The Gathering Society is composed of women in the Great Lakes region representing a diversity of cultural backgrounds.
We focus on sharing Traditional Knowledge including wild foods and medicines, songs, crafting, food preservation, teachings, and traditional living skills. With both Tribal and non-Tribal members, we strive to build bridges between us to heal our communities.
The Gathering Society is ever growing. We fulfill a desire for sharing Traditional Knowledge from our rich and varied cultures. Most of us live in the Great Lakes Region and we have members of various Tribes or First Nations or have Tribal ancestry. Our cultural connections are diverse and beautiful.
We generally meet on the first Saturday of the month, but may gather on Sundays as well. Our gatherings include workshops, foraging, wild food processing, making medicines, crafting, potlucks, and sharing songs. Sisters often offer to host these events at their homes or in natural settings all around Michigan. We also take field trips to visit sisters who live far away, or to attend workshops.
Our workshops cover a variety of topics. For example, we have crafted gourd canteens and beaded leather pouches, harvested and processed wild rice, made maple sugar and acorn flour, crafted medicinal salves and learned about traditional medicines. Many of these workshops have turned into "work days" and have become annual traditions, as was intended.
We also go to the woods and fields, marshes and meadows to harvest herbs, roots, berries, mushrooms, nuts, bark, rice, and fibers. These gatherings involve much sharing of information including plant identification, the proper way to harvest, what parts are most useful, and how to clean, prepare, and store these plants.
If you are interested in becoming a member of the Gathering Society or want more information email us at thegatheringsociety@gmail.com.