Raven Gray is a primitive skills practitioner and experimental archaeologist with more than 25 years’ experience in wilderness living and ancestral wisdom. She has travelled extensively around the world, respectfully learning from indigenous peoples, and studying with some of the world’s top survival, bushcraft and primitive skills instructors. In honour of this lineage, Raven is devoted to keeping the old ways alive through teaching, writing, and speaking. Her life is informed by her passion to restore the world’s wild places, including the wilderness of the human soul. She is particularly passionate about empowering women and the neurodivergent community in the outdoors. Raven is late diagnosed autistic.
A Permaculture designer and educator since the 1990s, Raven was a pioneer of the Transition Towns movement in the UK, and in 2007 she co-founded the national hub Transition US to inspire the emergence of resilient communities that can reimagine and rebuild our world. Her work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times and Elle magazine, and she has been interviewed on national television and public radio, and given presentations at conferences and events on both sides of the Atlantic. After having a son in 2008, she left this career and dedicated herself to full-time motherhood and homeschooling, taking her son on a lifetime journey of rewilding, practicing traditional skills together while living close to the earth. This path included several years of mentoring in a residential program with Jon Young , in the lineage of Tom Brown, Jr., that was a profound immersion in tracking, bird language, primitive skills, and the art of mentoring. Raven and her son have participated in numerous other survival programmes such as Lynx Vilden’s Stone Age Winter Immersion in the mountains of Washington, and the Coastal Hunter Gatherer Bushcraft Course with Fraser Christian in Dorset. Every year Raven and her son attend primitive skills gatherings in California, Idaho, Oregon, and Arizona where they have expanded their skill set and connected with a community of like-minded people. Raven is obsessed with tracking wildlife and tracking her own life, with the intention of coming into deeper relationship with the natural world around her and her own wildness within. Raven has discovered that deep nature connection and ancestral traditions are vital pathways that lead to personal and planetary health.
A lifelong learner, with graduate degrees in ecology and education, Raven is currently doing her PhD in Experimental Archaeology. She previously taught sustainable living skills for an international ecovillage education program; ran an organic dairy farm in West Cornwall; hosted a public radio chat show called “Let’s Talk”; and published print and online articles around her special interests, including a regular newspaper column. A graduate of the Kamana Naturalist Training, and the California Naturalist Training program, Raven is a long-standing member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and on the committee of the Cornish Ancient Sites Protection Network. She recently moved with her son to West Penwith in Cornwall, where she dreams of their previous life in the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Thank you, Raven, for all that you do: For people, birds, animals and planet. Beautifully written.