Sunshine Brewer is perhaps one of the most knowledgeable people around when it comes to primitive living skills and Native American survival wisdom. She has spent her entire life learning how to live off the land. In this new blog, she will share with our readers not only quick tips and tricks but in depth information on wild edibles, medicinals, and otherwise useful plants.

It is difficult for me to separate the skills required for self sufficiency and those needed for survival. The same skills that allow an individual to be self sufficient are often the same types of skills that can mean life or death in a survival situation.

When a person is living or can live “Off the Grid” they can provide heat, food, shelter, water and medicine for themselves and any types of livestock they might have. In a survival situation, regardless of the cause, a person must be able to make fire, find food, purify or find water and provide medical assistance for themselves and possibly others.

I have lived “Off Grid” many times during my life. Some were intentional others the result of a natural disaster or financial crisis. The skills and knowledge that I learned have helped me to live in these situations.

Learning to be self sufficient and living in a self sufficient way is not easy. Survival in a time of natural disaster or fiscal demise is just as hard. Manual labor increases ten-fold and when coupled with a limited diet can be disheartening for some.

A bucket of beans and a stockpile of water will only last so long before a person must “sink or swim.” There are only a few places in the United States that don’t have an abundance of wild plants that have multiple uses. Before the industrial revolution all medicines were created from wild plants. It is the same for many items we take for granted. Clothes are made from cloth that is woven on machines. Before machines became the method for weaving people wove their own fabrics from plant and animal fibers and colored them using plant and mineral dyes. Foraging for food from the wild to provide a balanced diet was a way of life and in many areas foraging still provides delicacies.

Primitive skills are a dying art form. These types of skills allow anyone at anytime to fashion tools, provide food, water, basic first aid materials, and in an extended emergency even clothing.