Smoking a Deer Skin

Making leather is not easy. There are many steps, and just when you think it's done, you'll here,"Ha! Not yet, got a ways to go." This is one of the steps: Smoking.

After the epedermis has been scraped off and brains pushed in, you smoke your hide. I used my little camp stove and red fir, which makes a nice color. Different woods will impart diffferent colors. This wood made a nice red/orange.

I plan to make a tunic out of this skin and some others I have. A buckskin shirt is far more than a primitive fashion statement, although that's okay in it's own right. But having a shirt like this should be more than a mere fetish. It is a direct connection between the one who wears it and the Earth we walk on. It protects the one who wears it from the thorny, sharp, and sometimes unforgiving landscape. You can run through a bramble patch.

Making leather from animal skin has wisdom to teach. Your mind, also, should run through the bramble patch untroubled.

Fin making flour from breadroot

Fin's relentless PR campaign has been a success at the Moapa River Paiute Reservation. While I mostly stayed in camp, Fin peddled the short distance into town almost every day to talk to the People. We met with the culture committee and Fin made root, pine-nut and berry cakes for them. They seemed to really like them, and today she and a bunch of interested People went on a field trip to find roots.

In other news, Snakes have decided to divide. We are all still committed to the Hoop, but will have separate camps.

Rabbit Woman

Ephedra in Bloom

Dodge Pocket Camp, Southern Nevada

After being given the bum's rush by a local redneck in the Meadow Valley Wash near Carp, NV, we set up camp in the Dodge Pockets of the Clover Mountain Range. We spent two weeks there in a burnt-out, cowed-out landscape with Joshua trees, yucca and cactus gardens. After four days Fin found Rabbit Woman (Rabbit Guts) in bloom on the Northeast slope of the hill just to our South. It was like coming home, the taste was pure and sweet. We also found blue ephedria in bloom, fragrant and pitchy. Even in this desimated landscape, the hoop still lives. For how long?