Remembering Our Ancestral Journey
“Race is a little bit like gravity, experienced by all, understood by few.”
- john powell, Director of the HAAS Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society
As a courageous group of forty strangers embarked upon a two-year journey together to face the reality and consequences of race and class in America, entering through the door of family ancestry, and the lens of land, race, money & spirit, not one person could have imagined in those early days who they would become at the end of two years together. You see, half of this group of forty were Black folks and half were white. It was a grand experiment (some say a setup!) to reckon with racial justice, white supremacy culture and deep belonging. This was the premise of the 2021-2023 Jubilee Justice Our Ancestral Journey (OAJ) course.
This online and in-person course, led by an extraordinary team of visionaries: Melisande Short-Colomb, Luisah Teish, Marian Moore, David Ragland, Briyana Cuffie, Dianne Houston, Bernard Winn and myself, was born out of the desire to transform hearts and minds by healing backwards and delving into our ancestry in order to heal forward.
As I grappled with how to explain the depth of impact we had on each other, on our selves and on our families and communities, it became clear that the best way to share the work we did and are continuing to do, is to hear a few snippets from the candid interviews from some of our OAJ family members…
“OAJ has been life changing. I took a leap of faith to join…and it has changed my family and it has changed me. I lean more into the words of my ancestors and I realize that’s whose been speaking to me this whole time. It’s brought my family closer together..it’s helped us get pass some brick walls that we had in terms of research. But overall this community of care has been incredible and it’s something I can fall back on and fall into. I’m grateful. My takeaway is that we can come together in a multiracial setting and do the deep hard often heartbreaking work and I think this is how we change the world. I have great trust in this group of people and I believe we can create the world we want to live in.” - Tiffanie Harrison
“The work around racial justice and ending white supremacy is not just about political work. It’s about our hearts and spiritual work and it’s lifelong. The ancestors are here…the ancestors are watching….the ancestors are required in the journey to repair.” - Kath Gilje
“My takeaway from Our Ancestral Journey is that we are connected in so many ways, we live in concentric circles and leaving these two years there is a tremendous promise of the work that we can continue to do together. I came into this as a stranger and I’m leaving as a family member” - Melisande Short-Colomb
“This program has been one of the most transformative experiences of my life. When I came into the program I knew I wanted to experience community, explore my family story, and I wanted to be guided in a practice that was rooted in love, spirituality and the spirit of repair. I’m very grateful that I got to experience all of these things in this journey. Being able to participate in something like this is revolutionary.” - Stacie Marshall
“As we move into the future as a population on this planet Earth, and grapple with the trauma of white supremacy and all of the damage we have done, we have to do it with spirit in some way. We have to do it accompanied by those who have come before. We have to do it with a consciousness and energy of spirit. We have tried to do things by ourselves rationally and logically and it won’t work. And the arts are essential to actually doing the healing and creating the world that we want to be living in.” - Jenny Ladd
“It’s unusual when you think of families that used to own slaves and people who use to be enslaved, those descendants all coming together and forming relationships, I think it’s really transformative.” - Adriane Rozier
“Meeting all of the ancestors of this cohort has been a really powerful way to have conversations across race about our pillars; land, race, money spirit. I am so grateful that I am here. This is unique & powerful. We are all blessed lucky people to be a part of it.” - Selina Lewis Davidson
“My ancestors were not the heroes I learned growing up, but committed crimes against humanity. And yet in painting them in a black and white way saying that my ancestors were criminals I’m also condemning myself because this is my own flesh and blood. So I went searching what were the wounds that my ancestors suffered because I’m suffering the same. I found just this week what those wounds are the nature and indeed we are suffering the same. And in order for me to heal I need to acknowledge my ancestors pain and maybe our whole line can heal together. If I’m able to heal then I’m able to walk a different path and not create suffering for other people including my African American peers. It can take two or three lifetimes to have that kind of understanding, but to have that emerge at this time over several days on this retreat is just absolutely life changing.” - Lotte Leib Dula
“The biggest takeaway for me is that forgiveness is possible. That is something that when I came into it I hadn’t even considered that that was a possibility. But from being able to sit in circle and cultivate my sense of deep listening from the heart and opening of compassion and seeing the parallel stories and realizing that we can only move forward through forgiveness. That is what I am taking away and will continue to work on.” - Zahra Baker
“This has been a life-changing experience like no other. I was open to the opportunity to research Ancestors on my Mother, Obie Lee Wright’s side.
Gathering with Black and White people that I didn’t know, except for Chief YeYe Luisah Teish, to research and experience relationships through the lens of Land, Race, Spirit and Money has been phenomenal, life-enriching, ever-evolving, and deepening. I’m not the same mature Black Woman who started this program in 2021. I have evolved and deepened in self-understanding, relationship-building, and creativity-expressing. This “experience” has impacted every aspect of my life because I know/feel/accept my Ancestors inside me. I am my Ancestors; West Afrikan (Fulani), European Irish, and Indigenous Tribes: Tigua, Ojibwe, Choctaw from my Mother and Father’s Side.
Despite the troubling conditions of life in Amerikkka and throughout the world at this time, programs like the Jubilee Justice Journey give us hope, because Love, Truth Commitment, and Soul have been generously shared and re-made us all FAMILY!
Onward, Upward, Forward Together!” - Elder Harriet Tubman
“In the process of these two years, I have watched people fall in love with each other, including myself, across all kinds of radical difference. Across all kinds of suspicion in the face of all the obstacles. And that new reality sounds sentimental but its actually bedrock of the kind of movement work that we’re about. We don’t know each other if we don’t care about each other. And we will just do each other in, which is the problem. And yet the kind of time it takes to build the relationships required for healing and repair of historic injury and the systems of oppression born of that historic injury shapes our lives today. That’s the deepest work so it takes the deepest relationships. So that’s the gift of this program for me.
This is forever work. We are going to be in each other’s lives and be committed to working together for collective liberation forever. Forty new folks in my life…did I need that? Yes i did. Did I know that? No, I did not. But what I know comes next and is the gift of Our Ancestral Journey, is that we are all involved in these different projects all across the country and beyond. And now they’re all networked. Now it’s about collective action. Now it’s about an ecosystem of social change and transformation. Of healing and repair. Of collective liberation. Moving money. Changing hearts and minds. I didn’t know this was the way to that. But there was no way around this to get to that. We had to go through this. The mysterious part of this work is that it is multigenerational. What I mean by multigenerational is that it is ancestral work. And they are longing for us to get it right. That’s the mysterious piece of the work that was news to me. But now that I know it, makes me understand all the more that the outcome is inevitable. That all creation clamors for healing and for repair. We just have to get about the work of doing it.” - Macky Alston
May it be so,
Konda