Sustainability — a values-based family-centered praxis that recognizes Earth as Mother of us all

Ketu Oladuwa's reflection on the significance of Proven Sustainable Conversations.

IMAGE SOURCE: Sara Makeba Daise. Facebook. Homepage image.

I find comfort in the Black Southern wisdom rooted in our lived experience. As the paradigm shifts and new ways of being are required, let us remember we descend from folks who transmitted spiritual knowledge back and forth across continents and oceans.

—Sara Makeba Daise, Cultural History Interpreter

Sustainability is the hueman give and take with the Ancestors and living Earth. This quote borrowed from a Gullah Geechee healer featured on the ProvenSustainable.org website identifies a relationship that’s a throughline in my life. But I didn’t recognize and respect it as such until the troubles were upon me.  

I grew up west of Main Street in a village 20 miles north of New York City during the late ‘40s and ‘50s. My adolescent adulthood was a schizophrenic break from my childhood. A foster child, raised by Elders whose rarely spoken history still permeated their daily lives, I subsequently was imbued with the deep traditions and spiritual essence of a living history. 

Elmsford was considered country in geographical reference to the city. We grew and canned our own food, raised and butchered chickens, turkeys, and pigs, and shared food with our neighbors. Originally born in Amelia County, Virginia in 1878, my Mom’s youngest years were disrupted by a Klan burning during her early teens that dispossessed and displaced her north to Brooklyn. My Dad, born in 1880, grew up in an orphanage on the Jersey side of the Hudson River. They married during the first decade of the 20^th century and by the 1930s had saved enough money to buy two acres of land in Westchester County.

The homestead was on a dirt street bordered on the west by miles of woods where I played comfortably exploring with imaginary friends. I drank from a stream that cut through the oaks, elms and dogwoods, and kept company with birds and pheasants, frogs and pollywogs, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, and the occasional fox and deer. For hours I sat with my back braced against a favorite oak, feet in the stream, watching life.

What I saw and imagined during those early single-digit years nestled in me a deep-rooted calm fortified by the wisdom of my Elder parents. 

Soon though, the draw of the street and quixotic rumblings of adolescence pulled me away from my roots, shrouding the peace of childhood. I didn’t return to that sound harbor until I was 26, after serving five years on death row. That time was spent recalculating my life and centering an identity rooted in the sustainability of those childhood relationships. I connected to Afrika and my people’s history of resistance to oppression.

The injustice of being sentenced to die for a murder I didn’t commit gave me the physical/intellectual/spiritual mental space I needed to find Afrika within. 

At the Proven Sustainable landing page, Marcia Douglas, Colonel of the Charles Town Maroons asks:

How can we preserve our culture and maintain our future?
That’s the question we all need to ask ourselves.

On death row, I answered with cultural and political resistance that I wed to Afrikan people’s day-to-day struggle to maintain the integrity of sustainable community relationships. I liberated my mind in prison reclaiming the peace of my youth and wisdom of my Elders & Ancestors. 

I understand sustainability as the Ubuntu principle — I am because we are.

I am because Earth holds, nurtures, sustains, and teaches me. That principle speaks to the knowledge and praxis of Afrikan Sacred Science which overstands all sentient life as the interrelated animated life force of the living Earth’s cosmic relationship. Through resistance to colonial mindset which separates and individuates, and by attending the praxis of ancestral incorporation in collective work and responsibility, I walk the path of knowing my Ancestors’ honoring Mother Earth. That is our indigenous maroon way.

Joining Sox & Kelsey in this process of remembering and re-membering who we are was an easy choice. Sox & I have more than 30 years of work re-membering together. Proven Sustainable Proven Free is a manifestation of his insightful vision and integral identity. Our relationship is a manifest of organic resistant sustainability and kinship in the face of social hypnosis, racial psychobabble, white supremacist fearmongering, and Afrikan historical erasure. 

Proven Sustainable is resistance as a metaphor for healing in an age of ascending spirit. I reject the colonizer mindset that sees the planet in a crisis of disintegration.

Rather I understand that Mother is bringing all things into alignment and balance and that all which remains ajar will fall away as we withdraw our consciousness and labor.

The truth of the matter is ably stated by two Maroon women quoted on the PS site: a Saamaka Maroon,

It is more important for us all to eat today than to know that I can eat tomorrow.

And a Jamaican Maroon, Nana Farika Berhane, said:

Wherever slavery existed Africans resisted and the most outstanding set of Africans who resisted were those who decided to steal themselves away from the master…into the hills and swamps away from prying eyes so they could now begin to recreate Africa and bring it close to them.

Asé and Asé!

The Proven Sustainable™ Conversation Series is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Transformative Action, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.