Class and program list

Willow Deer Education: Explorations in Ancestral Arts

We bring our programs to you! Willow Deer Education was created to bring high-quality in-depth skills and history classes to your group and location. Children and adults will learn by making an array of art and culture items with their own hands using traditional tools and materials!

No need to travel. Receive these exceptional learning experiences for your group in the comfort and familiarity of known spaces. Outdoor locations are preferred as it is the natural world we want the kids to experience while making these wonderful items, but any clean and safe location can work: homes, patios, backyards, park picnic areas, school classrooms, activity rooms. If you don’t have access to a suitable, central location for your group, contact us for other gathering place options.

Family friendly. Parents and siblings are welcome to be there to observe.

Recommended ages: Minimum of 8 years old if they have good hand skills. No max age. We rely on your group coordinator to put together a mix which is good for you. Younger ages welcome if a parent is with them to complete the physical handwork that these projects require.

Class /program location requirements.  Recommended facilities: outside, picnic table or work table enough for all class participants and chair for each student. Indoors is okay with a floor that can get dirty with dust and be vacuumed or swept. Hand washing facilities. Restroom for the students/families/class.

Willow Deer Education: What makes our programs special.

Join us as we explore the creative arts of the past. Learn how our ancient ancestors, using only the materials from the natural world around them, made an incredible array of beautiful arts, toys, games, and music, full of meaning and spirit.

Our hunter gatherer ancestors lived close to the natural world, yet they made a wide array of beautiful art and culture objects. These classes offer a look into how and why they made these personal expressions of art using only the natural materials they would have had from the local environment in which they lived.

The tools, techniques and materials used in the Willow Deer Education programs are the result of thousands of hours of teaching experience with hundreds of kids and adults. All the information presented is based on both 30 years personal experience AND the most current archeological and anthropological research (see Chucks Bio). Most of the materials used in these classes are hand gathered, sourced, and processed which takes a great deal of personal time by the instructors. Many items such as acorns, willow branches and stones can be gathered locally, but many of the materials used in these classes have been carefully gathered, from distant locations or during exact seasons, and bones and feathers must be processed, cleaned, and prepped for use in these hand on classes. Most of these materials are simply not available for purchase. 

What to expect. Students will learn to use stone and bone tools, in some cases making the tools themselves from traditional materials to craft their own items. These are hands-on classes that routinely require vigorous effort on the part of the participants! Most participants can and do complete the projects in the time allowed. We do our best to give them the tools, knowledge and personal help to be successful, but their efforts are absolutely required.

In these hands-on programs students will learn about:

  • Nature, plants, animals, 
  • History, human culture, anthropology, archeology
  • Ecology, earth science, geology,
  • Physics, chemistry, biology
  • STEM lessons,

All within the framework of Ancestral Arts and skills. 

Program Options:

Using only stone and bone tools, students will learn to make a cane double whistle using a local reed and pine pitch. They will then learn to twist up flax fiber into string and use it to create a neck cord. Beads from 2 different local materials will be fashioned to decorate their finished double whistles. If time allows, they will also decorate their whistles with hand-crafted pigments and feathers.

In this class, students, using only stone tools, will craft a whistle using a Turkey wing bone. They will also craft beads from 2 different traditional local materials to decorate their finished bone whistles. A hand-made string or leather cord will allow the decorated whistle to be worn around their necks. If time allows, they will also decorate their whistles with earth pigment paint and feathers.

Bullroarers have been used by indigenous peoples for tens of thousands of years for both serious spiritual purposes and as a children’s noise maker. Starting with a block of cedar, and using only an antler wedge and manzanita billet, students will split out a blank of wood. They will then sand, smooth, and shape it with sandstone and drill a hole in one end with a stone drill point. Students will then decorate the bull roarer with hand-made earth paints and natural brushes. For the second project, they will then shape and smooth a soapstone flake into a round buzzer, carefully drilling 2 holes that handmade string will pass through to make the buzzer come to life.

Oak trees offer us all a chance to make challenging and fun games that the local indigenous peoples made and played. Using only stone and bone tools, students will craft a challenging acorn cap ring and pin game. They will start off by grinding and drilling acorn caps on sandstone and make and sharpen a deer bone awl to help make a hole in the center. They will sharpen and shape a small tree branch, then tie on a piece of handmade string to complete the game. Using the same bone awl, they will learn to select, drill, and make acorn spinning tops.

Toys, games, and dolls have been made and used by our ancestors for millennia to teach social lessons, to improve necessary skills or to just pass time. In this class, students using only natural materials and stone and bone tools will create a traditional California Native style split cedar and cattail doll. After splitting the cedar doll blank out of a block of cedar with an antler wedge, they will shape and smooth it with sandstone. The doll is finished with two eyes made from ostrich eggshells.

Native black walnut shells make great gaming dice when filled with a pine sap/ground charcoal mixture. In this class students will learn how to make pitch, a valuable adhesive compound, which has been being made utilized by Humans and Neanderthals all around the world for over 50,000 years. In addition to completing a historic and fun game, students will also make pitch sticks which are small portable glue sticks of the past. 

New discoveries show that humans have been making handprints and painting scenes of animals on cave walls for over 50,000 years. In this class, students will learn how prehistoric peoples made the materials used to create these images. Students will grind earth colors into pigments, use traditional brushes and see how these ancient artists illuminated these underground spaces using only small flickering lamps. The motivations and techniques for applying paint to the walls will be explored as well as why certain animals were chosen to be illustrated. Students will have the opportunity to create handprints and to draw ice age animals with handmade charcoal and paints.

The amazing cave paintings of Ice Age Europe and the most recent discoveries from Sulawesi Indonesia, show how humans have been recording their association with the animals in their environment for over 50,000 years. In this workshop, we will learn to replicate some of the most famous renderings of animals from the last Ice Age. We will discuss and explore the variety of animals throughout the class.

Humans have been using earth colors for over 200,000 years to brighten and decorate their world. Students in this class will learn where those colors came from and the different techniques for processing, storing, and applying them onto cave walls, various objects and even themselves. Students will go home with pigments and brushes they have made themselves and the knowledge of where they came from and how they were utilized in the past.

The making of beads and ornaments for personal use is one of the hallmarks of our humanity. Our species have been making and wearing shell beads for over 150,000 years! In this wide-ranging class, students will learn how raw materials have been made into wearable beads and ornaments for millennia. They will have the opportunity to make beads from 4 different natural materials, all which share important cultural and historical lessons. They will use their hand made beads to make a bracelet or necklace. Some of the seasonally available materials we will use are: pine nut, bird bone, ostrich eggshells, olivella shells, soapstone, dentalium, slate, feathers, animal teeth are some of the materials to handcraft these beads.

40,000 years ago, a short distance from the edge of glacial ice sheets, the Sunguir people of northern Europe buried 3 people with a total of 15,000 handmade beads and ornaments. The students in this class will learn to craft these mammoth ivory, bone and animal tooth beads and ornaments to produce their own bracelet, necklace, or earrings. Additional Ice Age bead construction will also be shared.

Humans have been making and using stone and bone tools for hundreds of thousands of years to make all the material culture items we needed to be successful hunter-gatherers. In this class students will learn the fundamentals of making and using various prehistoric tools and see examples of a wide variety of traditional tools and thousands of items that have been made without using metal tools of any kind. Students will learn to cut, shape, drill and sand a variety of materials using these traditional tools and then shape an arrowhead of their own to take home.

The human tradition of shaping bone, antler and ivory into useful tools or decorative ornaments that predate making stone tools! The crafting of bone into tools, hooks, awls, arrowheads, and ornaments was as important as knowing how to craft stone tools. The goal of this class is for students to go home with a handmade bone fishing tackle set: bone hook, handmade string, and sinker stone. All the processes for reducing bone, antler, and ivory will be demonstrated and discussed.

The making and control of fire is a primary human hallmark. In this class students will learn how fire shaped our species, allowed us to move out of Africa to colonize the entire world simply by rubbing sticks together. Students in the class, working together, will make a friction fire and learn how to keep it going. But making a friction fire is not a simple as it seems. Knowledge of the plant materials that must be gathered and the subtle techniques of spinning a fire drill on the wooden hearth board must first be understood before one can successfully manifest a fire from cold lifeless materials. The many uses of fire as an important tool will also be explored and demonstrated.

Campfire Crafts: cool toys and games to make from natural materials around your campsite! In this class families will see a samples of the many toys and games that can be made from materials around your campsite.

These 1-2 hour presentations give participants an opportunity to see and touch hundreds of replica artifacts reflecting the rich and diverse array of material culture items possible to create, using only hand gathered natural materials. Many items reflect the cultural materials of Indigenous peoples of the Sacramento foothill region.

A lecture with hundreds of cultural artifact replicas on display highlighting the many diverse gifts from native plants, animals, and geologic resources of the area.

An exploration of how humans lived and thrived by having an intimate knowledge of, and respectful relationship with, the natural environment they shared with all the other living things. It includes discussions of daily life in the ancient past from different locations around the world.

A 1-2 hour hike through a mixed Oak and Gray Pine woodlands in the Roseville /Rocklin area. This hike will explore the unique Foothill environment that join the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains. The guide will explain the unique aspects and adaptations of the local native plant and animal communities that call this landscape home. It will also offer insights into how the local Indigenous Peoples utilized the abundant resources of this fertile, hilly landscape. 

The hike will conclude at a nearby City of Roseville Park for a bathroom and lunch break. Then a presentation of Maidu Indian cultural artifacts will be presented, and traditional games will be played. Total time with lunch break included 3 hours.

A morning hike combined with an afternoon skill class makes for a great day of in depth learning about natural history and our traditional human place in it. Contact us for more information about our hike and class combinations. 

Multiple day/week long camp options

Most of the above program listings can be combined by subject to create weeklong, half day after school camps or for home school groups. Below are some examples:

  • Making and using atlatls and darts, an ancient hunting system used before the advent of the bow and arrow.
  • Ancient Arts and Ornaments: overview of tools and materials used to make and decorate beads, ornaments, whistles, rattles, bull roarers, games and toys.
  • Ancestral Tools and Skills: focuses on the making of the tools and processing the natural materials to make a wide variety of toys, games, musical instruments, paints, and brushes.
  • Cave Painting 101: Learn to make all your own art materials by hand. Grind earth colors into paints, make charcoal to draw with, learn how to use fat lamps to light up the cave you are decorating. Learn to make handprints, draw, and paint animals and much more.