|  Humanitys failure to act in defense of the Earth is conventionally explained as a problem of knowledge: not enough people yet understand the dangers or know what to do about them. An alternative explanation is that this failure represents a fundamental problem of motivation. People know enough, but they do not care enough. They do not care enough because they do not identify themselves with the world as a whole. The Earth is such a big place that it might as well be no place at all. . . . There may not be any ways to save the world that are not, first and foremost, ways for people to save their own places.
Alan Thein Durning No matter who you are or where you are from, your ancestors practiced the sorts of skills described in these books. Learning primitive skills certainly helps you feel at home in the wilderness, with the knowledge that you can survive and even flourish without Gore-Tex or polypropylene, without matches or toilet paper or tents. But more than that, the practice of primitive skills puts you in touch with something deeply human, with a way of life that persisted largely unchanged the most recent African discoveries indicate for 70,000 years.
 Bart Blankenship, et al., Earth Knack; Stone Age Skills for the 21st Century (Salt Lake City UT: Gibbs Smith Publishers, 1996), ISBN 0-87905-733-5. The Blankenships have been in the forefront of those seeking to reconstruct and recreate stone age primitive skills for our time. Many years of teaching at Earth Knack in Colorado have resulted in this text, illustrated with black-and-white line drawings, which deals both with the skills of wilderness survival and with the primitive crafts that constitute stone age culture. Thus the book covers firemaking, cordage, netmaking, braintanning, and bone and stone toolmaking; but also card weaving, dying, basketry, pottery, cooking, gluemaking, clothing construction, and uniquely musical instruments.
 Paul Campbell, Survival Skills of Native California (Salt Lake City UT: Gibbs Smith, 1999), ISBN 1-89278-404-1. This is a huge, highly detailed, and meticulously researched compendium of primitive skills as practiced by native Californians truly an encyclopedia of survival skills. The book includes sections on basic skills, the tools for gathering and preparing food, implements for household and personal needs, and the arts of hunting and fishing. Chapters range from making an elderberry bark skirt to how to stalk, kill, and eat a white-throated woodrat; the fire drill, wickiups, cordage, acorns, pottery, berries, rabbitskin blanket, moccasins, yucca sandals, atlatls, bows and arrows, braintanning, fishing nets, harpoons, fish poison . . . well, you get the idea. The book has numerous diagrams and black-and-white photographs.
 Gregory Davenport, Wilderness Living (Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books, 2001), ISBN 0-8117-2993. The author, director of a wilderness survival school and a retired US Air Force survival instructor, follows up on his earlier Wilderness Survival with a guide to what he calls living by choice in the wild. It is, in fact, pretty much a book on primitive skills, and a very good one at that, although, like many general primitive skills books, it sacrifices detail for breadth. It covers hide tanning, buckskin clothing construction, improvised and semipermanent shelter, firemaking, water procurement, trapping, hunting, fishing, cooking and preserving meat, and the primitive living skills of making cordage, containers, glues, and soap. It is well illustrated with clear pencil sketches and rather murky black-and-white photographs. This is an excellent all-around introductory book on basic wilderness primitive skills.
 Tom Elpel, Participating in Nature (Pony MT: HOPS Press, 2001), ISBN 1-89278-404-1. Tom Elpel, director of Hollowtop School in Montana, author of Botany in a Day, and absolutely all-around nice guy, here shares not only a set of very useful skills but also his view of wilderness, the human place in nature, and the role of primitive skills in our essential humanity. The book discusses braintanning, sinews, hide glue, backpacking, felting with wool, fishing by hand, stone knives, wooden containers, willow baskets, cordage, stalking skills, trapping, and tire shoes. It includes dozens of innovative skills and nearly 200 illustrations.
 David Gidmark, The Indian Crafts of William and Mary Commanda (Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books, 1995), ISBN 0-81172-549-9. The Commanda family are members of the Iroquois Nation who have preserved a heritage of beautiful and useful crafts. The book is illustrated with black-and-white photographs, and shows in great detail how the Commandas make traditional articles such as moccasins, snowshoes, drums, baskets, canoes, and tanned moose hides, all placed firmly within their cultural context. The Commandas are people worth knowing.
 Peter Goodchild, Survival Skills of the North American Indians (Chicago IL: Chicago Review Press, 1984), ISBN 0-914091-69-7. Sparsely illustrated with black-and-white line drawings, this book is a general overview of stone-age skills as practiced by the indigenous peoples of North America. It is more of an anthropological overview than a practical instruction manual; still, it is comprehensive, and many of the skills are covered in sufficient detail to give you a pretty good idea how to do them yourself. More important, I think, is that the book illustrates the range of skills called upon for long-term wilderness survival. The book discusses plant and animal food, toolmaking, bows and arrows, traps, fishing, shelter, clothing, medicine, transportation, fire, hide tanning, cordage, basketry, and pottery.
 Richard Jamison, et al., The Woodsmoke Collections The Best of Woodsmoke: A Manual of Primitive Outdoor Skills (Bountiful UT: Horizon Publishers, 1993) ISBN: 0-88290-203-2; Woodsmoke: Collected Writings on Ancient Living Skills (Bountiful UT: Horizon Publishers, 1997), ISBN: 0-88290-611-9; Primitive Outdoor Skills: More Wilderness Techniques from Woodsmoke Journal (Bountiful UT: Horizon Publishers, 1993) ISBN: 0882902636. The Woodsmoke Journal was conceived in 1975 by Richard Jamison and Larry Dean Olson, author of Outdoor Survival Skills, during a desert survival trip. The last issue was published in 1984. During that time, the journal published articles on all aspects of primitive skills by many of the foremost practitioners in the United States and Europe. In 1982, the first collection of articles from the journal was published under the title The Best of Woodsmoke, to be followed by two more volumes in 1985 and 1987. These three volumes are a compendium of primitive skills from a variety of perspectives; subjects covered include more or less randomly the use of pitch, building a wickiup, ancient steam pit cooking, building snow caves, bulrush weaving, deadfall trapping, primitive fishing, wilderness cordage, and how to survive a blizzard with only a blanket. Many of the articles are illustrated with black-and-white photographs.
 John McPherson, et al., The Primitive Skills Series Naked Into the Wilderness: Primitive Wilderness Living and Survival Skills (Randolph KS: Prairie Wolf, 1993), ISBN: 0-96787-777-6; Primitive Wilderness Skills, Applied and Advanced (Randolph KS: Prairie Wolf, 1996), ISBN 0-89745-984-9. In 1986, John McPherson published a little 48-page booklet on braintanning. He had begun to experiment with primitive skills in the mid-1970s, and eventually published ten such small books on such topics as wilderness cooking, primitive pottery, and the making of primitive tools, which he sold, primarily by word of mouth, for around three dollars each. Finally, in 1993, he and his wife Geri collected the pamphlets into a single volume, with the catchy title Naked Into the Wilderness, and published it through their press in Randolph, Kansas. Their experiments in primitive living continued, and in 1996 they published a second volume, describing their stone age lifestyle and containing chapters on making a dugout canoe, primitive navigation, braintanning furs, primitive lighting, making bone needles, and other topics. Both books are clearly the product of extensive personal experience and experimentation. The skills are described in detail, in idiosyncratic and enthusiastic prose, and illustrated primarily with black-and-white photographs. Definitely a treasure.
 Larry Dean Olsen, Outdoor Survival Skills (Chicago IL: Chicago Review Press, 1997), ISBN 1-55652-323-8. This is in many ways the book which started it all. The author started teaching outdoor survival classes at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in the 1960s, and eventually established primitive living courses throughout the United States and Canada, developing the 26-day wilderness survival course that became the signature of the Boulder Outdoor Survival School. This book, published in 1967 and in numerous reprints and editions thereafter, was the first to establish and describe what has become the basic primitive skill set. The book gives detailed discussions of shelter, fire, water, plants, animals, tools and weapons, hide tanning, weaving, and clothing construction. Each skill is illustrated with black-and-white photographs and line drawings; the most recent edition contains an appendix of color plates of edible plants. If you go to the Boulder Outdoor Survival School or just about any other school of wilderness skills and survival this is the curriculum.
 Richard Schneider, Crafts of the North American Indians: A Craftsmans Manual (Steven Point WI: R. Schneider, 1972), ISBN 0-936984-00-7. The author, a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin, has devoted himself to the preservation of native North American skills. He has republished a number of volumes in the Indian Handicraft Series originally put out by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as other works, including such titles as Ojibwa Crafts, Quill and Beadwork of the Western Sioux, and Native American Basketry of the Seneca and Tlingit. This book is his own collection of indigenous crafts, described in detail and accompanied by black-and-white line drawings and sketches. The chapters cover toolmaking, skin and leatherwork, beadwork, the use of bark, basketry, ceramics, and fiber. The topics range from fashioning a crooked knife to making a corn husk doll, from birchbark containers to primitive pottery, from making an Inuit sewing kit to building a double-headed drum. This is a very practical manual for utilizing North American natural resources to make items of utility and beauty.
 Hilary Stewart, Stone, Bone, Antler, and Shell: Artifacts of the Northwest Coast (Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1995), ISBN 0-29597-536-9. First published in 1973, this book describes the tools of the native peoples of the northwest coast of North America the Tlingit, Haida, southern and northern Kwakiutl, the Salish, and the Makah. With more than a thousand illustrations, including photographs and detailed drawings, the book describes the construction of stone mauls, adzes, hammers, scrapers, sinkers, anchors, clubs, slate arrowheads, spear heads, knives, cooking rocks, hand-drills, burins, bark-shredders, mortar and pestles, pigment pots, beads, nose-rings, pipes, and other artifacts made of stone, bone, antler, and shell. Just as important, the book places these tools, weapons, hunting and fishing gear, ornaments, household and ceremonial items and puts them into the social and cultural context of the life of the native coastal people.
 David Wescott, et al., The Primitive Technology Collections Primitive Technology; A Book of Earth Skills (Salt Lake City UT: Gibbs Smith Publishers, 1999), ISBN 0-87905-911-7; Primitive Technology II: Ancestral Skills (Salt Lake City UT: Gibbs Smith Publishers, 2001), ISBN 1-58685-098-9. The Bulletin of Primitive Technology is the journal of the Society of Primitive Technology, and for many years it has been a foremost source of information on primitive skills, experimental archeology, and the practice and reconstruction of stone-age life. These two volumes include reprints of articles from out-of-print back issues of the bulletin, plus additional commentary and sidebars that have not been published before. Where begin to describe the riches in these volumes? Here are just a few random samples Steven Edholm on working hides with stone, bone, and antler tools, Errett Callahan on arctic archery, Jim Riggs on making hide glue, Manuel Lizaralde on bone flutes, Thomas J. Elpel on wild plant economics, David Wescott on rabbitsticks, Mors Kochanski on cattail dolls, Terry Powell on the tools of the dugout canoe maker. And that barely scratches the surface. The articles include photographs, drawings, and charts.
 Margaret Wheat, Survival Arts of the Primitive Paiutes (Reno NV: University of Nevada Press, 1970), ISBN 0-87417-048-6. The author, a geologist and archeologist, worked with the Northern Paiute people for twenty years, and the result is this remarkable photograph-filled book on survival skills, not as quaint survivals, but as actually lived day-to-day. The book describes the cycle of the year, gives brief respectful biographies of those elders still wise in the old ways, and discusses, among other things, how to harvest pinenuts, how to make a boat out of cattail and tule, building houses, fishing with a harpoon, and making cradleboards, duck decoys, rabbit skin blankets, tule huts, arrows and deadfalls, and sagebark clothes. There are no step-by-step instructions this is not really intended to be a craft manual but enough detail is given that you can pretty well figure out how to do the rest.
 Eliot Wigginton, et al., The Foxfire Books (New York NY: Doubleday & Company, 1972-1999). The Foxfire series was begun in 1966 by teacher Eliot Wigginton as a class assignment for the students of Rabun County High School in northern Georgia, who created the magazine Foxfire named after a phosphorescent lichen in an effort to record and preserve the traditional folk culture of the Southern Appalachians. Articles from the magazine were collected into the first Foxfire book in 1972. Wigginton declared Volume 9 the last of the series, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of his teaching in Rabun County. However, the series is now up to Volume 11, under various editors, with no signs of stopping. Many of the articles focus on traditional crafts and practices; an abbreviated list would include animal care, banjos and dulcimers, wild plant foods, butter churns, ginseng, fiddle making, spring houses, horse trading, sassafras tea, gardening, iron-making, blacksmithing, bear hunting, flintlock rifles, shoemaking, toys and games, gourd banjos, song bows, wooden locks, a water-powered sawmill, Southern folk pottery, quilting, home cures, log cabins, preserving and pickling, smoking and salting, honey making, beekeeping, and fishing. If you want to know how to live off the land and if you want to get to know the fascinating people who have done so for generations get these books.
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