the upstate of South Carolina where he hunts, forages and thrives on his homestead farm with his chickens and goats. Bee keeping and paddling whitewater and flatwater whenever possible are his passions.  A lifelong primitive skills student and practitioner, avocational archeologist and lover of life, James is always looking for a new adventure in life.

Leif Robert Diamant Is a lifetime student, teacher, and lover of Nature. He is also a licensed psychotherapist, ordained interfaith/interspiritual minister, organic farmer, and small forest steward.  He began teaching edible and medicinal wildplant classes in the 1970s and has taught at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens, UNC, Duke and throughout the state. His work has shifted to the intimate experience of Nature as an essential part of wellbeing, survival, and thriving for humans and the planet. Sacred Ecology and Nature Spirituality  are ways to connect with and experience Nature as Teacher about Life and Death, Creative Source, Healer, and Beloved. Leif teaches popular classes at Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival, and has taught at the Death Faire and also Climate Change Conference in Pittsboro and at Warren Wilson College and NC Annual Professional Counselors Conference and the previous five Piedmont Earthskills Gatherings. He lives and tends on a 42 acre farm/forest in Silk Hope.

Doug Elliott is a naturalist, herbalist, storyteller, basket maker, back-country guide, philosopher, and harmonica wizard. For many years made his living as a traveling herbalist, gathering and selling herbs, teas, and remedies. doug elliott with homemade basket.

He has spent a great deal of time with traditional country folk and indigenous people, learning their stories, folklore and traditional ways of relating to the natural world. In recent years he has performed and presented programs at festivals, museums, botanical gardens, nature centers and schools from Canada to the Caribbean. He has been a featured storyteller at the National Storytelling Festival. He has lectured and performed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and conducted workshops for the Smithsonian Institution. He has led ranger training sessions for the National Park Service and guided people on wilderness experiences from down-east Maine to the Florida Everglades. He was named harmonica champion at Fiddler’s Grove Festival in Union Grove, N.C. He is the author of five books, many articles in regional and national magazines, has recorded a number of award winning albums of stories and songs, and is occasionally seen on PBS-TV, and the History and National Geographic Channels.

In recent years he has received a variety of honors. The National Storytelling Network (the largest storytelling membership organization in the world) inducted him into their Circle of Excellence for “exceptional commitment and exemplary contribution to the art of storytelling.” The International Herb Association presented him with the Otto Richter Award honoring his work with herbs and useful wild plants. The National Association for Interpretation (the professional organization of park rangers, naturalists, museum curators, etc.) gave him the Master Front Line Interpreter Award for his “mastery of interpretive techniques, program development, and design of creative projects” celebrating the natural world and our human connection to nature.

Elliott’s passion for the natural world developed in early childhood roaming the woods and waters around his home. His dad used to say, “That boy knows what’s under every rock between here and town.”

He still roams the woods today. He has traveled from the Canadian North to the Central American jungles studying plant and animal life and seeking out the traditional wisdom of people with intimate connections to the natural world. And he still looks under rocks. These days he uncovers more than just a few strange critters; he brings to light the human connection to this vibrant world of which we are a part.

Learn more about Doug here

Jeff , MS (in Biology), has been a Naturalist, Outdoor Educator and Primitive Skills Instructor for more than 30 years. He works with school groups, nature centers, museums, scout troops and summer camps, builds full-sized wigwams and longhouses and replicates primitive tools and artifacts for display. His areas of special interest include fiber arts, flintknapping, basketry, edible and utilitarian plants, and nature awareness. He travels widely in the Eastern U.S. teaching at rendezvous, gatherings and historic fairs. He has written a how-to manual on building wigwams, and an instructors’ manual entitled Teaching Primitive Skills to Children. His new book on natural fibers and ropemaking is available directly from him.

Learn more about Jeff here

Jeff welcomes correspondence and can be reached via email at argskids@optonline.net, or at 245 Red Dog Lane, Whittier, NC, 28789.

Alex has been learning and teaching primitive and traditional living skills since 1995. He began with a formative apprenticeship with Steve Watts, the founder of the Society of Primitive Technology and director of the Aboriginal Studies Program at the Schiele Museum of Natural History.  In 1997, Alex completed his degree in Outdoor Experiential Education at Appalachian State University.  He has worked and taught at Earthcamp, Earthskills Rendezvous, Mountain Quest, LEAF Festival, Wild Abundance, Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills Gathering, and Florida Earthskills, as well as in public and private schools. Alex lives in a strawbale house that he built on his off-the-grid homestead in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He prides himself on continually learning and improving upon his skills in order to practice a more sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle.

Fuz is an endangered species biologist, Earthskills teacher, musician and storyteller. He has over 25 years as a wilderness instructor, naturalist, and research biologist for organizations such as 4H, National Wildlife Federation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, US Forest Service, US Park Service, and the Green River Preserve. Fuz coordinated the Earthskills Rendezvous for 8 years, and has now founded the Piedmont Earthskills Gathering in central North Carolina. Go ahead, ask him about birds.

Sangoma Oludoye is a sacred activist and cultural arts educator. She is an elder of the Primitive Earthskills Leadership Council, Wild Intelligence Year of the Coyote program and a traditional Yoruba priestess and chief of Oyotunji African Village, in Sheldon, SC. She has facilitated women’s empowerment retreats and earth camps for youth from a diversity of communities for more than three decades.

Learn more about Sangoma here

Snow Bear has been an environmental educator for more than 30 years. He’s embarked upon a life-long pursuit of knowledge with an emphasis in living skills, medicinal and edible plants, utilitarian uses of plants, and world rhythms. He’s studied with elders from the Cherokee, Creek, Lakota, Seminole, and Ojibway tribes. He has been involved with the founding of several environmental education organizations in the Southeast, including Earthskills Rendezvous.

Earthskills are of the hand and eye, yet also of the heart and mind”. – Snowbear

Raised in NC , Re-wilder, Feral child wrangler, Homesteader

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Specializing in primitive pottery and collecting most of his own raw materials and clay, Turnstone teaches the craft of pottery using ancestral methods. His classes are casual and informative and you can drop in on any time and stay as long as you like!

Towards the end of the gathering, he will fire all pottery in an open fire, which is rarely done in modern times.