Songs, stories and ancient wisdom & knowledge handed down since the beginning of time in which we all come from.

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Paul Chiyokten Wagner is the founder of Protectors of the Salish Sea, an indigenous-led organization dedicated to protecting and restoring our Salish Sea through direct actions. Chiyokten is also a cultural educator, bringing forward the words given by his Coast Salish ancestors which have allowed the First Peoples here to co-create paradise for many thousands of years. Chiyokten and Protectors have stood on the front lines of many places of indigenous-led resistance such as Standing Rock, Line 3, Sabal Trail Pipeline, Lelu Island, Mauna Kea, Thacker Pass and Fairy Creek, Olympia State Capitol Climate Change Occupations, Chase Bank divestment campaigns and Salish Sea Prayer Walks. Chiyokten is an award winning Coast Salish Native flutist and storyteller and has performed with a few greats such as Kitaro of Japan and Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

In this workshop, Inger Johanne introduces her “Four Pillar” approach to cultivating personal spiritual practice through a Nordic Animist lens. Drawing inspiration from ancient source material and literature, she guides you toward engaging with the natural and spirit world using the methods of Seid, Galdr, Runes, and Utesitting. Inger offers a modern and practical interpretation of these concepts, encouraging you to experiment with and experience magic for yourself, and to be in communication and connection with the natural world around you.

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Hailing from Norway and brought up with an animist worldview, Inger has a lifelong fascination with ancestral knowledge and traditions. She is a certified psychotherapist specializing in nature-based therapy and has over 25 years of experience as a teacher and ritual facilitator around the world. Her courses invite participants to draw from a deep well of knowledge, with practical and approachable insight into bringing these practices to daily life. In 2017, Inger founded Ing.Borg, a Danish-Norwegian company offering drum-making courses, Nordic sweat lodge experiences, practical animism courses, and other workshops centered around ancient Nordic traditions. She also offers translations from English, Danish, and Norwegian into Old Norse and runes.

Severed Branches Press exists in endless entanglements between theory and practice, helping shape a culture of militant animism by both participating in and describing it. This talk focuses on our solstitial publication Defending the World Tree: A Journal of Animist Awakening. We will discuss how this offering aims to explore, nurture, and offer guidance to the broader cultural, scientific, political, and religious phenomenon we call animism.

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Severed Branches Press is an independent eco-poetic publishing effort rooted in the South Salish Sea. We are wild-hearted animists devoted to ecology, spirituality, land defense, and community, offering our work in reverence to the living world and its protectors.

This workshop is a prayer — a marriage of the practical, material skills of ethical animal slaughter and magickal explorations of how to be in service to those that die so that we can live.

Using a blend of ancestral traditions, emergent collaborative ritual, professional butchering techniques, and wyrd experimentations, this class is rooted in reverence for our animal kin. We exalt the spirit of our food to its proper place as divine by learning how to kill, butcher, and cook in sacred etiquette of indebtedness and reciprocity. Every gift of the animal is celebrated by transmutation into practical, magickal items.

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Harmony and Sarah have been weaving animal death together for over a decade, crafting practices from the collision of ancestral customs, folk magick, and the Empire. Harmony is a Dark Woods Beast Conjurer devoted to animal technologies. Sarah is a bardic, shape shifting temple warden, devoted to reanimating the archetype of holy caregiver through radical community mothering.

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Holy Death will be an ongoing, three-day workshop, with the slaughter itself taking place on Friday. Please note that there is a suggested donation of $10-$40 (cash only) and a required time commitment of 3-4 hours to participate in the slaughter portion of the workshop. Following this, all festival attendees are welcome to drop in throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday as Harmony and Sarah lead a hands-on exploration of how to use all parts of the animal.

How does focusing on the "Blood of the Earth" — the water flowing above and below — help shape and recover a place's history? This experiential workshop connects participants with the layered history of Red Hawk Avalon and its surroundings using historical materials. We will explore the site's known history, from the landscape and its first Indigenous inhabitants to the extractive industries, settlers, and workers that created the ghost town of Walville and its cemetery. Through a collaborative ritual of research and storytelling we will honor the continuum of life this land and water have witnessed. Please join us for this shared act of listening and remembrance.

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Conor "Coyote" Casey is an archivist, curator, and historian preserving stories of working people. An experienced public speaker and oral historian, their work connects communities with the deep histories of place and labor. They are also a magical willworker, a vocalist, and a union steward. Certified with an MA and MLIS, they helped unionize UW library workers. Their current art project explores Pacific Northwest ghost towns, and their research focuses on labor and oral history.

Kundalini Yoga is a moving meditation practice that uses the physical body to access a higher state of consciousness. Together we’ll do a kriya (set of movements) for the Spirit of Water, mirroring the Yoruba creation story, to help us connect with the primordial river of creation. This practice links somatic movement and postures with the breath as we follow the river that leads from the heart to the womb/root.

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Randiah Camille Green is a writer, yoga teacher, poetry performance artist, animist, and spirit having a human experience from Detroit. She is a certified kundalini yoga instructor, CYT-200, and Advanced Usui Reiki practitioner. Randiah uses movement, energy work, breathwork, crystal singing bowls, and her voice to help people reconnect to the divine within, extending far beyond the physical body. She is honored to guide you on the journey back home.

Amber will lead an interactive workshop exploring the popular myth of The Selkie Bride and other, lesser known tales of the Sea Folk from Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and the Pacific Northwest. Through didactic lecture, guided active imagination work, and storytelling, she will guide you to find your skin and return to the realms of The Seal Folk. 

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Amber is an Olympic Peninsula-based pagan psychotherapist, poet, performance artist, and co-host of the Pocket Coven Podcast, a series exploring the intersections of magic and mental health. Amber is currently a scholar of Selkie and Seal Folk folklore, studying under master Scottish storyteller and author Daniel Alison of The House of Legends podcast series. Amber is the author of Cool Dark Places, a book of poetry exploring the fertile nature of darkness and rot, available through Port Townsend-based independent publisher Winter Texts. Amber specializes in somatic healing through re-wilding practices and feral emotional expression reached through art making, storytelling, and pagan reverie.

The art and music of Cascadian Midsummer and related gatherings is characterized by a set of recognizable themes, genres, concepts and aesthetics. Some prominent and familiar themes are mythology, environmentalism and ecological awareness, pre-Christian cultural traditions, Pantheistic spirituality, fantasy literature, and the Black Metal genre. Are these elements brought together because they are shared interests of individuals belonging to a scene and community? Or is there a tangible thread that links them together? Michael Korchonnoff reflects on his 20-plus years of immersion in these topics and active participation in the Cascadian musical community to find clarity on this question.

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Michael Korchonnoff is a writer and musician who has actively participated in the Cascadian underground music community since 2007. Michael currently writes and performs as a member of Alda, Byssus and novemthree, and is a live performing member of Returning. Past projects include Ekstasis, River, Haniwa Heron, With the End in Mind, and Ire Adrift. Michael grew up in the South Puget Sound region and lives there still.

You are warmly invited to join Asia and Matthew as they gather craft, story, and play into a small circle of enchantment—centering on the adornment of willow crowns. Simple willow circlets will be ready, waiting like woodland treasures. As the children take part in a gently guided crafting activity, they will decorate their crowns with gathered pieces of nature—sprigs of green, fallen petals, feathers, seedpods, and other small forest finds. While their hands work, stories will drift through the air and new games will be shared, weaving imagination through the afternoon. Families are welcome to arrive and depart as they wish. Children of all ages are invited to explore, create, and linger awhile—leaving with a nature-adorned crown upon their brow and a story tucked into their hearts.

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Matthew Giniat is a veteran teacher who has worked with children of all ages. He began his career as a therapist supporting children with ASD. After several years of in-home work, he earned his master’s in education and transitioned into the classroom. He is currently a special education teacher at a Waldorf school in Chicago. Matthew brings a deep joy for games, stories, and the connections they create, helping students build meaningful, lasting traditions together.

Asia Kindred is a mother, musician, and weaver who discovers and nurtures magic in all the tucked away places. 

Children must be accompanied by a responsible adult at all of Cascadian Midsummer’s family programming.

Gentle Yoga is a class Piper regularly instructs at Steamboat Tennis and Athletic Club in Olympia. It combines pranayama and awareness through movement to take account of the body and mind. There is no judgement in gentle yoga. There is great opportunity to remain equanimous and cocreate a healing energy. With intention and a strong and willing mind, all may deepen relaxation along with gratitude. 

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Piper started taking yoga classes as a teenager to recover from a back injury and continued to practice until her teacher training in 2016. She has a degree in exercise physiology and continues to teach yoga along with other group exercise classes in Olympia. She is inspired by mindfulness practices such as Feldenkrais, Butoh, yoga and meditation. She has also coached volleyball and gymnastics and loves to play acro yoga!

Through work on a program of recovery, Timm and Lou have found that living in isolation is not the answer. Community is, accountability is. Letting go over control of people and outcomes and living in the present moment is the way forward. The plan is to have a nonspecific recovery meeting for all that wish to attend, with a speaker for each day followed by discussion.

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Dagger Lou (he/they) is a group facilitator and space holder, always learning from his environment and looking to foster connection amongst all beings. His sober and self healing journey began in 2018 when at his bottom, he made the commitment to climb out and seek help. His world opened up after that. Lou has been in relationship to music his whole life, whether listening solo, sharing as a group, or creating. Lou is honored to share this deep and transformative time with everyone, coming together under the cedars.

Growing up on the west coast in punk and metal communities, Timm spent much of his youth riding freight trains, touring with bands and searching for a meaningful life. In the spring of 2017, a series of seemingly unfortunate events led to the beginning of his journey in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.

At a festival filled with so many intriguing human creatures, how do we know who is open to making connections with new friends and who would rather be left alone with their thoughts? This is an intimidating quandary for so many of us gentle, shy children of the forest. If you are seeking a consensual facilitated container to make new friends, Dragon welcomes you to the Friendship Forge! By the end of the hour, you will have cast the seeds of friendship into receptive soil and you can watch them grow throughout the rest of the weekend.

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Dragon Migwyn is a queer, non-binary, neurospicy, anarchist witch whose family has lived in the Pacific Northwest for five generations. Their lifelong passions are education, healing, and community building through music and art. Most recently, they have begun facilitating a Seattle-area witchy skillshare meetup called Feeding The Cauldron. They believe that friendship is the foundation of all relationships and the antidote to the ills of the modern world. They humbly invite you to join them in planting the seeds of new connections with fellow children of the forest.

More information coming soon

More information coming soon

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Children must be accompanied by a responsible adult at all of Cascadian Midsummer’s family programming.