What this is

WAKA is a collection of things that work: methods, games, practices, rituals, songs, images and readings for bringing young people into a real relationship with the living world. It is kept by the youth workers, ecovillage educators and facilitators who use them, and it grows one voyage at a time.

It exists because the alternative was a PDF. The first WAKA training week committed, as Erasmus+ projects do, to producing a downloadable collection of the methods used. A PDF is a fine thing and one will exist. But it cannot be added to by the next group, cannot hold a recording of a song, cannot be asked my group is asleep and it is three in the afternoon, and stops being true on the day it is exported. So the collection became a place.

Where the wheel comes from

The eight-direction wheel used across this site — eight points that are at once a day, a year and a life — comes from the nature-connection lineage taught by Jon Young and the 8 Shields Institute, set out in Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature by Jon Young, Ellen Haas and Evan McGown. That model in turn draws on teachings from many indigenous cultures, principally through Young's long apprenticeship with the tracker Tom Brown Jr and his later work with Kalahari San and other elders.

The wording on this site is our own, written for European youth work, and it is a simplification. The full 8 Shields model is a body of practice with mentoring structures, core routines and a depth this collection does not attempt to reproduce. If the wheel is useful to you, go to the source.

More broadly: directional wheels of this kind belong to living traditions — Lakota, Anishinaabe, Cherokee and many others — where they are not facilitation tools but cosmology, with protocols attached. What is offered here is a working map for running a week with a group. It is not a medicine wheel, and calling it one would be both inaccurate and disrespectful.

Where the name comes from

Waka is te reo Māori for the ocean-going canoe of Aotearoa New Zealand: a vessel that carried whole communities across the Pacific, and a word that still names the descent groups tracing themselves to each of those canoes. The name was chosen in Sicily in 2023 for that sense — a small crew crossing something large together, carrying everything they need. The group also knew waka as a classical Japanese poetic form, and as the word meaning to walk or to get somewhere together in several West African varieties of English.

It is a borrowed word, taken from a culture none of the founding partners belong to, by a project in Europe. That is worth being straight about rather than quiet about. What we hold ourselves to:

• Say where it is from, every time. Not "a word meaning canoe" — te reo Māori, from Aotearoa.
• Take the colours of the place, not the designs of the people. The palette of this site is drawn from kōkōwai (red ochre), pounamu (greenstone), pāua shell, harakeke and black sand. There is no kōwhaiwhai, no koru motif and no tā moko anywhere on it, and there will not be. Those are taonga, they belong to specific iwi and carvers, and they are not decoration.
• Do not claim the ceremony. Where a method here descends from a living practice — the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, the honorable harvest, solo time in wild places — the card says so, names the source, and describes what we actually do, which is always something smaller.
• Be correctable. If you are Māori and think this use of the word is wrong, we would rather hear it and change than be comfortable. The route is below.

The eight, in one place

Adding something

The collection is only worth keeping if it keeps growing. A card is worth adding when you have actually run the thing, more than once, and can say what happens when it goes wrong.

What a card needs:

• What it is for, in one sentence — the aim, not the description.
• Which direction or directions it belongs to.
• Duration, group size, materials, indoors or out.
• How it actually runs, step by step, with real timings.
• Facilitator notes — including the safety brief, and the failure mode.
• Where it came from. Whose method is it, which tradition, who taught it to you. If you do not know, say that; "origin unknown to us" is an honest line and an invitation to someone who does know.

Songs need a recording or they are not usable. Images need permission from everyone in them.

Credits

WAKA I was coordinated by Grain&Sens (Boffres, France) with Gaia Education Europe (BE), Zavod Veles (SI), RaizameVivo (ES) and Ježko (SK), and co-funded by the European Union through Erasmus+ KA153-YOU.

Project management: Romain Guilbaud, with Henriette Scholz. Lead facilitation: Ivan Ballesteros Barnie.