No Loose Braids

We organize and facilitate several kinds of workshops around various traditional and cultural practices. All workshops center Indigenous ways of knowing and being in relationship with all relations in creation. Types of workshops include:

• Hide processing - including fleshing, scraping, racking and brain tanning

• Hand drum or water drum making

• Rattle making

• Traditional regalia making

• Animal processing and storing

Workshops can run as one day-long session or can be scheduled over multiple days. 

No Loose Braids provides cultural education and has spoken at several venues across Massachusetts. Topics include Nipmuc and eastern woodlands history, food sovereignty and sustainability, land stewardship, Indigenous treaties and laws, the effect of colonization, current cultural reclamation work happening in Indigenous communities, and more. We have spoken at public elementary schools, colleges and universities, after school programs, public libraries, festivals and other cultural organizations and institutions. Speaking engagements also provide opportunity for teachings related to traditional social songs and dances. 

A mishoon, or a traditional canoe, used by Native peoples across turtle island for millennia, is made through the process of using water and fire to control the burning-out of a large log. The process requires much care and attention and can take several days or even weeks. The entire process not only involves the use of traditional knowledges and teachings, but offers the opportunity for apprentices and community members to awaken cultural practices and knowledges alongside each other. 

No Loose Braids hopes to lead Mishoon burns across the whole of Nipnet, or Nipmuc country.

At one time, many Wetus or traditional homes could be found across Nipnet. Today, we endeavor to build and re-build traditional homes and wetus across Nipmuc homelands. 

Wetus and accompanying homesites offer space for Nipmuc and other Indigenous people to gather, eat, shelter and decompress.

No Loose Braids consults with local land trusts and the state and local departments of recreation on the principals of land stewardship guided by Indigenous teachings and relationships of reciprocity with the land and our non-human relatives..