Hello!  I am Mara, the curator of this project Crow’s Nest Wildcraft.

Crow’s Nest started as just me, travelling and sharing skills.  It is growing to encompass more facilitators and differing skillsets.  From Crow’s Nest was also birthed Limina Collective.  A new website is being developed now to reflect these exciting transitions.  For now, read below for my bio.

The Crow’s Nest has a twofold meaning: it is a region and trail system, and it is a lookout on the mast of a boat. For years, I migrated seasonally between this region and my sailboat: between Sinixt and Salish territories, respectively.

I learned to live on land and water, by trail and by boat.  The skills needed to live remotely brought sustenance on many levels. More than simply survival, they were deeply healing.

I created Crow’s Nest to share these skills: connecting people to the wild and cultivating an embodied sense of belonging.

This work is artisanal – not traditional. I do not operate within an intact lineage of my own to call it traditional. I am a mixed settler: my ancestors are mainly from Scotland and Hungary, and some way-back ancestors are from the Plains in Treaty 4 territory, and I was raised in white-settler culture.   And so, I refrain from using methods and aesthetics that carry cultural appropriation or theft of Indigenous teachings.  The hide tanning methods taught through Crow’s Nest are mainly Sottish and eastern European.  The herbal medicine is in the Traditional Western Herbalism school.

Wild skills are intrinsic to all human cultures, but as mediums of community connection, they carry specific sanctity within specific cultures.  I look to my own ancestry for guidance and meaning for this, and aim to provide space for others to do the same.  In the Hide Tanning Immersion program, we each research the hide tanning methods of our ancestral lineages and unearth how these came to be displaced.  I strive to use this project as a tool towards decolonizing all my relationships: to people, to culture, and to place.