Reflecting on Cofed & Deep Routes

Sweet Potato Fellowship Reflections…

“You need to teach people how to look at one another. You need to teach people how they can help one another. I learned from everybody. . . That is what life is about. You not only learn, but you have to say where you learned it. You have to tell the world the names of those that helped you and taught you.” Leah Chase (excerpted from Creole Feast by Rudy Lombard and Nathaniel Burton)

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I remember the first time I really felt seen, really felt a connection between my current experiences and the experiences recorded in a history book. Because while I’ve always loved history, and had a deep affinity for understanding the past as a means of guidance in building the future, craving trips to museums and living inside encyclopedias, my experience with history often left me feeling depleted and angry without realizing it.

The first time I felt fed and validated by history was when I picked up Building Houses out of Chicken Legs by Psyche Williams-Forson. She centered her book around contemporary Black experiences and their connections to chicken as well as other foods. She also centered it on the experiences of Black women throughout history. Bringing the mundane, the joy, the sense of duty, the defiance, and the pleasure of being a Black person, and perhaps more specifically a Black woman, who works with food to the forefront in a way I hadn’t seen anybody do before. 

Hearing her words unpack the sources of stereotypes of and violence on Black people opened something up for me. I was beginning to feel empowerment around celebrating the foods of my ancestors. It made me feel reverence for foods like fried chicken. And in tandem with my work as a farmer, would be a sort of catalyst to not only deepen my relationship and understanding of foods that have been disregarded, but my desire to be apart of work that makes those stories more widely known. 

Although on the surface, my fellowship project Deep Routes is an afro-indigenous culinary and agricultural curriculum, one of the undergirding purposes of the project is to be a source of empowerment for other Black and Brown people. Perhaps not using as much academic jargon and theory as Psyche Williams-Forson, but to create resources with and for Black and Brown educators and learners where they really feel seen and heard. Where they have the platform and resources to determine what a learning experience can look like outside the framework of a compulsory education.

How can they apply what they’re learning in the classroom to deepen their relationship with themselves and others? What does a classroom look like when it balances critical thinking, reflection, and joy for Black and Brown people? What could it mean for Black and Brown folks to be seen and have agency in their education in the future? What would it look like for Black and Brown folks to be paid abundantly for creating this kind of community resource? These are the questions that drive me when things get hard.

Building a project that aims to completely overhaul something as deeply entrenched as educational institutions, whether it’s around culinary arts, agriculture, or any other subject, is not a simple process in and of itself. It’s even less simple when there’s a strong desire to do so collaboratively with the communities you want it to accurately reflect, support, and celebrate.

And that is to say that while my vision is clear and hopeful, the journey so far in launching the project has been full of many twists, turns, and sharp learning curves which I’m sure are only the first of many. Throughout the past six months I’ve found myself balancing actually working on the curriculum components and working on fundraising so that me and the contributors can get paid for our work. A familiar feeling of wearing multiple hats through researching, recipe testing, writing, rewriting, editing, and meeting with people became amplified because I’ve been wearing many hats in a way that’s felt different than past experiences.

Somedays I felt really energized and productive, perhaps finding gold nuggets in my research, eating some really good recipes, or having a great conversation with one of the collaborators or Dallas, Surparna, one of the board members, or my wildly supportive friends Kat and Daphne.

Other days I felt so so so so heavy. Both from the increasing complexity of the project and external stressors. Sometimes getting anything done was a heavy lift, and I’d become so frustrated with myself for not getting enough done according to my own standards or the timeline I’d set out for the project. However I’d often hear Dallas’ mantra to all of us fellows, echoing in my head to prioritize rest. Something my mom’s been telling me for years, and like many other lessons, I’m learning to appreciate more the older I get. My mom also often taught me to not make decisions based on fear, to pause if I need to and sleep on it, and maybe get an answer from my dreams. 

Something I’ve learned in this process is that working cooperatively whether your one of the people leading it or not, requires making trust-based decisions, and trust-based decisions go hand-in hand with rest which goes hand in hand with truly believing that I’m worthy of being taken care of. Not in a paternalistic way, but in a, community care, self-care kind of way.

Sure I can be passionate about this work of building and sharing resources, cooking and growing food with communities, and stepping into my duty of eliminating obstacles for Black and Brown people in educational systems. And it’s also necessary that I see myself beyond my passion for doing all of that, the teaching, the writing, the farming, and cooking. The past six months have taught me to ask myself a question that I’m still trying to figure out:

Who are you when you’re not doing anything, and how do you show her love so she can thrive?

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Video of this essay here.

Follow the project and my journey on www.instagram.com/deep_routes

Learn more about CoFED here.