Tamarack Song

Tamarack Song is the founder and director of Teaching Drum Outdoor School and an award winning author.

Tamarack’s medicine helpers are Mullein and blue-eyed White Wolf. His ancestors are the tribal people of North Africa and Central Asia. His first memories are of gathering wild strawberries with his mother and learning from her about the wildflowers, birds, and butterflies of the meadow surrounding their house.

At every opportunity as a child, he would be out in the woods and swamps, soaking up every teaching he could extract from the landscape, the weather, and all the animals he found so easy to communicate with. When he was a young man, the examples of Mohandas Gandhi and Aldo Leopold inspired him to dance around convention and go live in the wild. He built a wigwam, joined with a pack of wolves, and sat at the feet of Elders to relearn what it is to be human. Fighting with Ojibwe warriors to regain indigenous hunting and fishing rights, he relived the pain of his own ancestors losing their old ways.

Tamarack has spent his life studying the world’s aboriginal peoples, apprenticing to Elders, and learning traditional hunter-gatherer survival skills. He currently serves as a consultant for wilderness trekkers around the world, and for organizations such as the National Geographic Society. In 1987, he founded Teaching Drum Outdoor School. In 1994, he published his first book, Journey to the Ancestral Self, and has since published many more. He continues to write on the topics of the Native lifeway, connecting with Nature, healing, wilderness survival skills, and Zen.

Tamarack founded the Brother Wolf Foundation, a Wolf education center and the future site of a wolf sanctuary. Read more about Tamarack’s experience living with wolves.

To learn more about Tamarack, you can check out his books on Amazon, or visit Teaching Drum’s online bookstore. For his latest writings, visit his blog, Mongrel Drivel.