Offered: August 2009 - May 2010
Location: Bolinas and Pescadero, CA
Instructors: Jon Young and the RDNA team

If you trace your lineage back far enough, you’ll find ancestors who were natives — somewhere. To these indigenous ancestors, holistic awareness of the natural world (tracking) and land tending (permaculture) were so important that they became entwined and engrained in their biology. We can hardly guess what this relationship to land, creatures, and each other meant to our ancestors since we have come so far from it.

Using cultural mentoring, the tool that our ancestors used to teach this awareness, the Native Eyes Program will help you reclaim your human birthright to be an integrated and critical member of the natural world. This training, as outlined in Jon Young's new book, Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature, is not being offered anywhere else in the world — because the Bushmen aren’t taking applications! Join us for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  

 The Remedy for Nature Deficit Disorder

In his best-selling book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv writes about “nature deficit disorder, and how our lack of nature connection is leading to a wide variety of stresses and negative outcomes in our physical, mental and cultural health. Depression, attention deficit disorder and obesity, as well as species loss and ecological collapse, are taking on epic proportions — and they all can be linked to a lost relationship with nature that our modern experience has stolen from us.

How many of us can walk into our back yards or around our neighborhood and know each plant by name, know if it is edible or medicinal? Do you know how animals use your back yard and where to find them? How to find clean water or to make fire without matches? We have become people who don’t know how to connect with nature authentically, and we have lost a critical piece to our development and sustained health as a species. 

What will we need to get through the challenges that lie ahead? How can we again become stewards and tenders of the land? 

The answers lie with the cultures around the world who still have the wisdom needed to care for the wild places. These cultures — like the Kalahari bushmen, the Australian Aborigines and other historic nomadic hunter gather cultures from Asia, South America and Europe — still experience a deep cultural understanding of how to be in harmony with and how to relate to the land and its inhabitants. 

This course is based on the methods and wisdom gained from those cultures. Using the same methods, you'll experience how this kind of learning is the most powerful way for adults today to make an authentic nature connection. 

Ancient Routines for Awareness

During this 9-month journey, you’ll practice an ancient set of routines that will reawaken your sense of awareness — exploring bird language, “tending the wild,” advanced awareness, earth living skills, the “Eight Shields” of holistic tracking, and the way of the Native Scout. You’ll learn to walk like the fox, quiet the mind, move among the animals and listen to the stories the land tells. You will discover your place as an integrated member of the natural community, develop an intuitive sense of care giving, feed your adventurous spirit, come to know the animals and plants as friends, and experience the wilderness as home.

You’ll practice:

• Holistic wildlife tracking, track identification, gait analysis, landscape tracking
• Bird language 
• Modern wildlife inventory techniques and technologies 
• Plant identification and medicinal/edible uses
• Earth living/survival skills as a gateway to awareness 
• Core routines of awareness
• Animal form and the power of imitation
• The strength of unity and the scout lifestyle
• The timeless way of the wanderer
• Inner tracking and the internal landscape 
• Knowledge of and true connection to place 
• Storytelling, music, art and the creative mind
• The power of curiosity, imagination, and adventure 

As part of the program, you’ll also receive weekly mentoring with the RDI and Shikari Tracking Guild staff. 

This intensive experience requires commitment, stamina, and curiosity. We like to say, “the learning is in the doing,” so be prepared to camp on-site every Tuesday and Wednesday night to withstand all local weather conditions, and to provide for your own meals (although meal sharing is encouraged). Dinner will be cooked over a campfire, so please bring your own cookware and utensils. 

Although all are encouraged to apply, we are giving priority for our limited enrollment to RDNA, WARP, IATS, VWS, and Native Eyes graduates! 

See the RDNA Native Eyes web page for schedule and registration information.