I still own many of the books I collected during the Back to the Land movement of the 1970s, books that, along with classes at the UW’s Experimental College, taught me gardening and homesteading skills. Some of us made this movement our permanent way of life — living off the grid in remote areas, building our own homes from trees we cut and lumber we milled, raising livestock, growing and preserving food, and never returning to urban living.
Drawing from the skills and ethos of my generation and incorporating new ideas and ideals, 55 years after the Back to the Land movement, Saskatoon Circle (SC) strives to “bring together a multigenerational community of folks growing resilience and connection through practicing traditional skills.” Hosted by Katie Russell Sorensen and her husband, Dave Sorensen, from June 15-21, people from all over the country gathered at Skalitude Retreat Center near Carlton “to learn ancient technologies of living with the land and modern homesteading skills.”
If you hunt deer in the Methow, you might know Katie because she runs the deer skinning station. Katie wasn’t the founder of SC, but she’s been part of it since it started in 2009. In the early years, she taught hide tanning using brains and helped with the kids’ program.
Over time, Katie became the main organizer and has held that role for the past eight years. She’s a rancher who has done her share of butchering and processing livestock. She milks a cow and makes yogurt and cheese. At this year’s gathering, she taught 14 people how to process a pig: dispatching, gutting, and cutting it up.
Katie carefully selects teachers based on their expertise and familiarity with their subject. According to the SC website, the week-long program features classes such as friction fire making, cordage, hide tanning, and bushcraft skills, along with more modern homesteading skills like food fermentation, blacksmithing, food sovereignty, soap making, and many others.
After classes, you can attend evening programs, gather around a campfire for discussions, or join a song circle. SC is family-friendly, and at the instructor’s discretion, kids can take the adult classes or participate in programs specifically designed for teens and tweens.
SC features a camp-wide barter circle where everyone in camp is invited to lay their wares out for buying, selling, and trading. There is also a trade blanket where, when it’s your turn to trade, you lay out your item, and anyone participating can put out what they are willing to trade. You can then choose which item appeals to you or not accept any.
As SC’s organizer, Katie said, “I keep it small intentionally. I want people to get to know each other. It’s become a nice mix of people who have been coming for years and new people who get invited by their friends. Gatherings feel like a family reunion. It’s about connecting and getting together to learn.”
To register for SC, you must become a resilience network member. The resilience network’s mission is “to act as a vehicle by which all members may mutually and voluntarily agree to gather, learn, create and recreate together, in an environment where all attendees have agreed that they will treat each other with mutual respect and care.”
A friend of mine who lives near Skalitude Retreat Center went to SC for the first time and had nothing but good things to say about it. As an advocate of prosocial behavior, she said, “It was an empowering community event, acknowledging the value of traditional skills and also the value of dispersing and sharing that information with others. It felt very inclusive. You just have to have an open heart and an open mind.”
