Oh Sankofa, high on the Heavens you soar
My soul is soon to follow you, back to yesterday's moon
will it remember me?
Back to yesterday's sun, It will rekindle me
Rekindle the spirit into tomorrow and high on the wind
Sankofa flies again and again
-- Cassandra Wilson, SANKOFA/Blue Light 'Til Dawn
Before you can move forward, you must first return home. This is the meaning of the concept of Sankofa, said Zakiya Harris on today's Spring of Sustainability session entitled Sankofa: Regenerative Strategies for Connecting People to the Earth.
Before today, I was only familiar with the symbolism of the Sankofa bird through Cassandra Wilson's music. Before I heard Pandora Thomas and Zakiya Harris of Earthseed Consulting, I had not thought of it in terms of my interest in environmental justice. But they helped me connect the dots and it made total sense that resonated with my own discoveries. How does this apply to environmental justice work?
You can't start with An Inconvenient Truth to get people interested in climate change, for example, if people in the community have trouble securing basic life needs. But if you ask people if they know someone dealing with asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes, inadequate housing, poverty, or limited access to healthy food, says Zakiya, everybody in the room will raise their hand. Then you can help them connect the dots between those more familiar day to day challenges in one's own community and dirty coal plants, climate change, toxic chemicals and other stressors and conditions of the environment.
If the African-American, Latino and other communities of color seem to be underrepresented in the mainstream environmental movement, it's not because they are not interested in environmental issues. All of these communities have their own stories, their own culture's way of relating to Earth, their own expertise to do what's needed where they live.
Too often, says Zakiya, environmentalists wanting to help don't ask the right questions to reconnect communities with the expertise they already have. We don't start off by meeting them where they are before we try to help them move forward. What we need to do is listen to their stories and then frame things in a way that allows them to share and bring their own expertise back into the light.
According to Pandora and Zakiya, education and training is a key to their successful work with people, because when people learn new things, that naturally sparks interest to become involved in something. Among the projects that Pandora and Zakiya talked about were The Green Life program at San Quentin, and the City Slickers Farms project in West Oakland.
At the end of the discussion, Zakiya and Pandora each had a final thought to share (I was typing fast to get this, but I think this is close to what each one said with minimal paraphrasing):
Zakiya: We are witnessing the greatest paradigm shift any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes. We will need to be more inclusive and recognize that their [communities of color that have largely been excluded from the environmental movement in the past] expertise might look different. Drop the guilt, start with your own inner work...we're not here to heal the Earth, we are healing ourselves so we can stay on the planet.
Pandora: Get outside. There are so many aspects of the movement that have actually disconnected us from life. Immerse yourself in the outdoors no matter where you are and just listen.
You can listen to the discussion by registering at the Spring of Sustainability program page, however I think there is a time-limited replay window.
Here's a video of a TedEX talk -- The Vision of Sankofa -- by Pandora and Zakiya:
For some great articles on race and environment, check out Colorlines.
Comments