|  Ultimately we can all lay claim to the term native and the songs and dances, the beads and feathers, and the profound responsibilities that go with it. We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit. Part of that responsibility is to choose a place. To restore the land one must live and work in a place. To work in a place is to work with others. People who work together in a place become a community, and a community, in time, grows a culture. To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.
— Gary Snyder  I am Steve Beyer, sometimes known as Walks Slowly, and I am president of Wilderness Drum, Inc. I have three grown daughters and a wife who has kept me endlessly fascinated for thirty-eight years. I have two doctorate degrees – one in religious studies and one in psychology. For a dozen years I had an academic career as a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union. During that time I wrote three books on Buddhism in general and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. Then, for more than twenty years, I was a lawyer, and served as a senior litigation partner at a major international law firm.
For many years now, I have been drawn closer to the spirits of the wilderness. I have been certified as a Wilderness First Responder and Outdoor Emergency Care Technician, with additional certification in Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support. I have also been certified in wilderness leadership both by the Wilderness Education Association and by SOLO's Outdoor Wilderness Leadership School. I now work with others in a wilderness setting, offering counseling and guidance in what I have come to call wilderness spirituality, leading vision fasts and rites of passage, helping to facilitate traditional and self-created ceremonies, and helping others to contact the wilderness spirits who try to teach us how to be human beings.  My wilderness experience includes advanced survival training in the Sierra Nevada and the Mojave Desert. I have been in the Amazon seven times, including a two-week solo jungle survival trip up the Rio Blanco. I also traveled with two friends 800 kilometers up the Chapuli River into the highland jungle border area between Peru and Ecuador, where we studied the shamanic traditions and jungle survival skills of the last of the Shapra and Candoshi Indians. I worked with the Rainforest Health Project helping to provide basic medical care in the Peruvian Amazon. I have been privileged to work with some of the finest shamans in the Amazon, practicing ayahuasca rituals with curandero don Antonio Barrera, studying sacred plant healing rituals in the jungle hut of ayahuasquero don Rómulo Magin, and exploring the nature of ayahuasca healing with doña Mari Tuesta and don Rober Acho.
 I have also spent immensely valuable time in the wilderness with my wife. In South America, we have hiked and climbed together in the Cordillera Blanca; camped in the jungles of the Manu rainforest preserve; explored the cloud forest region of Chachapoyas, searching the hills for pre-Incan mummies; and climbed to the top of Auyan Tepui, one of the great massifs in the Gran Sabana country of southeast Venezuela, at the border with Guyana and Brazil. We have lived in the Grand Staircase-Escalante Wilderness studying and practicing primitive survival and living skills together in the Earth Skills program at Boulder Outdoor Survival School. And always she has brought me to the water she loves – canoeing for two weeks down the Green River, from the town of Green River 120 miles through Canyonlands National Park to the Confluence; making the first descent by raft of the Puyango-Tumbes river in the Andes in the far northwest of Peru; kayaking through icebergs and along glaciers in desolate and wild eastern Greenland.
 I have a long-standing interest in indigenous religious traditions, particularly of native North and South America. My study of Buddhism includes a year-and-a-half stay in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas. I have studied ethnobotany in general and spiritual ethnobotany in particular, including both medicinal and visionary plants. I have undertaken several four-day and four-night vision fasts in Death Valley, the Pecos Wilderness, and the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. I have been trained in council facilitation at the Ojai Foundation, have received training at the School of Lost Borders in the guiding of wilderness spiritual experiences, and am a certified instructor in nonviolent crisis intervention. Most important to me, I have served as an apprentice to vision fast guide Sparrow Hart of Circles of Air and Stone.
 I am a member of the Wilderness Medical Society, the Society of Primitive Technology, and the Wilderness Guides Council. I am on the Board of Trustees of the Wilderness Education Association.
My interests – primitive skills, wilderness survival, and wilderness spirituality – form, to me, a coherent whole. I am looking for ways to share with others what I have found in the wilderness. |
