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Hi here!

Thanks for viewing my project. I'm Chelsea and while I did not do this project in community with participants in the program, I've created this draft outline with a group of fellow educators as part of a two-year fellowship with Transformative Educational Leadership (TEL).

Our ultimate goal is create programming to support mindfulness practices within educational environments specifically for communities of color. My participation in the ESJC program augments my learnings from the fellowship. My focus area is on black liberation and embodiment for young adults. I hope to provide young adults with embodiment practices that are culturally responsive and adaptive to the environment in which they live whether they reside in urban, rural or suburban areas.

The project below is a work in progress that I'll continue to flush out in partnership with my colleagues in TEL. Feel free to add feedback and ideas for improvement in the comment sections. I appreciate your feedback as we work to strengthen the project.

The questions highlighted in blue are part of a discussion series created for Gavin van Horn's collection, "Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations." The readings and activities serve as ways for participants to answer the questions and embody the lessons through movement, contemplation, art, music, and more. I hope to incorporate more from the book series in the future.

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The source of the prompts in blue. https://humansandnature.org/kinship/

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Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a five-volume book series from the Center for Humans and Nature.

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"With every breath, every sip of water, every meal, we are reminded that our lives are inseparable from the life of the world—and the cosmos—in ways both material and spiritual. What are the sources of our deepest evolutionary and planetary connections, and of our profound longing for kinship?"

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Reflective Audiovisual prompt to see ourselves as a blip in the planet earth. Who are we in relation to the earth?

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In June 2018, I had the privilege to attend the Theatre in the Age of Climate Change convening hosted by HowlRound. It was a full weekend. While I was there I was grateful to reconnect with Jayeesha Dutta, who is a fierce advocate, artist, and cultural organizer. She and I first met while organizing for the 2017 People's Climate March, but the HowlRound convening was the first time we really got to learn more about each other's work.

During the convening, we were given the space to facilitate an activity using dynamized image theatre (from Theatre of the Oppressed) to ask convening participants to embody the concept of a Just Transition.

We asked convening participants first to embody the idea of "extraction" by making a static image using their bodies. Next, we asked everyone to look around the room at all of the varied images we had made and then, using words to name them, reflect back some of the common themes. We made images of crushing, tension, scratching, harm, pain, images with sharp edges and angles. After everyone shook those images off, Jayeesha and I asked everyone to make a new image of the idea "generative." We repeated the process of naming and reflection, and this time the common themes included lightness, peace, softness, offering, circles, images with gentle curves and upward focus. In the final step of dynamizing these images, we asked everyone to try to find a way, using a simple movement phrase, to transition from their first image to their second image. The goal of the activity is to use the body to explore possible solutions in the move from extractive to generative economies. Rather than spending ages and ages talking about theoretical hindrances in the work of moving toward climate justice, why not use the tools of the theatre in visioning possible futures? This is what we're good at!

Convening participants being led through an image exercise by Annalisa Dias and Jayeesha Dutta. Photo by Carolina Gonzalez.

What Is a Just Transition?

The concept of a Just Transition has been developed over the last thirty years. Briefly, it's a framework that seeks to unify the environmental movement with the labor movement. In many of the climate movement spaces that I've personally been involved with, folks prioritize talking about "climate justice" in place of just the problems of "climate change." The reason for this important nuance has to do with how, historically, the US and international climate movements have been focused on the politics of environmental conservation at the expense of social movements. In many ways, conservationist movements are rooted in anti-indigenous and colonial white supremacist ideology that conceptualizes the environment or "nature" as separate from human activity and relies on the myth of the wilderness in determining environments deemed worthy of saving.

So instead, we seek to transition away from extractive and exploitative economies by using the framework of a Just Transition. This means we must center the voices, stories, and experiences of frontline communities who are most deeply and already impacted by the changing climate, including indigenous peoples, low-income communities, and communities of color. As theatremakers, we know deeply that stories matter. In the face of the climate crisis, this has never been more true. For more information, see this helpful definition from the Climate Justice Alliance.
What is Groundwater Arts?

Convening participants. Photo by Carolina Gonzalez.

Ok, but now you might be thinking, "Sure that all sounds great, but what do we do about this?" Or, "Easier said than done."

Well, right. I get that.

I've been working (individually and together with my frequent collaborator Anna Lathrop) over the last several years with other artists and with arts institutions on a number of projects related to decolonizing practices and climate justice. Thanks to a seed of inspiration from the HowlRound Convening, Anna and I have made the leap into launching a new consulting and producing collaborative called Groundwater Arts.

We're an artist-led collaborative, and we want to begin working with like-minded artists to build a generative future through a just and equitable transition away from the exploitation of people and the planet. We hope to create long-term partnerships, collaborations, and resources that foster accountable theatremaking and powerful alternatives to structural racism, oppression, and inequity in the face of climate change. This vision is directly inspired by the groundwork laid by Storyshift to articulate principles and praxis for this kind of work.

Basically, this means we'll help you figure out how to implement programs and practices (or assess the ones you already have in place) to integrate a decolonizing framework with a vision for a sustainable future. We're excited to work with individual artists, arts institutions, and service organizations who believe, as we do, that the arts have a crucial role to play in shifting the narrative around the climate crisis.
A Challenge to Theatremakers
Start with the ground. Give thanks for the water. Seed a just future.

In many ways, Groundwater Arts also comes from another seed. Over the last few years, I've continually noted a critical gap between the work we're doing as a field to dismantle white supremacy and the work we're doing to build more sustainable, green ways of working. These two efforts are not and cannot be separate.

If you haven't read Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, I'd highly recommend it. She does a phenomenal job of explaining how the global movements for racial justice, indigenous sovereignty and land rights, equitable labor, and the environment are poised to come together in the face of the climate crisis. This is urgent and hopeful work.

So, in the face of the climate crisis (which I see as directly linked to 500 years of colonial violence and white supremacy), here are some steps that I think we, either as individual artists or folks working in institutional roles, can take:

My hope is that these will help us begin to tie together our critical frameworks and align our values with our practice around creating a more just and equitable future.
This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on September 20, 2018.
(Top image: Annalisa Dias and other convening participants. Photo by Blair Nodelman.)
Annalisa Dias is a Goan-American citizen artist, community organizer, and award-winning theatremaker. She currently lives and works in Piscataway territory in Washington DC and grew up in Seneca lands around Pittsburgh. She is a Producing Playwright with The Welders, a DC playwright's collective; and is Co-Founder of the DC Coalition for Theatre & Social Justice. Annalisa frequently teaches Theatre of the Oppressed workshops nationally and internationally and speaks about race, identity, and performance.
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The Possibility of Generative Futures Through Embodied Practice

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In June 2018, I had the privilege to attend the Theatre in the Age of Climate Change convening hosted by HowlRound. It was a full weekend. While I was there I was grateful to reconnect with Jayeesha Dutta, who is a fierce advocate, artist, and cultural organizer.

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"Given the place-based circumstances of human evolution and culture, global consciousness may be too broad a scale of care for us. To what extent does crafting a deeper connection with the Earth’s bioregions reinvigorate a sense of kinship with the place-based beings, systems, and communities that mutually shape one another?"

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Why is the image of an environmentally conscious African-American still hard for us to picture?

Ms. Miles is a professor of history at Harvard.

Naeem, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2016. Credit... Naima Green, from "Jewels From the Hinterland"

"Black people - we need a better publicist," the comedian Wanda Sykes declares in her new Netflix special, "Not Normal."

Ms. Sykes has just told the story of a black security guard in Chicago who apprehended a gunman and then was himself shot by the police. Her solution for changing the perception of African-Americans as dangerous is a nationwide publicity campaign featuring photos of black people doing "fun, nonthreatening, frivolous" stuff - bowling, for instance, or "something environmental" like taking out the recycling. Ms. Sykes reaches for an imaginary waste bin and tips one foot at a perky angle that says she is ready for do-gooder action, sending the crowd into uproarious laughter.

I wondered, as I watched (and chuckled), what makes this image of Ms. Sykes taking out the recycling so funny? At least part of the laughter is elicited by an unspoken asymmetry that viewers can recognize regardless of their racial identity: the image of a black woman being "environmental" versus the picture of the environmentalist that most Americans carry around in their heads.

More than 30 years into the movement for environmental justice, and more than a decade into a global, multiracial campaign led by groups like 350.org to raise awareness about climate change and push governments into action, many Americans still do not associate black people with environmental engagement. But this notion of African-Americans existing apart from natural environments is more than just a contemporary stereotype ripe for satire; it all but ignores crucial aspects of American experience. The truth is that African-Americans' relationship to the environment is complicated and runs deep.

The tension in American culture between black people and anything environmental does have a basis in history. Before 1900, 90 percent of African-Americans lived in the South, where many had been enslaved and then exploited as sharecroppers in rural areas. After two waves of migration between World War I and 1970, almost half of black Americans had relocated to the urban North and West. Blacks' determination to flee the horrors of the Southern rural landscape played out in long-distance moves to cities like Cleveland, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Blacks became associated with gritty cities, disassociated from nature in the popular view.

As African-Americans moved in, white urbanites began moving out to spaces in between the city and country - rolling green suburbs with colorful flower gardens and tree-lined streets. White Americans with the means to settle into suburbs and vacation in state and national parks seemed to fit the picture of leisure-time naturalists promoted by white nature writers and conservationists described in the sociologist Dorceta Taylor's "The Rise of the American Conservation Movement."

It is true that African-American attitudes toward nature were (and remain) conflicted. For most of American history, land was a bludgeon used against the bodies of black people, who were forced to work it to raise tobacco, rice and cotton while being deprived of that bounty.

When African-Americans left the South en masse, they spat on the memory of life-stealing cotton fields. But they also cherished the memory of Southern pines, meandering rivers, tropical flowers and the delicious dishes made from local plants and animals. In "The Warmth of Other Suns," the journalist Isabel Wilkerson captures the wondrous beauty of this environment that migrants abandoned, detailing the story of her own grandmother's sweet-smelling, night-blooming cereus flower around which an annual neighborhood ritual formed. Black departure from the South, while necessary for safety and opportunity, was cloaked in the loss of that regional beauty.

The writer Margaret Walker summoned this collective nostalgia in her poem "Southern Song": "I want to rest again in southern fields, in grass and hay and clover/bloom; to lay my hand again upon the clay baked by a/southern sun, to touch the rain-soaked earth and smell/ the smell of soil." Out of those mixed feelings of longing and relief, migrants remembered and remade connections with nature, reproducing rural lands in miniature through gardens and chickens kept in the yards. Cities are, after all, spaces of nature, which is why the collard greens from our grandmothers' urban gardens always tasted so good. The grass in these cities, if not greener, was still grass.

More difficult to contend with, though, is the legacy of slavery, tenant farming and convict lease labor in rural locales. The African-American ties to this land, unfairly seized from Indigenous people, are ugly and thick. As the poet Robert Hass put it in an essay detailing the ebb and flow of African-American relations with the earth: "In the tradition of the spirituals, 'black nature' is slavery."

But even in that long, dark tunnel of suffering, African-Americans recognized the capacity of nature to function as a resource - better still, an ally - in the fight for physical and psychological freedom. Like the Red Sea that parted to allow the Israelites' flight from Egypt, features of the environment could become instrumental in their escapes.

Nature often played a saving role as snake- and gator-infested swamps, moss-draped forests and rushing rivers sheltered their movements. Fugitives' use of stars in the night sky to navigate treks north is legendary. The natural world could support their escape attempts if only they watched and worked with it.

Margaret Garner, whose story was memorialized in Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved," depended on the cycles of the Ohio River to carry out a daring and ultimately tragic escape.

Enslaved in rural Kentucky and most likely sexually abused by her owner, Archibald Gaines, since her teenage years, Margaret married Robert Garner, an enslaved man on a nearby plantation. A mother of four, Margaret was pregnant again at 22. These children were the progeny of her husband and also, the record suggests, Gaines. In January 1856, the Garners sought freedom by crossing the Ohio River. The waterway had frozen over that month, forming what the scholars Nikki Taylor and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have called "a natural footbridge to freedom."

While the Garners did make it to the safety of a relative's home in Cincinnati, they were quickly surrounded by Gaines and armed officers. When Margaret Garner realized her family would be recaptured, she took the life of her toddler daughter to save her from slavery.

The perils of black life during slavery required a hyper-awareness of nature not only as a material resource but also as a spiritual one. Frederick Douglass, in his well-known escape from slavery, was also strengthened through this sort of partnership with nature.

The historian David Blight describes Douglass's flight, quoting Douglass himself: "Frederick found temporary safety in the woods, where the weary fugitive lay down on a bed of leaves, 'shut in with nature, and nature's God.'" Douglass, fleeing the farm of the sadistic "slavebreaker" Edward Covey, was discovered by an enslaved man, Sandy Jenkins, who was crossing the woods to visit his free wife. The couple sheltered Douglass in their cabin for the night. There, Jenkins acted as adviser, telling Douglass he had no way of evading Covey, so in the morning he should return to the farm, but fortified.

Jenkins, described by Douglass as a "genuine African," provided Douglass with a protective charm, or "root," procured from a different part of the woods and instructed him to wear it on his right side, to protect the teenager from being whipped by Covey or "any other white man." Later, when Covey attempted another assault, Douglass fought back and won, protecting his person and dignity. Douglass was unsure whether he believed in the magical powers of his new charm, but the exchange with Jenkins had set Douglass on a course toward psychological and physical freedom, a process he described as "how a slave was made a man."

Over time, the abundant natural environment that sustained this profound human drama itself became a casualty of it. As white planters and farmers extended the system of slavery west and directed enslaved people to clear more lands for cotton, forests receded, ecosystems changed, and familiar routes to escape and wooded areas used for the collection of special roots shrank. Enslaved people's knowledge of the natural world, though rich and bountiful, became less applicable in a drastically altered environment.

And this is where we - not just African-Americans but we as a species - find ourselves today, face to face with the complex and troubling source of the comedian's joke.

The journalist David Wallace-Wells is surely right when asserting in his book "The Uninhabitable Earth" that there is no analogue in human experience for this climate crisis. But in some ways, our present reality echoes that of enslaved black people. As we drastically reconfigure the land and climate, we undercut the environmental knowledge we have collectively gathered and curtail our own (and our children's) possibilities for freedom and security. We will all suffer that loss.

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Brian, Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, 2014. Credit... Naima Green, from "Jewels in the Hinterland"

Carolyn Finney has asserted in the book "Black Faces, White Spaces" that the notion of black people being aliens in the outdoors is a "whitewashing" of history. We should not accept this false narrative, but instead recognize the long tradition of African-American environmentalism, extending from the time of slavery to the farming cooperatives of the mid-20th century, the preservation of traditional food production, and even healing root work in the South. Today the innovative contributions of activists like the Midwestern food scholar Monica White, the South Bronx community organizer Majora Carter and the Sierra Club past president Aaron Mair carry on that tradition.

The African-American environmental consciousness is real, profound and hard-won. As the sixth mass extinction unfolds around us species by fragile species, as the rivers and seas rise above the sand bags and levees, there is no more escape into nature for the descendant of the slave or the descendant of the suburbanite.

But perhaps there is still an escape with nature from the storm we have wrought. As the Detroit poet Robert Hayden wrote in "Ice Storm," an elegy to the Northern environment that continued to witness black pain even after the change migration had brought, "The trees themselves, as in winters past,/ will survive their burdening,/ broken thrive."

Tiya Miles is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of "The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits."
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Black Bodies, Green Spaces (Published 2019)

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Why is the image of an environmentally conscious African-American still hard for us to picture? Ms. Miles is a professor of history at Harvard. "Black people - we need a better publicist," the comedian Wanda Sykes declares in her new Netflix special, "Not Normal."

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Reading of Margaret Walker's Poems Southern Song and Sorrow Home.

Text Version of Poems
Sorrow Home
Southern Song

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Another Place activity incorporating the arts.

OpenStreetMap Haiku project generates poetry about your location. Students use this to discover what pulled data says about their current location.

This is paired with the place-based poetry exercise to ground students in the natural spaces in which they inhabit and how others have tagged their experience in the area.

In what ways does the community's description converge or diverge?

What surprises you?

What seems common knowledge?

What are you now recognizing about the space?

What newfound knowledge do you have about your experience?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge_HX_yC64chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge_HX_yC64c

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Our town painting by Kerry James Marshall illustrates how Black people can coexist with nature despite urban decay.

Alejo Benedetti, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Dr. Beth Harris, "Kerry James Marshall, Our Town," in Smarthistory, August 22, 2022, accessed August 29, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/kerry-james-marshall-our-town/.

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"How do cultural traditions, narratives, and mythologies shape the ways we relate, or not, to other beings as kin? How do relations between and among different species foster a sense of responsibility and belonging in us?"

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The Role of Water in African American History

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The Role of Water in African American History

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Flint, Michigan continues to confront a water crisis that, by all accounts, is a human tragedy. In 2014, the state of Michigan took control of the city's finances after an audit projected it would face a $25 million deficit. To cut spending, the state redirected Flint's water supply from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River. However, the state neglected to take the necessary precautions for the pipeline and large amounts of lead crept into the city's tap water. Residents soon complained their water looked, smelled, and tasted " funny," but were ignored for 18 months until the crisis became undeniable. The city is majority Black and 41% of its population lives below the poverty line. Such communities are historically easy to ignore if they hold no representation. By December 14, 2015, Flint declared a state of emergency, and one month later, Michigan governor Rick Snyder requested federal aid to install " lead-free pipes " throughout the city.

While news outlets reported on the water crisis consistently throughout 2016, its national exposure severely decreased the next year under presumptions that federal interventions resolved the high toxicity levels. On April 9, 2018, NBC News reported that out-of-state contributions have already dwindled since the crisis "no longer grabs daily headlines." For a time, the state of Michigan provided free water bottles to Flint's residents, but governor Snyder recently announced the state will soon cancel this service. The maneuver is done under the assumption that Flint's water has passed all federal tests for contamination. Residents question the veracity of such reports, however, with one contending, " My water stinks. It still burns to take a shower. There's no way they can say it's safe." Given the government's slow response to the initial complaints, they have legitimate reasons to be suspicious.

Flint's saga reveals many issues in how America treats its poor and restricts their access to the most necessary of resources, but it also prompts a few questions regarding how we conceptualize and envision history. What role has water played in the lives of Black Americans from colonization to the present? Have historians unfairly privileged land-based models and ignored how people of African descent participated in aquatic activities? Has this been detrimental to how African Americans experience water and view its importance in their ancestral history? One finds that water holds a dual role in the history of Black culture and intellectual thought. In one sense, water is an arena for resistance that liberates, nourishes, and sanctifies a people, but it can also be weaponized by hegemonic forces seeking to degrade, poison, or eliminate rebellious populations.

Water was often present during key moments in the Black experience, but scholars often treat it as ancillary to the broader narrative. In Undercurrents of Power, Kevin Dawson argues that histories of slavery usually prefer land-based models contained within the plantation, and people rarely consider how enslaved people engaged with water for purposes of labor and recreation. He contends that Atlantic African societies resided near oceans, lakes, and rivers that allowed them to weave "terrestrial and aquatic experiences into amphibious lives." He proves that Africans taken in the slave trade were intimately familiar with water and their maritime skills surpassed those of Europeans, most of whom came from colder climates and rarely learned to command moving water without a ship. Accordingly, enslaved people of African descent were used as divers, swimmers, fishermen, and sailors in various parts of the Americas.

Outside its strictly physical importance, Ras Michael Brown and T.J. Desch-Obi reveal that water was a central feature in the spiritual practices of Africans on both sides of the Atlantic. Brown examines how ancestral water spirits (simbi) remained a fundamental component of religious practices connecting the living with the dead, while Desch-Obi contends that certain African martial arts relied on practitioners crossing the "kalunga," which he describes as "an entire cosmological system that understood bodies of water to be bridges connecting the lands of the living and the realm of the dead." When the kalunga was crossed the practitioner could commune with the ancestors in a space that was literally inverted, even to the point that people walked with their feet pointing up. The physical manifestations of this philosophy are most distinctly preserved in Brazilian capoeira, though Black combat traditions in other areas hold similar links.

Enslaved people understood water's practical use in escaping slavery, braving rivers, lakes, and rainfall to evade the sensory power of the bloodhounds. According to former slave William Walker, the most effectual means in evading dogs was to saturate his footprints in water, and other runaways noted they dived into swamps or streams to conceal their scent. Many researchers even maintain the popular spiritual "Wade in the Water" holds a literal interpretation, as it equates maritime engagement with resistance to slavery. This knowledge of aquatic spaces allowed Black people to creatively challenge the terrestrial brutalities of the Old South.

Water's culturally symbolic importance resonated across generations, embodied by Langston Hughes's 1920 poem " The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Hughes charted African American history using four noteworthy rivers in the Middle East, Africa, and America. The short piece begins with a reference to Black people's role in the dawn of civilizations and ends with allusions to American slavery. Inspired by the beauty of the Mississippi River, Hughes understood that, despite its majesty, that body of water held a critical role in preserving and expanding Black chattel slavery. It was the channel through which slave traders delivered Black bodies to toil under King Cotton. In many respects, Hughes's poem encapsulates how Black Americans confront aquatic spaces throughout the United States. Though used by Black people for purposes of resistance, they also exemplify the violence of American racism.

Positioning water as a tool of violence in Black Atlantic history requires one to revisit the slave ship. In Slavery at Sea, Sowande Mustakeem notes that Africans held a deep-seeded appreciation for the ocean, but as they were transported across the Atlantic this vast body of water began to symbolize "a repository of bodies, death, pain, and suffering." Historian Alexander Byrd likened the slave ship to a "floating stockade" that confined its cargo and prevented their engagement with the ocean. He even notes that, despite popular conceptions that captives willfully threw themselves overboard to escape a life of slavery, "documented suicides were relatively rare" and most Africans suffered their depression in confinement. Though many people understandably celebrated the last words of Black Panther antagonist Erik Killmonger, when he wished to be buried in the ocean with his ancestors who refused the denigrations of slavery, one must realize the ocean primarily served as a dumping ground for Europeans to unceremoniously remove the bodies of captives they deemed unworthy of sale. The 1781 Zong Massacre, in which the captain of a slave ship threw 133 diseased Africans overboard to collect insurance money, illustrates this concept in horrifying fashion.

Slave ships do not encapsulate the entirety of aquatic violence, however, they were only the beginning. Lynch mobs in the Jim Crow South relied on rivers and streams to dispose of the mangled bodies of Black southerners. Teenager Emmett Till is one noteworthy example. Urban areas throughout the North racially segregated public pools, and, as shown in the Chicago race riots of 1919, if a Black person crossed into the white section, death and devastation followed that individual and their community. Governments also fail to protect Black communities from water-based natural disasters. Prior to the devastations of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, where local, state, and federal governments failed to prepare poor, predominantly Black communities throughout the Gulf Coast for a category five hurricane, Black communities in the same region were previously devastated by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. After this event hundreds of thousands of African Americans had their homes destroyed and were placed in relief camps for lengthy periods. After their release, most fled North to escape the physical and emotional pain associated with this memory.

It seems no coincidence that water's involvement in structural racism has led to the popular adage that " Black People Don't Swim" in the United States, a stereotype that holds devastating consequences. Researchers note that 70% of African Americans lack basic swimming skills and Black children are 5.5 times more likely to drown than other children. If one is apt to pursue the reasons why Black Americans hold a unique aversion to swimming, this essay provides a starting point for explaining why many rejected the activity. The weaponization of water takes many forms, and Flint, Michigan, serves as the most recent example. Once a symbol of spiritual renewal and physical pleasure, water is transformed into an entity of terror in African America, causing many Black people to fear it and reject its cultural value. Black communities must be empowered to reengage water and claim freedom from structures designed to hurt them and ignore their pain. Reclaiming water as a cultural space might be a good place to start.

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

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The Role of Water in African American History

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Flint, Michigan continues to confront a water crisis that, by all accounts, is a human tragedy. In 2014, the state of Michigan took control of the city's finances after an audit projected it would face a $25 million deficit.

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I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.

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The Negro Speaks of Rivers - I've known rivers

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This months Featured Storyteller is Ingrid Askew!

Ingrid shares with us a tale by Robert D. San Souci, based off of African American Folklore ~ Sukey and The Mermaid.

Ingrid Askew is a life long Cultural Activist, Theatre Maker, Educator, Speaker and Organizer. She is the Executive Director at Crossing the Waters Institute for Cultural Exchange USA and Founder of Crossing the Waters Institute South Africa, where she leads the important work of developing cultural awareness, sustainable exchange partnerships and opportunities through education, the arts and healthy living initiatives.

Ms. Askew's work has always been centered around the goal of bringing people from diverse backgrounds together to build transformative communities and lead effective and lasting social change initiatives.

To connect with Ingrid and her work visit:

https://www.crossingthewaters.co.za/

This program is supported in part by grants from the Northampton Arts Council, South Hadley Cultural Council and Ashfield Cultural Council local agencies which are supported by The Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

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episode 8. sukey and the mermaid (ingrid askew)

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‎The SisterStories Podcast: Episode 8. Sukey and the Mermaid (Ingrid Askew) on Apple Podcasts

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This months Featured Storyteller is Ingrid Askew! Ingrid shares with us a tale by Robert D. San Souci, based off of African American Folklore ~ Sukey and The Mermaid. Ingrid Askew is a life long Cultural Activist, Theatre Maker, Educator, Speaker and Organizer. She is the Executive Director at Cro...

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"Wade in the Water" excerpt from Ailey Spirit Virtual Benefit

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"Kinship spans the cosmos, but it is perhaps most life changing when experienced directly and personally. Which experiences expand our understanding of being human in relation to other-than-human beings? How can we respectfully engage a world full of human and nonhuman persons?"

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is a black shambling bear
ruffling its wild back and tossing
mountains into the sea

is a black hawk circling
the burying ground circling the bones
picked clean and discarded

is a fish black blind in the belly of water
is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

is a black and living thing
is a favorite child
of the universe
feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean

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curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black.
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

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curling them around i hold their bodies in obscene embrace thinking of everything but kinship. collards and kale strain against each strange other away from my kissmaking hand and the iron bedpot. the pot is black.

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Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund - CELDF

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Seated portrait of a young Harriet Tubman, circa 1860s.
Library of Congress

The National Park Service shares the stories of former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, and the many brave Americans in the 1800s whose courageous actions led slaves to freedom and helped end the slavery era. In celebrating our nation's independence, the NPS reflects on the role the night sky played in the lives of these early Americans.

During the height of the Underground Railroad movement prior to the Civil War, Harriet Tubman, the best known conductor of the Underground Railroad, roused many enslaved Americans in the south to seek freedom in the north. Traveling under cover of night often offered the best chances of escaping. However, most slaves did not have maps or compasses to guide them. Without the use of these tools, a fugitive's ability to successfully navigate to a safe house, railroad station, or the woods was often a matter of life or death.

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North Star to Freedom (U.S. National Park Service)

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The National Park Service shares the stories of former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, and the many brave Americans in the 1800s whose courageous actions led slaves to freedom and helped end the slavery era. In celebrating our nation's independence, the NPS reflects on the role the night sky played in the lives of these early Americans.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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The coming of summer heralds cook-outs, line dancing, and brightly colored t-shirts iconic of Black family reunions. These events serve as important rituals in African American families that are heavily enmeshed in centuries of American slavery. During these times enslaved families were often broken apart as slave owners sold children, siblings and even married off individuals as chattel.

As waves of emancipation swept through the country, coinciding with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteeing enslaved individuals their freedom, many African Americans sought to reunite with lost family members and to define family roles and responsibilities in ways they believed best suited their new circumstances. Their efforts highlighted the importance of family as foundational to their status as free people.

With the end of slavery, searching for family members who had been separated or sold away became the focus of many formerly enslaved individuals. The number of years of separation did not deter people from hoping to reunite with lost loved ones. Newspaper advertisements, letters, and word of mouth all were employed as part of the search. The hope was that a positive response might lead to a reunion with family members.

However, the transition to a freedman was not an easy one. Enslaved individuals had been stripped of their names, rights, and identity. This created numerous challenges as families, married couples, parents and children attempted to locate one another.

Names

Enslaved individuals often had their names selected for them by their enslaver. Freedom provided the opportunity to make a choice: pick a new name or retain their previous one. Many individuals chose to adopt a new name that represented their new status and desire to control how others addressed them.

Marriage

Formal marriage ceremonies were not encouraged by slaveholders and were a rarity for the enslaved. With freedom, many formerly enslaved men and women participated in official ceremonies to reinforce their commitment to one another or for legal purposes. As husbands and wives, they also renegotiated their roles together as free people.

Women

African American women faced a struggle to gain respect for their rights as wives, mothers, and women. Both within and outside their communities, their quest for equal status was questioned. Among other things, they were denied the right to vote, scrutinized if they chose not to work, and subjected to harassment and physical abuse. Defining and defending their place within American society remained a challenge throughout the years after the end of slavery.

Born enslaved in North Carolina, Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) was a writer, organizer, and advocate for women's education and civil rights. She received a mathematics degree from Oberlin College in Ohio and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris. In 1892 she published her acclaimed book, A Voice from the South, which expressed her belief that African American women had a central role to play in the struggle for racial equality.

Children

Enslaved parents had no legal rights to their children. Their offspring could be taken away or expected to obey the orders of others, despite the preferences of their parents. As free people, African Americans resisted outside efforts to undermine their parental authority or to take their children away through court-ordered apprenticeships to a white person. They wanted to ensure their influence and love were the most important factors in their children's lives.

A white farmer in Tennessee filed the court document above in 1867 stating that a freedwoman named Harriet wanted her three young children bound to him as indentured workers. Courts often accepted the word of white landowners, even when African American parents protested that they had not given consent to indenture their children.

While newly freed endeavored to reunite with their loved ones despite these challenges, in many cases, newspapers and letters weren't enough to prompt a reunion. Ultimately, the separation of family proved to be so effective a tool of oppression to disempower African Americans, that its legacy persisted long after the abolishment of slavery.

However, public interest in family reunification was revived in 1976 after the publication of Alex Haley's book "Roots: The Saga of an American Family." The book told the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America, and follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley, the book's author. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots in 1977, led to a cultural sensation in the United States.

The powerful story encouraged many previously splintered African American families to search and document for their own family genealogy. Utilizing a variety of tools such as publicly available archives, slave sale records, family Bibles and blood tests many attempted to trace their ancestral roots to slavery and African villages. However, even with the advantages of modern technology, many today must still grapple with incomplete family histories as a direct result of their ancestors being defined, by law, as little more than property.

The drive to discover and reinforce family connections has continued to guide the African American community through the tradition of family reunions. At these celebratory events, family history is recounted, traditions are taught, and bonds are strengthened through shared memories. Reunions are often held in significant places, where a family has historical roots, or where new generations have moved and thrived. Many include a visit to NMAAHC, where families gather to reinforce their connection to the broader narrative of African American history.

Another hallmark of the modern African American family reunion are commemorative items such as a program, group photo, and T-shirt that put a tangible stamp on the importance of family ties. The Jones-Walker family reunion logo uses the adinkra symbol of Sankofa, meaning "go back and get it," evoking the idea of reflecting on the past.

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The Historical Legacy of Black Family Reunions

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As waves of emancipation swept through the country, many African Americans sought to reunite with lost family members and to define family roles and responsibilities in ways they believed best suited their new circumstances. Their efforts highlighted the importance of family as foundational to their status as free people.

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"From the perspective of kinship as a recognition of nonhuman personhood, of kincentric ethics, and of kinship as a verb involving active and ongoing participation, how are we to live? What are the practical, everyday, and lifelong ways we become kin?"

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Nate Edwards, filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist, at Bayou Bend Gardens in Houston. Credit... Naima Green for The New York Times

Opinion
A photographer aims to interrupt the predominant narratives about people of color surrounded by urban decay.

Nate Edwards, filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist, at Bayou Bend Gardens in Houston. Credit... Naima Green for The New York Times

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Naima Green is an artist and educator living in Mexico City. These portraits are part of her series "Jewels From the Hinterland."

My great-grandmother turned an empty lot next to her rowhouse in West Philadelphia into a flower and vegetable garden in the 1980s. This garden was a refuge in the urban landscape, not just for our family but also for the community.

Seven years ago I started photographing black and brown people in similar urban green spaces. When I first started talking about the concept, one of my former classmates asked me how this work would differ from images of slavery. The fact that that was his only framework for imagining black people in nature was exactly what stirred me to make my first portraits.

Image

I wanted these photographs to assert and insert our presence in these tranquil landscapes, to interrupt the predominant narratives about people of color surrounded by urban decay. Beauty here is an entry point - it makes us stop and look, but it isn't the whole story.

I began the project in New York and broadened it to Chicago, Houston, Miami and Oakland, Calif. In the Second Ward of Houston, Ryan Dennis led me across mossy rocks by the mouth of Buffalo Bayou. Zakkiyyah Najeebah took me to Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago, where her family has lived since the 1930s. In Oakland, at Temescal Regional Recreation Area, Jay Katelansky and I discussed how expensive life in our cities has become.

Jean Williamceau took me to Earth N Us Farm, which, with its chickens and bees, sits hidden from street view on two acres in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami. While I photographed her, she introduced me to her take on "shinrin-yoku," Japanese forest bathing, which many believe reduces stress and improves health.

"There is so much healing," Jean told me, "in the color green."

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Opinion | These Are the Faces of Tranquillity (Published 2019)

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Opinion A photographer aims to interrupt the predominant narratives about people of color surrounded by urban decay. Nate Edwards, filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist, at Bayou Bend Gardens in Houston. Credit... Naima Green for The New York Times Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month.

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That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

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	arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
   League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You'd better not be cruel!
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!
Herein they kiss and coddle and assault
Anew and dearly in the innocence
With which they baffle nature. Who are full,
Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all
Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.
To be a random hitching post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
	Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor-passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is-something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!
The noxious needy ones whose battle's bald
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
	But it's all so bad! and entirely too much for them.
The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,
Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,
The old smoke,heavy diapers, and, they're told, Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs. The soil that looks the soil of centuries. And for that matter thegeneral oldness. Old Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old. Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe. Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic, There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no Unkillable infirmity of such A tasteful turn as lately they have left, Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars Must presently restore them. When they're done With dullards and distortions of this fistic Patience of the poor and put-upon. They've never seen such a make-do-ness as Newspaper rugs before! In this, this "flat," Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered . . . ), Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon. Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look, In horror, behind a substantial citizeness Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart. Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door. All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft- Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt. Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost. But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . . They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra, Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks, Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin "hangings," Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend, When suitable, the nice Art Institute; Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind. Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers So old old, what shall flatter the desolate? Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames And, again, the porridges of the underslung And children children children. Heavens! That Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League agree it will be better To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies, To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring Bells elsetime, better presently to cater To no more Possibilities, to get Away. Perhaps the money can be posted. Perhaps they two may choose another Slum! Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!- Where loathe-lover likelier may be invested. Keeping their scented bodies in the center Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall, They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall, Are off at what they manage of a canter, And, resuming all the clues of what they were, Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

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arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair, The pink paint on the innocence of fear; Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.

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This project will continue to evolve throughout the year as we prepare for our summer retreat in July 2023. We'll put this to the test with other fellows before rolling out to students.

Thanks again for viewing and providing feedback on my project. I'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn.