#rematriate

RESIST antiblackness

REVOLT against empire

REMATRIATE the land

This Juneteenth I wanted to explore what African-American liberation would look like on Turtle Island beyond reparations. I took inspiration from my Gullah-Geechee ancestors who maintained their indigenous African lifeways and culture in the face of chattel slavery and cultural genocide.

This painting includes a character of mine who I lovingly refer to as Sister Liberation. She represents a continuum of Black women’s militant resistance against misogynoir and colonialism outside of motherhood. I call her Sister Liberation because she “ain’t nobody’s mama”.

Pictured here is Sister Liberation adorned with cowrie shell jewelry and her signature rifle (adorned with the Akan Adinkra symbols for justice, freedom, and wisdom from the past). In her left hand, she holds stalks of wild rice. In front of her, a Gullah-Geechee sweetgrass basket is adorned with Aya, the Adinkra symbol for survival and endurance. The basket is filled with indigo leaves and okra.

Prints and posters of this piece are now available on my printful!

Pulling out the best cobs for seed and the rest for food from our Sehsapsing Flint Corn harvest. Each of the 6 boxes represents the yield from a different seed source: our growouts from 2016, 2017, three different individual cobs from 2018, and seed from the USDA. We learned that the seed from 2016 and cob #3 from 2018 yielded the best quality and quantity (we will grow only from that stock next year), and the USDA seed was slightly crossed and unimpressive. It’s a Lenape variety, kept until 1985 by Nora Thompson Dean, an Unami Delaware/Lenape herbalist who dedicated her life to preserving the culture and traditions of her tribe. This variety was brought west to Oklahoma by her mother, Sarah Wilson Thompson. Many Lenape people moved west over hundreds of years, continually pushed onward by white settlers. Our original seed comes from William Woys Weaver and the Roughwood Seed Collection. We primarily grow this corn to rematriate it to Lenape people, and to its original territory. #sehsapsing #sehsapsingcorn #zeamays #seedkeeping #rematriate https://www.instagram.com/p/B25hHqpANfF/?igshid=1vs8d44vc3ajt

I add my breath to your breath,

That our days may be long on the Earth

That the days of our people may be long

That we may be one person

That we may finish our roads together

May our mother bless you with life

May our Life Paths be fulfilled.

old Keres song, as told by Paula Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop, p.56

“In the beginning was thought, and her name was Woman. The Mother, the Grandmother, recognized from earliest times into the present among those peoples of the Americas who kept to the eldest traditions, is celebrated in social structures, architecture, law, custom, and the oral tradition. To her we owe our lives, and from her comes our ability to endure, regardless of the concerted assaults on our, on Her, being, for the past five hundred years of colonization. She is the Old Woman who tends the fires of life. She is the Old Woman Spider who weaves us together in a fabric of interconnection. She is the Eldest God, the one who Remembers and Re-members; and though the history of the past five hundred years has taught us bitterness and helpless rage, we endure into the present, alive, certain of our significance, certain of her centrality, her identity as the Sacred Hoop of Be-ing.”

— Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. (introduction to Ways Of Our Grandmothers)