Introduction for big kids and grownups
Welcome to life skills unschool!
The world is changing in scary ways. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we do know two things:
Our plant and animal neighbors are in trouble right now and need help.
The ways most of us currently get the things we need (food, medicine, clothes, tools, and shelter) here in the United States are not ecologically sustainable and will stop being possible in the future.
We don’t know what is coming to replace the production lines, supply lines, and stores we get the things we need from, but we DO get to have a say in what we do next. Our grandparents (depending on how old you are), great grandparents, great-great grandparents, and even older ancestors didn’t live the same ways we do now. Going back to the way things were then isn’t possible or good, but they did have skills like how to forage, grow, and make food, how to make their own clothes, how to fix things around their homes (or even build new homes!), and even how to make medicine. Some of our ancestors knew how to live in an ecosystem with their plant and animal neighbors, with everybody making space for everybody else, helping eachother out, and being respectful of one another.
During the mid-20th century, parents, grandparents and other grownups stopped teaching these skills to children. Forager Alexis Nicole (look her up!) calls this “The Great Food Forgetting”, but I think it applies to stuff like making clothes or taking care of a home, too. Grownups stopped teaching these skills to kids for reasons that we can understand and empathize with: They were afraid or ashamed of looking “poor” for not buying food from a grocery store or clothes from a department store, and families of color faced violence (and still do) from their white neighbors and from the police and government for living their cultures’ ways of life. For a hundred or so years even before that, the government had been making it harder and harder for people to make their own stuff and live in peace with their plant and animal neighbors by writing laws that made it illegal for people to gather food on land they didn’t own and made it illegal for Indigenous and immigrant families to eat traditional foods, live in traditional houses, or wear traditional clothes.
Some of those laws are gone now, but a lot of them are still around. Many of them make it specifically illegal to raise kids in these ways of life by saying that parents have to live in specific kinds of home (like one that has a concrete foundation, plumbing and electricity), and get most of their food in specific ways (like going to the grocery store), and if not the government will take the kids away from their parents and put them in foster care.
Those same laws and cultural changes also taught a lot of grownups (probably a lot of the grownups reading this!) all the reasons you could be afraid of doing things like foraging and preserving your own food or making your own medicine, instead of how to do them safely.
All of that is why I’m making this for you. We all need to learn how to make and get the stuff we need without going to the store, but most grownups these days don’t have those skills and don’t know how to teach them to their kids. Plenty of grownups are afraid of getting it wrong. It’s okay to feel scared of how the world is changing and not know what to do about it. I hope that by working together on some of these projects, you and your grownups (or you and your kids) can feel a little bit more capable of helping eachother and all of your human, plant and animal neighbors get what you need.
About the author: Hi! My name is Mildie Amyx. I’m an herbalist, health educator and real-life mountain hermit. I live on a forest farm I built with my friend in southern Appalachia. I spend a lot of time hanging out with plants, making things, and chasing opossums off my porch with a broom. I was homeschooled as a kid and lucky to have spent most of my early childhood outside eating dandelions and chasing bugs.
If you have any questions about how to do a project, or just want to say hi, please email me at mildewamyx@protonmail.com. I would love to see pictures or hear about your experiences!