When Joshua Hood looks at a Pacific yew tree, he sees more than just the beginnings of a bow.
He sees a partnership that spans generations, a meditation on balance, tension and rest — a lifeway linking him to his Klamath-Modoc ancestors. He sees his namesake: nteys s?odt’a, or “bow worker” in his tribe’s language.
For Hood, 35, that name has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Along with constructing custom bows and teaching traditional bow-making and archery courses for majority-BIPOC students in Portland, Oregon, he also runs a nonprofit focused on teaching youth outdoor skills. Every part of Hood’s work revolves around traditional archery in one way or another.
Everyone is welcome at Hood’s courses, which he announces through his Instagram account. His work fills a need in the BIPOC outdoor education space at a time when the Trump administration has slashed grant funding and support for programs that empower historically marginalized communities. As the primitive-skills world — often associated with bushcraft, toolmaking and wilderness survival — moves into high-cost courses and crowded retreats, it often fails to acknowledge its Indigenous roots. Hood’s focus on decolonizing the exchange of Indigenous archery knowledge while keeping participation costs down provides a haven for a community that isn’t necessarily at home in other modern archery spaces.
“There aren’t a lot of Native folks doing this type of work. They aren’t as abundant as our counterparts, who have a chokehold on what you might call the ‘skills’ world.”
“There aren’t a lot of Native folks doing this type of work,” Hood said. “They aren’t as abundant as our counterparts, who have a chokehold on what you might call the ‘skills’ world.” Bow-making courses can cost $1,500 or more for several days of instruction, compared to Hood’s class, which runs $500 to $750 for three days. “I have to put food on the table and keep the lights on, but I’ve been able to do this work without breaking the pockets of our participants,” Hood said.
HOOD LEARNED HOW TO MAKE BOWS in his late teens, teaching at a survival school where a co-worker led bow-making clinics. Hood welcomed the chance to learn a new skill, but the work didn’t satisfy him the way he hoped it would. The group used power tools that Hood lacked access to outside class and purchased commercial lumber from a hardware store.
“I wanted to be able to do this like my ancestors did it, without going to Home Depot to get the lumber,” Hood said. At first, he gathered ash saplings and carved them with a whittling knife. Then he began honing his skills with hatchets, draw knives and other hand tools. “I wanted to be able to do this process wherever I gathered the wood,” he said.
Hood’s bow-making process begins with the slow, mindful selection of the wood. Earlier in his career, he worked with hazel, ash and dogwood. Now, he prefers harder woods like osage orange, black locust and Pacific yew, or “tsû’pinksham,” the Klamath-Modoc Tribe’s traditional choice of wood for bow-making. Today, the tree is in danger of overharvest, so Hood uses it only when making bows for himself or another archer of Klamath-Modoc descent.
Once he selects his tree, he leaves an offering of tobacco as an act of reciprocity. Hood, who embraced sobriety in 2019, credits it with enabling him to build more meaningful relationships with the trees he harvests. Asking for permission is important, he said. “We take a life from something very precious, that gives us oxygen, and then it just kind of sits in a void,” he said. “The spirit of that tree is like, ‘Where am I going next? Am I going to be firewood, or am I going to be made into something, or am I just going to sit, and get eaten by bugs?’ ”
After harvesting the wood, Hood lets it cure for nine months or so, “like a baby in the womb.” When the cured piece of wood, known as a “stave,” is ready, Hood initiates a ceremony for it before starting his woodworking process.
“We let it know what our intentions are for it, and then we smudge it with cedar, give a prayer, and try to welcome it into a new form that can teach us how to restore balance to our lives,” he said, explaining how the limbs of the bow must balance to project an arrow properly. “To have some type of vision, to see a bow in a piece of wood that otherwise normally just looks like a big stick, it’s like a mirror,” he said. “How do we have vision for where we’re going?”
HOOD’S APPRENTICE, VEE, who asked that we not use her last name, also sees bow-making as a metaphor for envisioning a better and brighter future. Vee, 32, made her first bow with Hood in the fall of 2023, after losing her brother to a gunshot wound two years earlier. Hood became a kind of brother figure, and the following spring she returned to study bow-making and assist at clinics.
“We take a tree that was once living and bring it back to life in a new form, one shaped by who we are,” Vee said. “I’ve seen people come in with hopes of making a bow and walk away with a little more soul, having tended to some of their wounds. Our world is medicine, and healing can be so simple.”
Distilling something so meaningful into an educational course takes time, and Hood believes in letting each student take as long as necessary. Sometimes, the three-day course ends before the student is finished, so they return to complete their work at their own pace.
“Patience is a big value in bow-making,” Hood says. “Nothing sacred should be rushed.”
Once the work is complete, Hood leads participants through archery practice so they can learn to use their new bows in a safe, attentive atmosphere. His USA Archery instructor certification also qualifies him to teach archery to kids in school settings.
In September, Hood and co-founder Joshua Tuski launched a nonprofit called Learning Through Land that focuses on teaching outdoor skills classes for Portland-area youth. Archery and bow-making will be central, but they will also offer classes in arrow-making, hide-tanning, knife-carving and creating fire by friction. Hood and Tuski hope to enrich the lives of young people by teaching them these practices and imparting the wisdom that comes with them.
“These are fun and important skills, but also we want to have conversations with students about how they can impact our daily lives,” Hood said. “There are always teachings within teachings.”
“There are always teachings within teachings.”
Ultimately, Hood aims to someday harvest an animal on his tribe’s traditional homelands using a bow of his own making. This would be the ultimate full-circle moment, he said. Until then, he will continue honing his own craft and taking pride in teaching others to do the same.
“This is in everyone’s DNA,” Hood said. “We just have to wake it up.”
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This article appeared in the December 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “He makes bows – and bow makers.”
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