Community Updates

Summer Update 2026

Hey Folks,

A couple of months have passed since we gathered in April for Rivercane Rendezvous. A lot happened at Rivercane Rendezvous and a lot has happened since Rivercane Rendezvous. It was a week full of both connections and challenges, and those have continued to unfold in the past months. We, the General Coordinator and the Leadership Council (LC), have been having a lot of conversations with a lot of people to gather different perspectives as we consider how to address the challenges facing our community. We think it is time now to share some of what’s going on. If you’re interested in the social undercurrents happening in and around the event, read on.

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TLDR/The short version

• We recently received a list of concerns from a number of people in our community, particularly elders and longtime instructors. 

• They shared that they have been having negative experiences and asked us to reassess certain issues.

• We care about the experiences of all parts of our community and are working to address those concerns in a balanced manner.

• We are currently planning changes in three areas:

  • Our relationship with Tyson and Bigwitch

  • How we present support spaces to the community

  • How we use Morning Circle and what we intend it to accomplish  

The Long Version

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Tyson and Bigwitch

We’ve been working with Cherokee folks, with Tyson and the Bigwitch Indian Initiative in particular, in an effort to honor the Original People of the land where we have the event. Many people have been very grateful and appreciative of the knowledge, skills, and perspective Tyson and the Cherokee relatives bring, and yet we have also heard from many people who have had very difficult experiences with Tyson and others in the Bigwitch space. We haven’t had an appropriate feedback process in place to relay this feedback to Tyson in a good way and adjust course. 

This past event, there was a significant response to Tyson’s words in Morning Circle on Thursday during the event. Many people relayed to us that they received those words as harmful and divisive, and they are wondering why this behavior is allowed and asking for it to change.  There has also been an impact on Tyson of fewer folks being willing to engage in the Bigwitch space and more negative energy pointed in their direction. 

In response to the points of tension, post-event we made a rapid decision to not invite Tyson back as an instructor this fall while we take time to consider how to create a feedback process that works for us and for Tyson.  We acknowledge that in doing this, we did not implement our stated processes for handling conflict, or include Tyson in the decision making process.  We are currently working to remedy that situation and involve Tyson moving forward.  We are also  working on making sure that our expectations for instructors and staff are clearly stated and that we all abide by them. 

For now, we are going to reassess how we’re navigating our relationship with Tyson and Bigwitch for everyone’s benefit.  Tyson isn’t banned from the event and this isn’t a permanent end to working with Bigwitch - we just need to take a pause while we figure out what sort of changes would need to be made for us to continue to work together.

Support Spaces

We created “support spaces”—the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) space and the LGBTQ+/Queer space—in response to feedback from community members with those identities that they needed extra support and care in order to be at the event and feel welcome and supported. 

What we heard from them was that the event has not always felt like “one big safe space” in their experience, and they needed “safer” spaces to process the things that happened to them during the event (comments people made, the way they got treated, painful incidents) and to have an area to retreat to where they were met by people who shared and understood their experiences because they also shared their identities. Because we want earthskills to be accessible to anyone who wants them, and because we care about the experiences of all the parts of our community, we decided to meet these requests for support and to create these spaces.  And we have heard from some black people and queer people that these spaces are indeed helpful and supportive.  

Some people have experienced a feeling of division, though. Is that because we’ve begun naming that some people are having a very different experience of the world than what we might be having? Or is it because we’re focusing too much on what is different and not enough on what is the same? Something about the way we’re doing this is having the unintended impact of a sense of division.

We think it might be helpful to change how support spaces are shared with the community. Focusing on them during Morning Circle hasn't had the effect we hoped for.  We’ve been spotlighting those spaces for the purpose of both letting folks know there are spaces available for support, and to help educate the community on the need for those spaces.  We’re not sure the approach we’ve been taking is effective in educating the community or in making the community a safer place for black, hispanic, or queer folks to be, where they experience fewer negative incidents and more connection.

We think we need to continue to have support spaces. We’re open to changing how we present those spaces, though.  Our current thinking is that we should no longer spotlight them to the same extent in Morning Circle. They exist and are available for support, and their facilitators can announce events happening in them (what, where, when) the same as other instructors do when we do class announcements. We are exploring other ways to provide detailed information on the importance of these spaces, such as listings on the class board or in informational sessions. We’d like to try these changes and see how they impact our community members, both those who utilize the spaces and those who do not.

We’re also discussing finding better locations for our support spaces. We think the current location of the queer tent in particular is creating extra tension around its existence and that we can ease some of that tension by finding a better location. We’ve been discussing support space locations already since their current position is kind of a through-traffic zone and a shortcut folks take to get to the main road, teen camp, and the woods chapel. It might be better to have them be their own destinations, not on the way to somewhere else, so we’re pondering what makes sense in the grand scheme of camp layout to best meet everyone’s needs.

We care about the members of our community who need our support spaces in order to be at the event and feel wanted and welcome. BIPOC and Queer folks bring valuable perspectives and experiences to the table. We need them with us. They are a part of us, and we want to affirm their belonging. So while we’re shifting how we present support spaces and where we might locate them, we will continue to have them and to look for more ways to create safety, welcome, and connection for these members of our community.

Morning Circle

What is Morning Circle for? We’ve been considering this question for several years now. It’s one of the few times the whole of the community gathers. And it’s been a variety of things in the past: a venue to share important logistical info, an opportunity to inspire, a chance to educate, a place to connect. It’s some of all those things.  

We’ve been periodically tinkering with its composition. A few years ago, we stopped doing instructor class announcements because we got feedback that circles were too long, and having 15-20 people speak for even just one minute means 15-20 more minutes of circle. But people missed class announcements, both for the inspiration they offer and the logistical needs they meet (identifying instructors and class locations), and our event is an educational gathering, so we brought instructor announcements back last fall. We also shifted to just spotlighting one support space each day (instead of all of them every day). And we stopped doing so many logistical announcements each day (about first aid, the store, class sign-ups, etc) and just focused on doing them a couple of times during the week when a lot of new folks had arrived in camp. These adjustments have been fairly well-received, but we’re still getting a lot of feedback about morning circle and what it does and does not include, as well as how long it is.  

So the question remains: what is morning circle for? How do we use it and why?

Please know that this is something we’re discussing in Leadership Council meetings and among the staff and that we will continue to tinker with what we present. Morning Circle will likely look different again this fall. And we’ll see how that lands and how we need to adjust for next time.

So yeah. These are some of the things currently cooking behind the scenes of Rendezvous. People have strong feelings about it all, and concern for the impact of what is and is not happening. We’re working hard to address the various concerns different parts of our community bring to us and to find a good enough path forward that works well enough for the whole.

If you have specific questions or would like to connect more about what’s going on, you can reach out to the General Coordinator, or to the Leadership Council, or both. There’s also a lot of info on our website www.primitiveskills.org including our Mission Statement, Code of Conduct, Leadership Council, Community Updates, and more. Please check it out.  

General Coordinator - earthskillscoordinator@gmail.com

Leadership Council - earthskillsleadership@gmail.com