Embodied Learning at New Cowgirl Camp

By Maya Weeks

Participating in New Cowgirl Camp loosened something in me that I had been trying to figure out how to loosen up but hadn’t known how. I am a geographer and poet who works on pollution and gender. I was a poet first, and then trained as a geographer to develop research skills in environmental justice to write stronger poetry. And then I became a researcher whose practice involves creative writing. And then an educator who uses all of the above to teach. By the time I arrived at New Cowgirl Camp, it had become clear to me that I needed to integrate land stewardship into my life in a major way. Since my rural childhood, land stewardship had been relegated to the periphery in my life while I developed my creative and scholarly faculties as the first person in my family to attend university. And I love those parts of my life. But fire seasons where I lived, on acreage on the overgrazed and mineral-depleted Central Coast of California, were getting more and more catastrophic with climate change. On top of that, my body was aching to feel alive. I needed another dimension to my work, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the sheep my cousins had raised when I was a kid.

New Cowgirl Camp participants (clockwise from bottom left: Jenna Coughlin, Andrea Baeza, Tanner Delp, and Maya Weeks) collect plant growth data in a breakout group.

I arrived at New Cowgirl Camp—which was the version in collaboration with Grazing School of the West in Tomales in October 2024—anticipating learning a ton about animal husbandry, water infrastructure, Holistic Management, and prescribed grazing business plans. And I did! But I also had a profound experience of training in an educational setting focused on collaboration, mutual understanding, and relationship building — with my instructors and facilitators, with my peers, and with the land. I experienced this as an instance of the feminist environmental justice theory I work with regularly in action in real time.

Best curriculum ever.

When I was participating in a climate justice conference a year and a half later, I found myself looking around the conference room, observing the body language of my fellow delegates, listening without taking very many notes at all, and then getting to know and thinking with my colleagues. Rather than focusing on collecting every grain of information as is quite traditional in academia by constantly taking notes, I was having an embodied experience and absorbing what I was hearing through my body, then putting it into action during breaks and in the weeks that followed the event. I have found that I have borne the embodied approach to education I experienced at New Cowgirl Camp into my academic and creative work, and it has made me a better geographer, poet, and educator. Now I just need to get my sheep.

New Cowgirl Camp participant Andrea Baeza holds indigo in the Fibershed dye garden.