About Ash & Bone
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Our principal focus rests in four interwoven domains: earth-based spirituality, birth work and intentional family creation, natural building, and herbalism.
These are the threads we pull most often the ones that have anchored human life across culture and continent for as long as memory holds. And yet the ancestral arts are as diverse as the ecosystems of this earth, and we hold that diversity with reverence. We aim to include as many lineages of wisdom as we can, always with care for the unique roots from which each tradition grows honoring where knowledge comes from, and the people who have carried it.
These arts may have been forgotten. But they have not been lost.
Together, we remember them and together, we claim them as our collective birthright.
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Ash and Bone: School of Ancestral Arts was born from a simple and ancient longing — to support people in returning to the skills that have shaped human existence since the very beginning.
These are the simple arts. The mundane ones. The absolutely necessary ones. The arts that gave meaning, purpose, and structure to the lives of our ancestors — and to which some deep part of us still yearns to come home.
※ How do we create shelter that honors the natural world and builds us back into the ecological web? ※ 𐫰 How do we remember the matricentric cultures that fostered healthy, rooted family life for most of human history? 𐫰 ꥟ How do we honor the sacred thresholds of our lives through rite of passage, ritual, ceremony, and song? ꥟ 𖧧 How do we heal with the allyship of plants, held in nuanced and caring relationship with practitioners who truly know us? 𖧧
These are the questions that live at the heart of Ash and Bone.
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These arts are your birthright. And together, we will remember what it means to be human — in a good way.
Modern life, late-stage capitalism, and the colonial backdrop of our existence have severed so many of us from the deeper meaning of what it is to be human. We feel it — that quiet ache. The sense that something essential is missing. That we don't quite belong to the place we live, or to one another.
Here, we believe that resettling ourselves in the ancestral arts is how we begin to reweave ourselves back into the web of belonging.
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Art of Birth
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Art of Spirit
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Art of Plants
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Art of Home
• Our Mission •
To resurrect the ancestral arts as living practice, supporting people in returning to the skills, ceremonies, and ways of knowing that have given human life meaning since the very beginning.
• Our Vision •
We aim to create a world rooted in Respect and Reciprocity, where the ancestral arts are remembered, relationships with the living world are restored, and every threshold of human life is met with Reverence: reweaving ourselves, thread by thread, into the ecological web to which we have always belonged.
Our Approach •
We believe the ancestral arts should meet you where you are in your season, your capacity, and your calling.
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The first thread of connection. Articles, practices, recipes, and teachings offered freely — because this knowledge belongs to all of us, and access should never be a barrier to remembering.
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Short, accessible, and designed to be woven into modern life. A way to begin learning the arts that call to you, in your own time and at your own pace.
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Longer, deeper containers that take you beneath the surface of a practice — structured learning with real substance, from wherever in the world you are.
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In an increasingly online world, there are things that can only happen when we are in the same room, on the same land, breathing the same air. Our in-person offerings are an invitation to commune — with the earth, with the arts, and with each other. To remember not just the knowledge, but the feeling of being held in community around something that matters.
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The most intimate path. Personal mentorship, herbal consultations, and individualized support in each of our four arts — for those ready to be met exactly where they are, with full presence and care.
Woven through every offering are the threads that make this more than a school song, ritual, ceremony, and the turning of the seasonal wheel. Because the ancestral arts were never meant to be learned in isolation. They were always meant to be lived.
• Our Values •
The five R’s
These are not values posted on a wall. They are the living principles that shape how this school is held, how its offerings are designed, and how community is tended the roots beneath everything.
Founder Bio
Clinical Herbalist · Natural Builder · Educator · 15+ Years in Service to Families
There is a remembering that lives in the hands.
In the way they learn to read soil, to receive a labouring woman, to gather the right plant at the right moment, to shape a wall from the earth beneath our feet. Ashley McDonell has been following this remembering since she was nineteen years old and it has led her, faithfully, back to the same place every time. Back to the land. Back to the body. Back to the threshold where the human and the wild meet and recognize each other.
She is the founder of Ash and Bone: School of Ancestral Arts.
Born on the occupied homelands of the Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples, her life moves with the seasons gathering teachings, weaving community, tending the seeds she has been given to sow.
Her practice lives at the crossing of four ancient arts natural building, herbalism, birth keeping, and earth-based spirituality the same arts that have held human life in place, in body, in community, and in the sacred, since the very beginning.
As a natural builder she guides people from vision into manifestation — earthen homes, community sanctuaries, regenerative landscapes — each one an act of reciprocity with the land, an offering to those yet to come. As an herbalist she tends the ongoing dialogue between the human body and the green world, listening as much as prescribing, learning as much as teaching. As a birth keeper she walks alongside women across the full arc of the reproductive continuum — from conception through birth, postpartum, and loss — holding the profound initiatory thresholds of womanhood with presence, skill, and sacred regard. And as a ceremonialist, she crafts ritual and song for the ordinary and the extraordinary alike, because she knows that every threshold of human life deserves to be met with beauty, intention, and community.
Earth-based spirituality is not something Ashley practices. It is something she is.
She teaches the way the land teaches through pattern, through season, through the kind of knowledge that enters the body before it enters the mind. Her work is rooted in Respect, Reciprocity, Reverence, Relationship, and Remembrance. In every container she holds she arrives whole: the herbalist, the builder, the birth keeper, the ritualist, the woman who believes, with her whole life, that these arts are not lost.
• A note from our founder •
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A Note on the Complexity of This Work
We live in a time of profound unraveling and profound remembering.
The world we are all trying to find our way back to was not lost by accident. Colonialism, patriarchy, and the relentless hunger of late-stage capitalism have spent centuries deliberately severing human beings from the earth, from their lineages, from the wisdom of their bodies, and from each other. This is not ancient history. It lives in us now in the grief we cannot name, the rage that has nowhere to go, the ache of belonging nowhere, and the bone-deep sense that something essential has been stolen.Almost every culture on this earth carries this wound, though not equally and not in the same ways. Some peoples have endured losses of a magnitude that demands its own grief, its own space, its own witnessing. We do not flatten these histories into a single story. We hold them with tender hands the complexity, the specificity, the weight of what has been taken and what has survived.
What we know is this: the longing to return to the land, to the ancestral arts, to the web of belonging is not nostalgia. It is a sane and sacred response to an insane severing. The earth has not forgotten us, even when we have forgotten her. The wisdom of our ancestors has not disappeared, even when it was driven underground. It waits. It persists. It rises to meet us when we turn toward it.
That turning is what we are here to tend.
We hold this work with as much humility as devotion, knowing that we are all, in different ways, finding our way home through the wreckage of what was broken. We will not always get it right. We are learning, always, how to offer these seeds with more love, more care, and more respect for the ground they come from.
At Ash and Bone, we believe we all do better when we receive honest reflection. If you see ways we can offer this work with more love or respect please reach out to us directly. This community is tended by many hands, and yours matter.
• Songs That Bring Us Home •
The ancestral arts are the skills all our ancestors practiced : building, healing, birthing, growing, praying, and singing. Always singing. Song is not secondary here, It is one of the oldest technologies of remembrance our species has ever known. It bypasses the thinking mind and lands somewhere older in us, in our bones. At Ash & Bone, we sing in every retreat, every gathering, every online circle we hold, the songs help wake up what we know in our bones.
Enjoy some of the songs we share here:
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