Learning Ancient Lessons About City Life on a Rural Retreat
In June, 170 people, ranging in age from infants to grandparents, assembled on a 220-acre patch of private land 10 miles northwest of Carlton, Washington, population 345. Saskatoon Circle, a weeklong “primitive and traditional living-skills gathering,” is the brainchild of Katie Russell, who teaches children and adults how to track, hunt, and field-dress animals—as well as process their hides. Saskatoon is inclusive in its spiritual orientation, and primitivist in its philosophy: The annual gathering “looks toward ancestral skills in order to figure out what’s going to help humanity weather the storms of the future,” Russell told me.
People did a lot of things at Saskatoon: They harvested and processed rabbits; they cooked festive meals without running water or electricity; they gave lectures about condors and the ecological consequences of hunting with lead bullets; they weaved and carved and brain-tanned animal hides. They also talked, endlessly. These conversations, ranging from chatter to soul-plumbing philosophical rumination, struck me as the manifestation of a powerful need to connect, especially without the intermediation of technology. Participants came from as far as Alaska and New York City to connect—both with others, and with the Earth. Saskatoon offered me, too, the chance to disconnect from technology and reconnect to the natural world; experience the cohesion of a self-selecting community committed to ancient skills and values; and reflect on the degree to which this sort of life—rural, socially tightknit, technologically minimalist—resembled the life of our ancestors.
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