Annual Project Summary 2007

Founded as a non-profit organization in 1986 by John Stokes, The Tracking Project (TTP) in Corrales, New Mexico, has worked with community educators and Native elders from around the world to design a series of teachings which connect individuals directly to the natural world. Our programs of natural and cultural awareness include a wide range of skills—from traditional tracking and survival skills to music, storytelling, dance, peacemaking and martial arts training. The name Arts of Life was chosen to describe these programs which emphasize indigenous knowledge, the lessons of Nature and the power of art.

Our special thanks to the Aurora Foundation, the Frances V.R. Seebe Charitable Trust, the California Community Foundation, the Attias Family Foundation, the Gerbic Foundation, the Ward & Eis Gallery, the Creare Fund of the Tides Foundation and the many individual contributors who have made these programs possible. Projects in the past year included:

❖ Nurturing the Roots: an international community mentor project. We continued to expand our mentor network through our Mentor Outreach Initiative 2005–2007 to Native communities in Brazil, Hawai‘i and the islands of French Polynesia. Members of our team traveled to Cuiabá in October to take part in Círculo dos Saberes II, an indigenous youth & elder gathering founded by one of our mentor graduates which was attended by members of eleven different Brazilian tribes. We also completed the third and final year of a NTR program with the staff of the Cottonwood School in Corrales, New Mexico, graduating 33 new members into our global network.

❖ Brazil youth camps & leadership trainings. We renewed our connections with our Brazilian partners Projeto Pegadas with a collaborative youth camp in Manaus in May and another tracking course north of Brasília in October.

❖ National Indian Youth Leadership Program (NIYLP). We traveled to Laguna Pueblo lands in June to take part in the NIYLP national summer camp for 65 young Indian leaders from North America and Hawai‘i.

❖ Hawaiian Arts of Life programs. We traveled to O‘ahu in February, March, June and September as we expanded our annual Arts of Life programs with Kamehameha Schools (grades 1, 2 & 7), new youth programs with musician Brother Noland, the YWCA, and the Ho‘omana project on O‘ahu and Moloka‘i. We also joined Brother Noland and his band One Tribe Aloha for performances in Honolulu.

❖ Permaculture & sustainability. Through Joel Glanzberg, we continued to expand our course offerings linking tracking, permaculture and ecology. In April we joined Bill Gilbert and the University of New Mexico Land Arts Program for an introductory course, and in September we camped with the Land Arts group in the Malpaís region. And in June, Joel and John Stokes presented The Art of Seeing / The Way of the Tracker, a course blending the pattern recognition of permaculture and tracking, for the second year.

❖ Summer Skills camps. We continued to host our summer youth tracking and survival skills camps in New Mexico: our twelfth annual Dreamtracking camp for girls, ages 10–16; Hawkeye Training, our twenty-first tracking/awareness camp for boys 12–18; and our ninth Hawkeye Scout invitational advanced skills camp.

❖ Tracking/Awareness courses. We held the second year of our popular Tracking in the Southwest course and the first year of a new Art of Tracking / Arts of Life course on Long Island.

❖ Wildlife preservation. We continued our work in the field of wildlife preservation through our classes, literature and products. We also continued to network with other projects working to protect global ecosystems and biological diversity, such as the Center for Wildlife Law and the All Species Project.

❖ Publications. We continued to spread the idea of offering thanks and expressing appreciation for life through our publication Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World. Adapted from a traditional Iroquois address to the natural world and originally printed in a Mohawk/English dual language edition, these words of gratitude are now available also in German, Swedish, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Bisayan and French (each with the original Mohawk). There are now 55,000 copies of the book in print worldwide.

❖ Teaching resources / products. We continued to generate our array of resource products, which now includes: the Thanksgiving Address booklets; Thanksgiving Address notecards; two posters—Animal Tracks of the Southwest and Animal Tracks of Brasil; and our workout DVD, Secrets of Natural Movement.

❖ www.thetrackingproject.org. We maintained and updated our website to make our programs and strategies accessible to a global audience. The site now receives about 4,800 visitors monthly, with a total of more than 266,868 visitors since the site was posted in 2001.

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