Woniya Thibeault, an author and ancestral skills instructor who participated in the reality TV show Alone in season six, has released her new book Never Alone.
She held a book reading in the Visitor Centre last Thursday.
Her writing tells the story of her wilderness adventure in the Northwest Territories in the fall and winter of 2018. It includes autobiographical information about her life leading up to her journey and her time in the wilderness as well as her recovery and integration back into normal life after a deep survival immersion.
During the TV series that Thibeault was a participant in, 10 people were dropped in 10 different locations along the east arm of Great Slave Lake with only 10 items each to survive as long as they could.
Thibeault said that she grew up in northern California but had lived in colder climates such as upstate New York, Vermont and northern Ontario.
She said that she has devoted her life to learning, practising and teaching ancestral skills such as tanning hides, making baskets from wild materials and collecting wild foods.
She was never interested in television until ‘Alone’ found her through her teachings and website, she said.
“And I realized that while I was resistant to the idea of television,” said Thibeault, “It was a really important way to get the message and the practices and what I do and how I do it to a larger group of people because mostly we see Rambo-type people who are out there like to conquer the wilderness.”
Thibeault said she started writing Never Alone the day she left the wilderness. She was then helicoptered out of the wild and flown straight to the emergency room in Yellowknife. She started writing in a journal she bought from a book cellar in town. The book took four years to complete.
During the interview with Thibeault, she shared more about her background and what led her to participate in the Alone show. She explained that she has devoted her life to learning, practicing, and teaching what she calls ancestral skills — “The skills that our ancestors used from 500,000 years ago to much more recently to live and thrive in the wilderness,” she said, “And that’s been the main thrust of my life is practising all of those techniques and integrating them into modern life as well.”
Thibeault said she felt it was really important to bring a different perspective — one of a woman, one of someone who’s there with a sense of belonging.
Thibeault also shared more about her experience on the Alone show. She explained that one of the things that was important to her on her journey was going out not in fancy high-tech gear but in homemade gear made from natural materials — the kind of things that her ancestors would have been wearing for thousands of years and the kind of material that people used here to survive before modern gear. So furs, leather, wool - that kind of thing. It was really about representing a different way of being than our modern way of being.
Thibeault told Yellowknifer that the book Never Alone just came out last week and she wanted to share it with the world from Yellowknife — the place where her journey began first, “so kind of bringing it full circle back to where it all started because this was such a powerful place and experience for me.”