Wendy Davis - Guest Instructor

(She/they/momma/hey you) has been studying all things homestead and primitive culture related for over a decade now, with her interests primarily focusing on the creative and agricultural themes. It has always seemed like a great mountain adventure; with every plateau there is a realization that there is always another level to be obtained, another goal to reach. For more than a handful of years now, she has been building up her own homestead full of chaos, critters, lots of hard work and happiness with her now extending family. Heart and Homestead focuses on becoming a creative self sufficient homestead and teaching others how to do all of this for themselves as well! Which takes a number of skills and a great community to be successful but obtainable by everyone! Bring back the skills!

Ryan Grohsmeyer - Guest Instructor

Ryan has been throwing sticks, picking them up, and throwing them again since the age of three. He grew up in the woods behind his family's house near Historic St. Mary's City in Southern Maryland, and has enjoyed making things by hand for as long as he can remember. He was introduced to atlatls at the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum at age 14 while working on the archeology merit badge in Boy Scouts. After realizing that atlatls were an excellent way to throw sticks, he found that he couldn't stop using them, and 14 years later Ryan is the acting vice president of the World Atlatl Association. Ryan was president of the archery and atlatl alub and the artineering club at Alfred University where he completed a B.S. in materials engineering, and was a founding member of the blacksmithing club at Missouri University of Science and Technology, where he completed a Ph.D. in materials science. When not working as an engineer or throwing darts, Ryan enjoys blacksmithing, archery, drawing, hiking, timber framing, and helping his wife Alex take care of their eleven dairy goats, nine chickens, three horses, and three cats on their hobby farm in Western NY State.

Ruth Ann Colby Martin - Guest Instructor

Ruth Ann earned a BA in Experiential Education before living a year in the woods and practicing primitive skills which began a near-decade teaching skills to several thousand adults as Head Instructor and Director at Tom Brown’s Tracker School. Ruth Ann has homesteaded for 20+ years on a 400 acre mountain education preserve surrounded by a million acres of national forest, producing most of the food her family requires. She is founder, owner and midwife at Ecstatic Birth, LLC and teaches as core faculty at Midwives College of Utah where she teaches herbology.  She has devoted her life to mentoring-based education via experiential learning and practiced honing these skills for over 20 years.

Eden Cornelius - Lead Instructor

Growing up homeschooled, Eden first found the primitive skills community in upstate NY through enrollment in a program called Primitive Pursuits at age seven. From that time until her teen years, she participated in Ancestral Knowledges Homeschool program for many years and attended primitive skills gatherings. In her teens, her time was spent hiking, camping, backpacking, cross-country skiing, and filling her journal with detailed sketches and facts about the wildlife around her.

All of her free time was spent outdoors, building debris huts, making cordage, and adventuring in the forest. Schooled by her fiber artist and aspiring naturalist mother, her love of the natural world was fueled by a rich curriculum with a focus on hands-on learning and her intense interest in insects and plants.

Now, Eden is a multimedia artist and painter who continues to share and learn skills, with a particular passion for pottery, wet felting techniques, needle felting, and natural pigments. With a background in youth leadership, she enjoys working with groups and fostering a creative connection with the earth.

Nate Salzman - Guest Instructor

Nate works at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum where he specialties in outdoor education, from building clay ovens to wigwams to blacksmithing if it's outside and hands on he enjoys it!

Julie Ann Biedrzycki - President BOD/ Instructor

Julie is a teacher and outdoor education specialist. She is currently raising and forest schooling her 4 children. As a student of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Maryland College Park, Julie ran educational support programs in local public elementary schools. This inspired her to stay involved with youth and her community ever since. In the education field for over 20 years now, she has taught ages 3 yrs through adults, in all variety of programs and venues, from public to private schools, from classrooms to National Parks. Julie's focus is conservation, environmental awareness, and outdoor education. She is passionate about gardening, foraging, herbalism, forest schooling, and sustainable living. She currently lives in MD, as caretaker to a beautiful historic forest and the century-old homes there. Julie brings both experience and enthusiasm as President of the Board for Ancestral Knowledge, working mainly on fundraising, community outreach, and moonlighting as instructor and host.

Denton Bragg - Guest Instructor

Hope Greene - Guest Instructor

Hope has been a MAPS Meet regular attending with her family over the years. She is a fiber artist, forager, and hide tanner.

Matt Weahterholtz - Guest Instructor

Matt Weatherholtz was born in and raised in the Shenandoah Valley, beginning his passion for primitive skills while in his youth.  Informally educated by a handful of mentors, he began his journey learning how to make bows in his pre-teens. He was tanning hides before he graduated high school, and building Living History exhibits in his twenties.

Matt's handcrafted work can been viewed at Frontier Culture Museum, Henricus Historical Park, Natural Bridge of Virginia's Powhatan Village, Colonial Williamsburg and even Living History Museums in Germany.  He is well versed in all that is primitive; woodwork, flint knapping, peck and ground stone tools, hide tanning, domicile construction, fibers, friction fire, and mat making. Practicing these skills daily, students learn from Matt that a sturdy foundation is important as all these skills overlap and compliment one another.  His passion for education comes from a desire for people to be more sustainable and knowledgeable in utilizing their local resources respectfully.

Todd Elliott - Guest Instructor

Todd is a freelance biologist, naturalist, lecturer, primitive skills instructor, and performing artist. His research has focused on studying global biodiversity and interrelationships in nature. These studies have taken him to remote corners of the world and allowed him to learn from indigenous people and to explore diverse ecosystems on six continents. Todd has discovered and published organisms new to science and is currently writing a field guide on the mushrooms of the Southeastern United States for Timber Press. Todd teaches on a range of subjects centered around primitive skills, foraging, ecology, traditional life-ways, and the human interface with the natural world. To learn more about Todd’s work visit: http://toddelliott.weebly.com/

Jillian-Taylor Stokes - Guest Instructor

Jillian-Taylor Stokes has shaped her life path as an ethical and emergency response to the ecological imbalances of the 21st century. After a few years working within the slow gears of climate policy, she decided to pursue a more direct approach to living a low-impact life.

From focusing on pantry and apothecary skills to building traditional ecological gardens or responding to hurricanes, life has become an adventure in learning how to live simply and seasonally.

Sara Corrigan - Guest Instructor

Sarah Corrigan Sarah is an herbalist and primitive skills practioner who has a focus on ethnobotanical studies. Informed by these land based arts, she finds they offer the rewards of self reliance through skill, responsibility and gratitude through growing and gathering, and the awe and wonder of things through the beauty of the natural world. In effect, that this interaction can educate us to being more capable, responsible, and healthier human beings. As a student and an educator, she remains passionate about continous learning, and facilitating a student's relationship to the natural world through supporting their own learning processes.

Brad Salon - Guest Instructor

Brad Salon - My work at Roots combines my love for wilderness and adventure, hard work with good folks, building with my hands, and constant problem solving. Although I have a love for all the skills I have devoted possibly too much time to flint knapping stone tools and find ever increasing complexity and challenges to pursue with that skill. I have a love of bow building, archery, and hunting, a skill that has tested me on every level. The skills of tracking and awareness are brought to bare in every skill I work. The Scout classes are near obsession for me, but you will see that should you attend. Learning to connect these skills to the present day, to the present conditions of the world, I strive to re-evaluate and grow my perspective. My work is done in the company of friends, all determined in their own ways to make the world a richer, healthier place. I started teaching wilderness skills in 2000. Aside from there skills I have a deep love for telling stories through the mediums of picture and video.

B.A. Individualized Studies, Goddard College, 2006

Heather Cornelius - Instructor

Heather has been passionate about fiber arts for two decades, teaching all ages for the last 10 years. Natural dyeing with plants she grows and forages marries her love of fiber arts and her botanical interests. Handspinning raw wool aquired from the local fibershed is one of her favorite expressions of sustainable craftmanship.

Matt Hansen - Guest Instructor

Wolf Bravo - Guest Instructor

Wolf Bravo is a specialist in sharpening all kinds of blades and hand tools. From an early age he spent his summer vacations at his great-grandmother’s farm in Peru, where he developed a special love for hand tools under her tutelage.

For over ten years, he has been teaching sharpening and safety at the Mid Atlantic Primitive Skill Group In West Virginia. Short after he became a Hudson Valley resident in 2009, he started tool drives to help new farmers, later with the excess tools he started a Tool-Lending Program, known as a Tool Library for residents in the area. He also conducted free tool repair workshops for different communities in Ulster County. In the last four years Wolf Bravo has been a steady volunteer at the Repair Café in Rosendale, his home town, where he also started teaching sharpening workshops and making knives out of recycled blades from scrap knives.

He is an active member of the Hudson Valley Repair Café and the Roundout Valley Permaculture group.

Wolf is an avid proponent of sustainability and redesigning junk as a way to reduce our waste impact on the Earth.

Matt Corridino - Guest Instructor

Matt has been honing his survival skills for the last fifteen plus years. After 6 years of learning from various teachers, including Tom Brown Jr., Errett Callahan, Jim Hamm, Eddie Stardnator, Bill Kaczor, and numerous others, he spent 7 years teaching at Tom Brown Jr's Trackerschool. While teaching at the Trackerschool, he lived in a primitive shelter with his wife Carmen. Currently Matt and Carmen reside on the beautiful Island of St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where they own and operate Mount Victory Camp Eco-Lodge. Along with providing lodging on their homestead , they teach classes in tropical survival skills, and host music and cultural events.

Eric Lewis - Guest Instructor

Eric is a lover of plants and an aspiring greenman who dedicates much of his energy to deepening the relationship between people and plants. Inspired by the wise words of world renowned ethnobotanist Frank Cook, Eric is continually encouraging people to respect the plants as individuals and eat something wild everyday.

Nick Neddo - Guest Instructor

Nick is an artist, author, naturalist, primitive skills educator, and craftsman. He has been teaching people wilderness skills professionally since 2000. He makes his art supplies from materials that he gathers from the landscape, which is the topic of his new book: The Organic Artist. Nick enjoys clean air, water, food and dirty hands.

Rod McCraken

Rod has been fascinated by nature since being inspired shortly after graduating college.  After a survival class, he chose to focus on learning local plants.  But it wasn't until he grew tired of cooking for potlucks that he hit upon fermenting, and soon combined this ancient art with his knowledge of local plants.  His plant classes begin before the class arrives, with a gathering each morning of plants from the landscape to flavor day's adventures in mead-making.

Josh Roberts - Field Instructor

Josh Roberts discovered his passion for wilderness survival skills in Vermont in 1998. Through Tom Brown Jr's books he was inspired to practice survival skills which lead him to pursue these skills as a vocation. For over 15 years he has gained experience in this field with various summer camps, organizations and schools in over ten states. These include The Vermont Wilderness School, The Wild Earth Programs, The Roots School, The Institute of Natural Learning, The Fairview Lake YMCA, The Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, and The Student Conservation Corp among others. Josh's goal in life is to share his passion for the benefits of wilderness survival skills. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Adventure Education and Environmental Studies from Prescott College in Arizona.

Josh has been working with Ancestral Knowledge in the DC area since the spring of 2012. Before moving to the DC area he taught similar survival programs in the Swanguak Mountains of New York. He is currently involved in instructing and developing Ancestral Knowledge’s home school programs, it’s summer camps and his own survival skills workshops. Josh has been actively involved with Mid Atlantic Primitive Skills youth programs and plans on continuing that involvement. He enjoys flintknapping as well as pursuing his interests in permaculture, primitive archery, wild edible foraging, guitar playing and snowboarding.He is best known for his warm personality, fire making skills, his mentoring and teen rites of passage programs, as well as his dedication to teaching wilderness survival skills.

Keith Grenoble - Lead Instructor

Keith Grenoble has been a product of the Back to the Land movement and developed close ties to Native communities from an early age. Keith started his journey by making stone tools represented in the rich archaeological record of Tidewater, Virginia and has been teaching earth skills since 1987. Over time, Keith has become skilled in a variety of earth skills.  He is very passionate about making simulations of prehistoric cookpots, and enjoys working with people of all experience levels and interests. He can often be seen catching a knap here and there.

Cindy Suter AKA Bluefeather - Guest Instructor

I have been involved with The MAPS Meet (Mid-Atlantic Primitive skills) since the very first event. In the beginning, I helped co-organize the events and am now an instructor. I have become personally fond of working with dried gourds.

At these events I will teach working with a dried gourd to make a beautiful finished bowl. I will also have a few gourds for sale in the trade store.

“I find it so fulfilling to watch young participants return year after year and now come to teach others. It is such an Honor to have met so many kindred spirits and friends. I feel so Blessed to be a part of this.”

Doug Elliott - Guest Instructor

Doug Elliott is an herbalist, naturalist, storyteller and author. He has spent a great deal of time with traditional country folk and indigenous people, learning their stories, folklore, and traditional ways of relating to the natural world.

For many years he made his living gathering and selling herbs. In recent years he has performed and taught from Canada to the Caribbean. He has been a featured storyteller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN and has conducted workshops and programs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the Smithsonian Institution. He has taught regularly at the Gaia and the International Herb Symposiums, the Green Nations Gathering, and Omega Institute. He has trained rangers for the National Park Service and guided people on wilderness experiences from Down-east Maine to the Florida Everglades. He was named harmonica champion at Fiddler's Grove Festival in Union Grove, N.C.

He regularly writes articles for regional and national magazines. He has authored five books and produced a number of award winning recordings of stories and songs. His first book, WILD ROOTS, An Underground Botany and Forager's Guide, has been around for thirty-five years and is considered an "underground" classic. He is occasionally seen on PBS-TV and the History Channel. www.dougelliott.com

Lindsey - Field Instructor

Z has been inspired by nature since she was a little girl in growing up in New Jersey. Her fondest memories of her childhood were out in the forest and hiking through streams. She followed her feet to Richard Stockton College of NJ where she earned her Bachelors of Science in Biology and Environmental Science. Here, she was active in the environmental community; organizing clean ups and teaching children water education throughout Atlantic County. Encouraged to pursue education, Z went to Islandwood in Washington State to learn how to be an outdoor educator. Here, she met instructors from the Wilderness Awareness School (WAS) and was introduced to Coyote Teachings and Primitive Skills. She took her excitement for the environment to California, where she spent six years seasonally working at Whiskeytown Environmental School (WES) in Shasta County. At WES she began fusing her background in Science and teaching with the practical skills of homesteading and ancestral teaching.

In her spare time, Z enjoys knitting, sewing by hand, sewing with machine, animal processing, re-purposing materials for use and art, picking up trash, photography, dancing, singing, roller skating, and just creating things in general.

Jeff Gottlieb - Guest Instructor

Jeffrey Gottlieb, MS (in Biology), has been a Naturalist, Outdoor Educator and Primitive Skills Instructor for more than 30 years. He works with school groups, nature centers, museums, scout troops and summer camps, builds full-sized wigwams and longhouses
and replicates primitive tools and artifacts for display. His areas of special interest include fiber arts, flintknapping, basketry, edible and utilitarian plants, and nature awareness. He travels widely in the Eastern U.S. teaching at rendezvous, gatherings and historic fairs. He has written a how-to manual on building wigwams, and an
instructors' manual entitled Teaching Primitive Skills to Children.  His new book on natural fibers and rope making is available directly from him. He welcomes correspondence and can be reached via email at argskids@optonline.net, or at 245 RedDog Lane, Whittier, NC, 28789.

Carmen Phillips Corodino - Guest Instructor

Carmen has been studying primitive skills and wilderness survival since childhood. Carmen graduated from the College of the Atlantic majoring in plant biology. After graduating Carmen began to hone her survival skills by living primitively in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey for over 4 years. Carmen has been an instructor at Tom Brown Jr's Tracker School specializing in wild edible and medicinal plants, brain tanning, basketry, and fire by friction.

Carmen brings a much needed energy to Ancestral Knowledge with her calm and insightful demeanor. To learn from Carmen is always a treat. Her wealth of knowledge and experience is well worth tapping into.

Tom Brown III - Guest Instructor

Tom, otherwise known as “T3”, has been a practitioner and teacher of primitive technology, wilderness survival, tracking, and nature observation since an early age. Trained from birth by his father, Tom Brown, Jr., founder of the world-renowned Tracker School, Tom is one of the world’s foremost instructors of primitive technology and primitive wilderness survival.

For several years, Tom traveled the United States practicing the arts of primitive living throughout many different wilderness areas, as well as practicing his urban survival techniques in major cities across the country. Upon returning to Tracker School in 2003, he became head instructor and helped educate thousands of students from all over the world. In late 2009, Tom formed Primitive Arts Collective in order to take his teaching to a broader audience. He currently teaches workshops and lectures throughout the United States, helping to educate people in ancestral traditions and keep alive the skills that were once at the core of daily life.

Tom is an avid hunter and fly angler, and is accomplished as an archer and marksman. He is also a master of the throwing arts.

Joe Murray - Co-Founder

Joe has been teaching nature connection since 1997 and has made it his life’s work to learn from the indigenous peoples of the earth and share their wisdom with as many people as possible. During that time, he has mentored thousands of kids and helped design the curriculum for several wilderness schools and is a founding member of the nonprofit Ancestral Knowledge. Currently he is the Caretaker at the Pearlstone Center in Reisterstown MD.

Bill Kaczor - Co-Founder/ CEO 2007-Present

Bill is the CEO and co-founder of Ancestral Knowledge. Bill has worked and studied intensively with the masters in the fields of; youth mentoring, naturalist studies, primitive technology and tracking. He has been teaching children and adults in these subjects since 1998 — Bill was a lead instructor at Children of the Earth Foundations- Coyote Tracks summer camps for 5 years, and two years as the assistant director. He has instructed students at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, Rivercane & Falling Leaves Rendezvous, Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills Gathering (MAPS Meet), Bill can often be found instructing at Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School teaching primitive traps, bow making, flint knapping, pottery and hide tanning. In 1999 after 11 years, Bill chose to leave his skateboard/snowboard business and dedicate his life to helping people connect with the Earth through ancient skills. Shortly afterwards, Bill designed and was granted an after school and summer program for the 21st Century Learning Community in Public School District 150 of Peoria, Illinois. This program was successful in that it led the children to a respect for nature, respect for themselves and others, self-discipline and adventure. Bill is a specialist in bow making, stone tool technologies, hide tanning, fire by friction and hunting and experienced in many more skills.

A letter from Tom Brown Jr