Kiliii Yu has some difficulty expressing the philosophy of his endeavor, Dancing Hawk Hunter Gatherer Lifeways.

As he says, it can be “elusive” and is always changing. Dancing Hawk is dedicated to helping people learn to capture happiness and live in tune with the world around them.

He strives to bring people closer to seeing the world as an indigenous culture would. Currently he is following this path in Manzanita.

The name for his enterprise came to him one day as he was sitting and working on a set of buckskins, the clothing he prefers. He looked up to see a bird seemingly dancing through the sky. It soared, dropped toward the ground, soared again, all around the open meadow where Kiliii was sitting. Eventually, the bird crashed into the ground, and on inspection Kiliii realized it was a sharpshin hawk which had obviously been on a “lean energy budget.” He realized it had been riding the line between life and death for awhile. He thus chose Dancing Hawk for the name of his organization.

Through example and experience in skills such as foraging, hunting, music, fishing, kayak building, hide tanning, bow making, basketry and naturalism – learning local birds, animals, fish, and their languages and habits, Kiliii teaches students to learn to see the land with “native eyes” where everything is alive and connected. In native ways, there is only “he” or “she,” there is no pronoun for “it.”

The harvests are managed so that “the area is better the next year.” Kiliii includes the Chinook language in the philosophy he demonstrates as it is one of the local indigenous languages, and it can express concepts that other languages have no words for.

His intent is to help others to live the native lifestyle which means being centered in your body and senses, a conscious part of the community, to think about solutions, not problems, and to make the lives of people around you better.

Kiliii has seven interns at the present time from the ages of 17 to 23, some of them have been with him through several internships. The internship is about building community and how to live together, based on the Iroquois model of an indigenous system. Besides learning the skills mentioned above, the interns focus on personal growth and self-knowledge.

Kiliii Yu is of Chinese and Siberian ancestry. He was raised in El Paso, Texas, and then New York City. He remembers “a lot of bugs in New York.” He and his brother had a two-member bug club. His parents are immigrants and one of the major influences in his life has been a distant relative from Russia who is a shaman, Nadhezdha Duvan. She is the last of her lineage, and Kiliii has gained in many ways from knowing her. He has taken a class from survival expert and tracker Tom Brown and helped for a while with Tom’s classes, but his own interests lie more in connecting with the land, and “creating a system where we all work together on the land.”

The local group is planning workshops in which local people will be invited to participate. Some of the interns need work and are open to doing a variety of tasks. You can contact them at kiliii@dancing hawk.com with short- or long-term employment.