|  Seeing the wolf in the night shadows was not just a matter of superior eyesight. Grandfather’s sense of belonging informed his perceptions. Grandfather knew that he lived with and by a bounty not of his own making. His belonging to a particular place entailed the responsibility of sustaining the livability of that place for future generations. Through his rootedness in place he asserted his connections forward and backward in time. His lessons were both hallowed and haunted.
— Fred Donaldson This section discusses books dealing with specific primitive skills – basketry, pottery, hide tanning, bowmaking, flintknapping – which go beyond simple survival to living well under primitive or wilderness conditions, and, often, turning the necessities of survival into objects of beauty. Many of these books discuss skills that are also covered in the more general primitive skills books, but in much more detail and depth. I doubt that anyone can truly master all these skills; in primitive societies, too, people specialized, and were recognized as boat builders or arrowsmiths or basket weavers. Still, these books are all a pleasure to read, and I have tried to list books that show how survival skills can be made into living skills.
 Edwin Tappan Adney, et al., The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). ISBN 1-560-98296-9. There is not another book like this one. It is a scholarly study of the bark canoes and skin boats of the North American Indian, featuring 224 detailed drawings of just about every type of water craft used by native peoples in North America, including numerous scale drawings. It discusses the history of each type of craft, the materials and tools employed, how to build them, and the way in which the design and construction varied to fit specific needs. The study is arranged according to tribe and region.
 Rachel Brown, The Weaving, Spinning, and Dyeing Book (New York NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), ISBN 0-394-71595-0. This is a massive book, with more than 400 large pages of information, instructions, photographs, and detailed drawings that tell you just about everything you might want to know about weaving, spinning, and dying. The book covers card weaving, the inkle loom, the Hopi belt loom, the backstrap loom, the Navajo loom, and the treadle loom. It describes how to spin wool into yarn using drop spindles, hand spindles, Navajo spindles, the charkha, and different types of spinning wheels, and then how to dye that yarn using natural materials such as beet root, birch bark, bracken fern, elderberries, marigolds, lichens, onion skins, tea leaves, and walnut husks.
 Rita Buchanan, A Dyer’s Garden (Loveland CO: Interweave Press, 1995), ISBN 1-883010-07-1. This small book is an essential resource on using plants as dyes. While it focuses on creating a garden of dye plants, many of the plants discussed can also be found in the North American wild – goldenrod, coneflower, yarrow, broom sedge, cocklebur, ragweed, willow, poplar, black walnut, sumac berries, elderberries, blackberries. More important, the book provides detailed discussions of turning plants into dyes, so you can experiment on your own, and it covers equipment, choice and preparation of yarn, mordanting, making the dyebath, and dying the fibers. The book discusses dozens of individual plants, giving specific dying instructions, each with a color chart showing what the plant dye should look like when used in different ways on different fibers.
 Susan Miller Cavitch, The Natural Soap Book: Making Herbal and Vegetable-Based Soaps (Pownal VT: Storey Books, 1995), ISBN 0-88266-888-9. This is not really about primitive soapmaking, but it is still the clearest and most comprehensive book I know on how to make soap at home. Unlike many contemporary soapmaking books, it discusses using animal fat – lard and tallow – in soapmaking, but its recipes still focus on the use of vegetable oils that are unlikely to be available in a wilderness setting. It discusses the chemistry of soapmaking, has separate chapters on scents, colorants, nutrients, and preservatives, and describes cutting, trimming, and wrapping the soaps once you've made them.
 Comstock, et al., The Traditional Bowyer's Bible, Volume 1 (New York NY: Lyons & Burford, 1993), ISBN 1-55821-206-X; Volume 2 (Guilford CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2000), ISBN 1-58574-086-1; Volume 3 (Guilford CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2000), ISBN 1-58574-087-X. Released in 1992, 1993, and 1994, respectively, these three volumes offer the secrets and techniques of traditional bowmakers whose combined experience totals well over a century. They thoroughly explain every facet of the bowmaking process, from choosing wood to applying finishes, making construction easy even for the first-time bowyer. Leading experts discuss various types of bows and arrows from all over the world, with hundreds of photographs and illustrations. Subjects covered include the selection and seasoning of wood, design, tillering, performance, history, and correct use. The chapter on bow design and performance in the first volume, written by Tim Baker, was based on years of experimentation, and was written with such clarity that it inspired thousands of readers to make their own bows.
 Steven Edholm, et al., Wet-scrape Braintanned Buckskin: A Practical Guide to Home Tanning and Use (Boonville CA: Paleotechnics, 1998) ISBN: 0-96549-654-6. This book is an encyclopedic resource that gives tanners all the basic information they need to get through the process – from skinning the animal to using the finished buckskin – and at the same time provides enough details to make it a long-term reference. It not only sets forth the wet-scrape braintanning method, but also gives information on skinning, tool sharpening, dying, and clothing construction. It also discusses other methods of tanning, including dry-scrape, and offers suggestions for further experimentation. Numerous illustrations and a bibliography.
 Sue Gabriel, et al., The Complete Book of Basketry Techniques (Devon UK: David & Charles, 1999), ISBN 0-7153-0934-X. This book is a comprehensive guide to every aspect of basketmaking – straightforward, practical, with hundreds of photographs of finished baskets and detailed drawings of every weaving technique used. Although geared to material and techniques found in Britain and Northern Europe, everything in the book is adaptable to North America. The book discusses the material, tools, and equipment used in basketmaking; how to make stake-and-strand, frame, ribbed, coiled, plaited, or twined baskets; and how to add borders, handles, and lids. Unlike many step-by-step project books, this text focuses on techniques that are applicable to a wide variety of materials and situations.
 Evard Gibbey, How To Make Primitive Pottery (Liberty UT: Eagle's View Publishing, 1994), ISBN 0-94360-438-9. This is a very helpful book on primitive pottery, with more than sixty photographs showing each step of the process – preparing the clay for use, adding temper, building the pot, and finishing, decorating, and drying the green pot, followed by a detailed discussion of primitive firing techniques. The author then tells how to cook a meal outdoors in a pot you have made yourself. The book describes ancient pottery types from the Anasazi to Guatemala.
 Bruce Grant, Encyclopedia of Rawhide and Leather Braiding (Centreville MD: Cornell Maritime Press, 1972), ISBN 0-87033-161-2. The author is a journalist, born in Texas, with a lifelong interest in leather braiding. In pursuit of this passion, he traveled over much of the world gathering examples and collecting every reference he could find on the subject. The result is truly encyclopedic – more than 500 pages on every sort of braid, button, appliqué, turk’s-head, and buckle, ring, and handle covering you can imagine – rings, bracelets, hatbands, belts, quirts, whips, lariats, horse gear. The book has more than 350 illustrations, really clear step-by-step instructions, and an index, glossary, and bibliography. There is no better source for making beautiful and useful objects not only from leather but from cordage of all kinds.
 Jim Hamm, Bows and Arrows of the Native Americans (New York NY: Lyons & Burford 1991), ISBN 1558211683. With numerous black-and-white photographs, including historical photographs, this book describes in detail how to make self bows, sinew-backed bows, composite bows, bowstrings, arrows, and quivers, using understandable, good-humored prose. This is above all a practical book – not an analysis of bow styles among different groups, but a book for someone who wants to make a bow that is fast and accurate.
 Carol Hart, et al., Natural Basketry (New York NY: Watson-Guptill, 1976), ISBN 0-82303-155-1. This book, for beginners and experienced basketmakers alike, provides a complete guide to making wicker, splint, coiled, and twined baskets. The book explains both how to use commercial materials and how to gather and prepare natural materials, as well as how to make dyes from natural materials. Each section includes two complete step-by-step demonstrations, covering all types of basket shapes, sizes, lids, handles, and decorative techniques. The book discusses the use of round reeds and fibers – jute, sea grass, paper cord, rush – as well as wild materials such as weeping willow branches, honeysuckle vines, cattails, and wisteria runners. The dyes used are made from black walnut, butternut hulls, yellow onion skins, and barberry stems.
 Wyatt Knapp, et al., The Atlatl and Dart Workbook: How to Make Your Own Atlatl and Darts for Competition, Hunting, and Fun (Allendale MI: Onagocag Publishing, 2000). This book is a complete reference guide to building your own atlatl and dart set, with plans for four different atlatls and three different darts. It is ninety pages long, with measured drawings, pictures, and step-by-step instructions. In addition to building instructions, the book contains chapters on atlatl games, safety, and how and where to compete with the atlatl, and hunting and fishing with an atlatl and darts, including plans for an atlatl fishing reel. Order from Atlatl Book, Onagocag Publishing, P.O. Box 555, Allendale, MI 49401-0555.
 Reginald Laubin, et al., American Indian Archery (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), ISBN 0-80612-387-7. Reginald and Gladys Laubin are dancers, whose interest in Native American culture began with dance and ended with them being so thoroughly immersed in Plains Indian culture that they lived as fully accepted members of the Sioux people. This is less a book of specific bowmaking skills than it is a detailed look at the place of bows and arrows in Native American culture, intended to prove, despite the claims of Eurocentric anthropologists, that Indian bows had real power and accuracy . Along the way, the book deals with hunting practice, material culture, mythology, social customs, and games surrounding the use of bows and arrows. Other books will teach you how to make these tools; this book will put them in a cultural context.
 Judy Mofield Mallow, Pine Needle Basketry: From Forest to Finished Project (Asheville NC: Lark Books, 1997), ISBN 1-88737-414-0. There are many wilderness areas in North America where pine needles are easily available. This book explains, with step-by-step instructions and clear illustrations, the technique of coiling and stitching those pine needles together to make baskets. The book covers materials, tools, basic techniques, and, based on the basic basket design, forty projects. The book discusses a number of variations on the basic technique – shaping the coils, dyeing the needles, varying the stitches, adding embellishments, incorporating centers made of leather and wood, and weaving intricate teneriffe rings.
 Matt Richards, Deerskins into Buckskins: How to Tan with Natural Materials: A Field Guide for Hunters and Gatherers (Rexford MO: Backcountry Publishing, 2004). ISBN 0-96586-724-2. This is the completely revised and updated edition of probably the best single written resource on the wet-scrape method of tanning hides. In addition to clear step-by-step instructions on braintanning, it also discusses skinning; stone, bone and wood tools; making rawhide and hide glue; garment construction; and the scientific principles that make tanning work. It has over 130 photos and illustrations. The author has been tanning hides for a long time, and his experimentation has led to quick, simple methods that produce soft, strong, and smoky buckskin.
 Robert Roy, et al., Stone Circles: A Modern Builder's Guide to the Megalithic Revival (White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green, 1999), ISBN 1-89013-203-9. If your notion of primitive skills includes building huge stone monuments like Stonehenge, then this is the book for you. This book takes the reader on a tour of ancient sites, sets forth the adventures and perspectives of contemporary individuals who have built their own circles, describes contemporary circle-raisings, and gives detailed instructions on how to design and construct them yourself. It is not easy to move seven-ton stones, and people only do it when they feel they have a good reason; and this book will give you renewed insight into the spirituality, religion, and technology of our stone-age ancestors.
 Mary Dodds Schlick, Columbia River Basketry: Gift of the Ancestors, Gift of the Earth (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1994), ISBN 0295972890. Baskets made by the people of the mid-Columbia River are among the finest examples of Indian textile art in North America, and they are included in the collections of most major museums. This book is a thorough examination of Columbia River forms of weaving – twined basket hats, root-digging bags, folded cedar bark containers, and the flat twined bag. This is more than an instructional book; the author discusses the baskets in the context of the lives of their creators. ”Baskets are works of art,” she writes, ”but they also carry stories of human ingenuity and survival in its most generous sense.” Still, the book explains the weaving techniques clearly, with extremely detailed photos and illustrations of both techniques and finished products.
 Michael Simpson, Making North American Pottery (Happy Camp, CA: Naturegraph Publishers, 1991), ISBN 0-87961-191-X. The author, part Cherokee and Yakima, was taught by Doris Blue, a Catawba master potter. His short pamphlet details how to gather and prepare clay, build pots by hand, without a wheel, and decorate, slip, burnish, and fire the pottery without a kiln in an open pit, using wood, dung, and grass. The process is illustrated with detailed photos.
 Douglas Spotted Eagle, Making Indian Bows and Arrows . . . The Old Way (Liberty View UT: Eagle’s View Publishing, 1988), ISBN 0-94360-421-4. Most people, I guess, have heard of Douglas Spotted Eagle as a flute player, but he is in fact a noted authority on Native American bows and arrows. His book is written for the beginning craftsman, and has over 150 illustrations, photographs, charts, and diagrams. It discusses acquiring tools and woods; designing the bow to fit your purpose; how to cut and shape the wood; methods for tillering, recurving, backing, and finishing the bow; and making quivers, arrows, and bowstrings.
 Hilary Stewart, Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1994), ISBN 0-29595-803-0. Of the many resources available to the indigenous people of the Northwest Coast, the most vital was fish. The people devised ingenious ways of catching the different species of fish, and the author illustrates their hooks, lines, sinkers, lures, floats, clubs, spears, harpoons, nets, traps, rakes, and gaffs, in more than 450 drawings and 75 photographs, showing with clarity and detail how they were made and used.
 Ginger Summit, et al., The Complete Book of Gourd Craft (Asheville NC: Lark Books, 1996), ISBN 1-887374-55-8. One of the first primitive living skills I remember practicing was sitting patiently and cutting away at a gourd with a sharp fractured rock in order to make a bowl for supper. The result was utilitarian but hardly attractive. This book provides information about growing, drying, and cleaning gourds, and describes more than 55 ways you can decorate them, wrap them, carve them, and add handles, lids, and hinges to them, to turn them into items that are not only useful but beautiful. You will probably not want to make all the suggested projects, but the book will certainly turn on your imagination.
 Gaylord Torrence, The American Indian Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1994), ISBN 0-29597-333-1. A parfleche is made of rawhide, and gets its name from the ability of the tough material to turn aside arrows. Specifically, a parfleche is a container of folded or sewn rawhide, made by many of the Plains Indian peoples as the principal means for storing and transporting their food and possessions, and elaborated with painted designs on the exposed surfaces, often of great abstract beauty. This book is thus actually the catalog of an art exhibit held at the Des Moines Art Center, devoted to showing this unique form of art. For our purposes, the book also provides detailed descriptions of traditional techniques for making both the rawhide and containers of various shapes. It is illustrated with 127 color plates as well as black-and-white historic photographs showing the work of more than forty tribes. It demonstrates, if demonstration were necessary, that even simple utilitarian objects can enhance life in the wilderness with beauty.
 Alta R. Turner, Finger Weaving: Indian Braiding (Cherokee NC: Cherokee Publications, 1989), ISBN 0-935741-13-5. Finger weaving, also called flat braiding, is a very old method of thread interlacement, almost certainly predating the use of looms in most parts of the world. This book teaches the flat braiding techniques and patterns of the North American Plains and Woodland Indians – the diagonal, chevron, double chevron, diamond, double diamond, lightning, double diamond, and arrowhead designs – and then the Peruvian rep braids and cross rep braids. The results are woven sashes, belts, headbands, and bands for trimming your capote. The book contains numerous diagrams and photos, many in color. I have to warn you that making these things is addictive.
 Nancy Turner, Plant Technology of First Peoples in British Columbia (Vancouver BC: University of British Columbia, 1999), ISBN 0-774-80687-7. Most books on wild plants focus on their use as food, but indigenous technologies use plants in almost every aspect of life – housing, clothing, transportation, weapons, fishing lines, basketry. The book is organized by plant group, beginning with algae, and covering lichens, fungi, mosses, ferns, conifers, and flowering plants. For each plant, it discusses both practical uses and methods of preparation, including such various uses ornamentation, scents, cleansing agents, and insect repellants. The book has numerous photographs. The author, an ethnobotanist, has also written two books on edible plants – Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1995), ISBN 0-77480-533-1, and Food Plants of Interior First Peoples (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1997), ISBN 0-77480-606-0.
 Bernard Verdet-Fierz, et al., Willow Basketry (Loveland CO: Interweave Press, 1993), ISBN 0934026882. Willow, in all its forms, is one of the most generally useful of North American plants. This very thorough resource provides a remarkable amount of information about willow – how to harvest, store, and peel it, how to make tools for peeling it, and how to prepare it for use in baskets. Then it provides complete step-by-step instructions for making each basket.
 Alexander Weygers, The Complete Modern Blacksmith (Berkeley CA: Ten Speed Press, 1997), ISBN 0-89815-896-6. This book reprints three classics by the author – The Modern Blacksmith, The Recycling, Use, and Repair of Tools, and The Making of Tools – which are essential for anyone interested in the making, repair, maintenance, or arcana of tools. The book covers just about every tool and technique of the forger’s art – forge design, making your own custom anvil, the needed equipment, developing the correct hammer and body motions, and how to design, sharpen, and temper tools. The book describes how to make screwdrivers, pliers, shovels, hinges, door latches, water pumps, stonecarving chisels, decorative wallhooks, candle sticks, and carving, cutting and sharpening tools.
 George White, Craft Manual of North American Indian Footwear (Arlee MT: Frank E. White, 1969), ISBN 1-884693-00-8. This little book, hand-stapled and illustrated by the author, may be hard to find, but it is worth searching for. It consists of detailed step-by-step instructions and – most important – detailed patterns for twenty-six different kinds of moccasins from the Iroquois, Yellow Knives, Kootenai, Giljak, Oneida, Navajo, Apache, Salish, Paiute, and other native peoples, covering center seam, gathered toe, shaped sole, side seam, and other styles. A general introduction describes how to make a foot tracing, measure the height of the foot, and sew leather.
 John Whittaker, Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), ISBN 0-292-79083-X. This is a comprehensive, detailed, scholarly, and practical text on the making of stone tools, which looks at flintknapping from the archaeological perspective of interpreting stone tools as well as making them. The book proceeds from the beginner level, describes the tools and materials needed, and gives step-by-step instructions for making the basic stone tool types, accompanied by numerous diagrams and drawings of the stone tools. The techniques covered include hard-hammer percussion, pressure flaking, and soft-hammer percussion. The book has lists of resources for knapping supplies, newsletters and journals, and flintknapping events.
 Edna Wilder, Secrets of Eskimo Skin Sewing (Fairbanks AK: University of Alaska Press,, 1976), ISBN 1-88996-312-7. Edna Wilder is one of the world's best-known practitioners and modernizers of traditional Eskimo skin sewing techniques. This little book is her definitive guide to traditional Inuit tanning, cutting, sewing, construction, and decoration of baby booties, mittens, mukluks, parkas, hats, belts, and toys. It gives clear and complete instructions along with detailed drawings and eight pages of color photographs.
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