Past Event: Black Sacred Arts Conference on Ecology and Environmental Issues

• Justin Brown, Yale University
• Ryan Darr, Yale University
• Rebecca Dirksen, Indiana University
• Tao Leigh Goffe, Hunter College, City University of New York
• Clifton Granby, Yale University
• Ayodeji Ogunnaike, University of Virginia
• Solimar Otero, Indiana University

• 1:00 – 1:30  | Arrival and check-in
• 1:30 – 3:00  | Plants, Expressive Culture, and the Spirit (Dining Room)
  • Chad Graham, “A Song for Osain: Lessons from the Orisha of Plants & Medicine”
  • Peter Hoesing, “Ecologies of Well-being: Hearing Uganda Through Ritual Repertoires”
  • Samuel Umoh, “The Forbidden and Sacred Landscape of the Gods in Nigeria”
  • Katherine Dimmery, Chair
• 3:00 – 3:30  | Coffee break
• 3:30 – 5:00 | Vodou Ecological Ethic for Earth Liberation (Dining Room)
  • Bayyinah Bello
  • Jean-Daniel Lafontant
  • Cecilia Lisa Eliceche
  • Elizabeth McAlister, Chair
• 5:00 – 6:00  | Opening reception (Foyer/Patio)
• Dinner on your own. 

• 9:00 – 9:30  | Continental breakfast (Upper Lobby)
• 9:30 – 10:30 | Kalunga Crossings: Waterscapes of Terror and “Teachment” in the African Atlantic World: Dialogic Keynote (Dining Room)
  • Tracey Hucks
  • Dianne M. Stewart
  • Solimar Otero, Moderator
• 10:30 – 10:45 | Morning break
• 10:45 – 12:15 | Homegrown: the Arts, Ethics, and Fugitive Sciences of Conjure Feminism (Amphitheatre)
  • Kameelah L. Martin, “Conjure Feminism: The Root(work) of Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions”
  • Mark Lomanno, “ ‘For the Song was Given Me’: Abbey Lincoln Conjures a More Wholly Earth”
  • Yvonne Chireau, “Care and Creation in the Conjure Women’s Garden: An Ecological Perspective”
• 12:15 – 1:30 | Lunch (Dining Room)
• 1:30 – 3:00  | The Rituals and Art of Self-Repair and Sustainability (Amphitheatre) 
  • Laura Carter, “Ecologies of Marronnage as Self-Repair in Guadeloupe”
  • Simone Delaney, “Black Electronic Music as a Means of Eco-Ancestral Repair: Aural Traces of More-than-human Relationalities”
  • Ijeoma Forchu, “Ala,the Eagle and the Kite: Advocates of environmental sustainability in Igbo songs”
• 3:00 – 3:30  | Coffee break (Upper Lobby)
• 3:30 – 5:00  | Standalone Performance-Demonstration (Outside/Dining Room)
  • Mudfish: An Ecological Sonic Ritual, Viktor le Givens and Roman Norfleet
• Dinner on your own.

• 9:00 – 9:30  | Continental breakfast (Upper Lobby)
• 9:30 – 11:00 | The Rituals and Poetics of Water (Dining Room)
  • Falana Gbenga, “Echoes of Ecological Activism: Yoruba Spoken Word ‘Omi Yaya’ and Musical Narratives on Flood Disaster”
  • Sally Hansen, “Stammering Sea, Re-writing Sacrifice: M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Sangoma Poetics”
  • Steveen Ulysse, “​​Konesans soti anba dlo, a wet ontological approach to understanding Ginen’s positionality in the shaping of Vodou knowledge”
  • Collin Edouard, Chair
• 11:00 – 11:15 | Morning break
• 11:15 – 12:45 | Theology of Migration and the Black Arts (Amphitheatre)
  • Stephanie Boddie & Isaiah Baba, “​​Singing with the Soil: Exploring African Diasporic Farming Traditions and Theological Connections”
  • Stephanie Boddie & Bianca Smith, “Migration stories: Me, My people, and Creatures Big and Small”
  • Ralph S. Emerson & Robert White, “Growth from a Garden: A Biblical Discipleship Model through the Lens of the Soil”
  • Ryan Darr, Chair
• 12:45 – 1:45 | Lunch (Dining Room)
• 1:45 – 3:15  | Art, Eco-Spirituality & Ecological Crisis (Amphitheatre)
  • Zainabu Jallo, “Abdias do Nascimento: Eco-Spirituality and Art”
  • Michelle Lewis, “Water and Spirit: The Ecotheologies of Black Coastal Communities”
  • Sibahle Ndwayana, “Caboverdianidade e Africanidade: Batuque’s ec(h)o poetics and maroon reverberations”
• 3:15 – 4:00  | Coffee break (Upper Lobby)
• 4:00 –4:30 | Concluding discussions (Amphitheatre)
• Dinner on your own
• Departures

Abstract: In this presentation, we seek to reclaim the spiritual roots of farming. Though farming is often associated with the means of providing food for sustenance, it is so much more. In most places in rural Africa, working the land took on cultural, social, and spiritual meaning. The farming practice was often accompanied by the use of rhythms, sounds, and songs. This approach towards working the land is unfortunately being lost over time. When engaging members of communities still practicing singing with the soil, they share that these songs help them connect with their culture, creation, and the Creator. The lyrics of such songs share profound truths, often referencing religious beliefs. Spirituals arise organically from individuals based on their lived experiences and feelings as they connect with the land.

The views reflected in these farming traditions may seem strange and superstitious to some Western thinkers. However, careful examination reveals the practice encourages love, community, belonging, heritage preservation, and respect for creation and the Creator. These values impact one’s perception of and relationship with the land. The songs bless both the workers and the soil. Chanting prayers and making music while tending the soil enhances our sensitivity to creation’s needs. By embracing the understanding that “everything breathing contributes to one song,” we ground our identity within an interconnected, melody-rich land (adamah) and other parts of creation.

This research considers how spiritual and ecological practices open possibilities for reciprocally caring for the sonic and sensing environments that sustain collective thriving. Cultivating this sensibility of interconnection sparks greater motivation for conservation and collective movement. It protects the sacred art of sustainably, purposefully working the land, growing food, and nurturing the spirit. By expanding participation in these practices that resist extractive capitalism, we revive rituals that support flourishing ecosystems throughout the migration of the African diaspora.

Bios: 

Dr. Stephanie Boddie is an Associate Professor of Church and Community Ministries. At Baylor University, she is affiliated with the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work, George W. Truett Seminary, the School of Education and the Environmental Humanities Minor program. She is currently professor extraordinarius at University of South Africa. She developed the course Education from a Gardener’s Perspective based on permaculture principles and eco-womanist perspectives. She is the principal investigator for the Sustainable Community and Regenerative Agriculture Project (S.C.R.A.P.). Boddie also participates in initiatives at University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Michigan. Boddie was the 2015-2016 CAUSE fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. During her CAUSE fellowship, she created the musical documentary, Unfinished Business: From the Great Migration to Black Lives Matter. She has co-authored over 70 publications including several books. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and University of Pennsylvania.  

Isaiah Baba is pursuing a Master of Divinity at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary and graduating May 2024. He is a resident chaplain where he leads worship and designs spiritual growth programs blending Christian practices with cultural humility. Isaiah has a Master of Science in Journalism from the University of Illinois and also holds a Bachelor of Science in Agribusiness with a major in climate change and food security from the University of Development Studies, Ghana. He has experience reporting for investigative units and advising on best practices for sharing messages, as well as two years of professional working experience as a communications officer for agricultural projects in Ghana, West Africa. Isaiah also preaches in churches in Texas, has served in camps, led Bible studies, and mentored youth. His heart for service and leadership shines both in Ghana and the United States. He has served as Dr. Boddie’s research assistant.

Abstract: All of God’s creation migrates. Often in search of something better (e.g., food, shelter, or mating opportunities) or fleeing a threat (e.g., unproductive or contaminated environments). Human beings uniquely change their homes to suit specific needs and alter the environment by their migration patterns and activities. In the case of monarch butterflies, the removal of milkweed across the U. S. has changed its migratory pattern. These pollinators are essential to protect the balance and biodiversity of our ecosystems for both nature and humans to thrive.

In 1916, the United States experienced the beginning of one of its largest migrations—The Great Migration. This migration is described by award-winning journalist Isabelle Wilkerson as a migration that “would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system” and “push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.” A climate of losses of property, beatings, lynchings, and limited economic mobility drove over 6 million African Americans both North and West. This movement of people changed the social and religious as well as the natural ecosystem.  

Since 2012, we have captured and featured the migration stories of over 50 African American elders affiliated with historic Black churches and civic groups in the musical documentary Unfinished Business: From the Great Migration to Black Lives Matter. Beyond the South, many of these elders encountered other forms of racism and challenges. However, through their faith and the support of religious communities, many forged better lives for themselves. For some this included finding ways to stay in harmony with the land.

In this presentation, we explore the theology of migration for all of God’s creation. We use the stories and music of the Great Migration to illustrate the complex and intertwined migratory path of human beings and the rest of creation.  

Bios:

Dr. Stephanie Boddie is an Associate Professor of Church and Community Ministries. At Baylor University, she is affiliated with the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work, George W. Truett Seminary, the School of Education and the Environmental Humanities Minor program. She is currently professor extraordinarius at University of South Africa. She developed the course Education from a Gardener’s Perspective based on permaculture principles and eco-womanist perspectives. She is the principal investigator for the Sustainable Community and Regenerative Agriculture Project (S.C.R.A.P.). Boddie also participates in initiatives at University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Michigan. Boddie was the 2015-2016 CAUSE fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. During her CAUSE fellowship, she created the musical documentary, Unfinished Business: From the Great Migration to Black Lives Matter. She has co-authored over 70 publications including several books. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and University of Pennsylvania.  

Bianca Smith is an author, activist, advocate, and adjunct professor. She is also a licensed master social worker (LMSW) and policy practitioner. Amidst the global health pandemic, she launched iKultivate, a consulting and counseling practice. She serves clients and organizations in the United States and Kenya. Smith specializes in serving those affected by anxiety, depression, and trauma-related disorders as well as substance-related and addictive disorders. As a doctoral student at Baylor University, she has started exploring practices from the garden and drawing from permaculture principles and the work of Dr. April Phillips’ The Garden Within. She is currently a research assistant working with Dr. Boddie exploring race-based health disparities. She is also interested in class-based health disparities in Kenya. Her professional career is a result of late nights, early mornings, vision boards, tears, prayer, and hope that turned into faith.

Abstract: The French Caribbean offers a particular Black Atlantic lens that allows for a fuller understanding of racial capitalism’s multiple “holds” on those who have persisted in revolting against it since the colonizers’ initial crimes. The latter were the conditions within which Guadeloupeans’ cultivated a radical imagination, an enduring ability to resist, to defy, to maroon, to “remix”, to create a spirituality and corresponding cultural practices grounded in their Caribbean environment at the antipodes of the colonizer’s logic of possessive individualism, enclosure, and maximizing of profits. The export-oriented monocropping production for European market economy reduced Guadeloupe’s natural diversity, its original capacity for self-subsistence, while near-slavery conditions persisted after abolition. So-called “decolonization” via assimilation (1946) turned Guadeloupeans into full-fledged citizens of France–albeit confined to the ‘other’ category of the French imaginary. The Gwoka drum dance complex—born on the colonial plantation, of stigmatized, mixed African origin—is a set of dance and music-based collective practices constitutive of the institutions and lifeworlds of the laboring classes in Guadeloupe since slavery. Here I show how cultural/environmental activists seize Gwoka’s transformative potential–for awakening of both individual and collective consciousness of their wounded “vivant” (all living things, beings). The multiple, unrepaired crimes that continue to materially affect Guadeloupe’s people, its land, and its water–are most flagrantly obvious through the case of chloredécone (kepone) poisoning. In this presentation, Mouvman Kiltirèl Voukoum (Voukoum cultural movement of Guadeloupe) allows me to demonstrate how Gwoka practices–formerly demonized by the status quo–have always also been a means by which Guadeloupe’s people reconnect with their natural environment and create their own spirituality, as well as a medium to denounce crimes (such as the chlordécone-ecocide). Here I discuss how Voukoum’s mobilization of specific Gwoka rhythms and practices–grounded in a mixed ancestry and militant anticolonialist forms of marronnage–constitute a powerful form of self- repair for Guadeloupe.

Bio:

Laura Bini Carter, PhD candidate in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, is currently teaching at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She has conducted research in the Caribbean since 2004. Life and work in Martinique, Dominican Republic, Haiti and New York City, helped her to make connections between the African diasporic traditions, and her own practice of these has pushed her to study their particular histories as well as the broader implications of social movements and groups that use ‘subaltern’ expressive forms (music, dance, story-telling, carnival). With support from Wenner Gren, NSF and Fulbright, she went on to undertake dissertation fieldwork in Guadeloupe and Paris. Her research focuses on diverse forms of cultural politics, nationhood and belonging generated within the ‘French Antillean (post)colonial’ that testify to the persistence of race, class, and gender-based inequalities on the one hand; and to creative resistance through artistic production and social mobilization, on the other.

Abstract: In June 1945, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois, proposing the establishment of a cemetery in Florida for housing the remains of the “illustrious Negro dead.” As an initiate of New Orleans Hoodoo, Hurston perceived the non-embodied presence of spirits within the living forms of plants, trees, and other flora. Her proposed cemetery recalled African American practices of root-working, where Conjure women foster vitality from the very soil of human decomposition for healing and remembrance of venerated ancestors.

Placing Hurston’s envisioned cemetery within the context of a Conjure woman’s garden serves as a prime example of a speculative vision of Black womanist/feminist ecologies—what Kameelah Martin terms Conjure Feminism. Although most often viewed through a religious lens, Conjure, which is often glossed as magic, might also be interpreted through Britt Rusert’s concept of “fugitive science,” African American vernacular cultural production and knowledge (including magic performances and other artistic formations) derived from older forms of African American naturalism that stand in relation to the formal styles of study and observation that have persisted in.

Encompassing Christianity as well as indigenous African and native American styles, Conjure (also called Hoodoo) employs natural materials to connect its practitioners to the visible and invisible worlds for purposes such as healing, protection, and empowerment. In this conversation I define the Conjure woman’s garden as a co-created space, initiated and given purpose through magical intent. Whether adorned with plants flowers and fauna or whether housing the bodies and bones of revered ancestors, as a healing space the Conjure woman’s garden is dedicated to the edification and wellbeing of the supporting community, with the divine impulse serving as partner in designing and operating this specialized ecosystem. These aspects of spiritual engagement resonate with practices in African diasporic religions such as Yoruba-derived Lucumi and Haitian Vodou.

My talk will use a Conjure methodology to address three key themes. First, I will discuss Elonda Clay’s concept of the backyard garden as sacred space for African American women, emphasizing the development of an ethics of Conjure practice in Hoodoo traditions of healing and care. Second, I will revisit recognized sites of Conjure-Hoodoo earthcare, such as the Chesapeake Conjure Society, who continue to build upon local practices of land veneration and plant medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Finally, I will focus on the cemetery itself as a potent space for embodying the material and non-corporeal dimensions of a Conjure ecology—a garden of spirits that includes divinities, elevated humans, and ancestors.

Bio:

Dr. Yvonne Chireau is the Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies and Religion at Swarthmore College, where she teaches classes on American religions, Africana and Afro-Atlantic religions, and Magic and Religion Studies. She is the author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003) and the co-editor of Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism (1999). She is interested in spiritual pluralism in the United States, as well as topics concerning the theoretical and practical intersections of religion and magic. Her varied thoughts on the historical intersections between magic, Africana religions, comics, and popular culture tropes of black spirituality can be found at the research blog “The Academic Hoodoo” (academichoodoo.com). She is currently writing about contemporary reclamations of the African American ancestral traditions known as Conjure, Hoodoo, and Rootwork by millennial practitioners, artists, educators, and entrepreneurs.

Abstract: Many see electronic music genres as disconnected from the natural environment due to the synthetic sounds associated with higher tech music production. However, since the 1970’s, the advent of synthesizers, drum machines, and electronic production methods has led to many unexpected explorations of eco-ancestral repair within Black communities. In re-establishing reciprocal relationships with land through inherited spiritual practices, electronic music holds the power to facilitate Black ancestral repair by evoking aural traces of more-than-human relationalities — embodied means of relating to elements of the wider biosphere beyond the oppositional binary of human/non-human. The reparative nature of these genres can be mapped from collective means of survival on the plantation subsistence plot, through which contemporary Afro-diasporic communities have inherited a spirit of commonality and a sacred conception of the earth. In retracing the conditions of invisibility necessary to continue sacred practices without mastery and control, the subcultures of Black electronic music emerged from underground portals through which rituals such as the ring shout enabled spiritual possession by deities personifying elements of the natural world, eventually laying the foundation for secularized forms of Black vernacular dance styles to come. With DJs inheriting the call-and-response techniques of plantation conjurers, contemporary Black electronic music subcultures reestablish the personhood of its participants through the continuation of folk traditions rooted in reciprocal relationships with land, rejecting colonial categorizations that deem Black bodies as less-than-human to facilitate more-than-human interconnectivities within the wider biosphere. This reconstitution of relationships to the natural environment therefore allows for the Afrofabulation of self-determined futures, calling for new forms of vibrational transmutations to generate ancestral repair.

Bio:

Simone Delaney (they/them) is a multidisciplinary designer in MIT’s Master in City Planning program interested in intersections of race/space/ecology. With a background in architecture and landscape architecture, they have been an active organizer with Design as Protest since 2020 and have supported resilience-centered projects in San Francisco, New York, Louisiana, Florida, and Jakarta. As a descendant of self-emancipated fugitives that migrated north to so-called Canada, their research interests include fugitive landscapes, Maroon legacies, Black + Indigenous interrelationality, and climate disaster collectivism. Outside of design, they are committed to centering ancestral land-based practices through Black rootwork.

Information: “Vodou ecological ethic for Earth Liberation” is a panel discussion featuring Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Bayyinah Bello and Jean-Daniel Lafontant.

Abstract: Haitian Vodou is a High Science centered on the maintenance of telluric and cosmic balance. In the midst of the environmental chaos caused by the colonial hecatomb we will share the ways in which, since its birth in the congress of Bwa Kayiman, sevites (memebers of Haitian Vodou communities) have been, in the words of prof. Bello Earth “guardians of the living entity that is Earth”. We will take two non-Haitian territorial concepts to dialogue with: Liberation of Mother Earh and Terricide. The environmental ethics of Haitian Vodou, its ecological consciousness, are not isolated but in dialogue with other cosmogonies that struggle for Earth Justice. “Terricide” is a term coined by Mapuche Weichafe and intellectual Moira Ivana Millan together with the “Movimiento de Mujeres y discidencias Indigenas por el Buen Vivir” This concept was coined to expand the notion of ecocide that excludes the spiritual world. It describes the destruction of tangible and intangible ecosystems, visible and invisible beings that co-habit territory and are inextricably linked with the biological biomes. We will discuss: How is terricide relevant to sevites inside and outside of Haiti? A second idea we will dialogue with is “Liberation of Mother Earth”, a movement funded by the Nasa people in the colonial frontier of Colombia. We will discuss how the funding of Vodou as a Theology of Liberation of the enslaved Africans was also a movement of Liberation of the enslaved soil. How is Vodou working for the abolition of monoculture and plantation system. Hos is Vodou working for the prospering of radical difference and pluriculture of crops, trees, seeds…? How are other than human agents, roots, winds, microbes, leaves, stones active agents in this struggle for Liberation?

Bios:

Cecilia Lisa Eliceche is a mother, dancer, choreographer and campesina based between Salvador de Bahia, Brussels and Necochea. Amongst her choreographic works are “Unison”, “the non-massage dance”, “The Ghost of Lumumba”, “Caribbean Thinkers for a New Europe”. She has collaborated with Heather Kravas, DD Dorvillier, Janet Panetta, Etienne Guiloteau, Claire Croize, Tereza Diaz Nerio. Since 2016, they have been sharing life with Leandro Nerefuh diving in the deep waters of Ayiti . She’s a co-founding member of the dance editorial writing group Dancing at the Crossroads (as we walk). Cecilia is a spiritual daughter of Sosyete NaRiVèh and is proud to serve in the board of KOSANBA (the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou). They are currently doing their PhD in Anthropology (UFBA). She is thankful to Houngan Jean-Daniel Lafontant, Egbomi Nancy de Souza and Dr. Kyrah Malika Daniels for their friendship and guidance.

Professor Bayyinah Bello, Vodouvi, is an Ayitian Ourstorian, Educator, Writer and Humanitarian, with over 40 years of extensive research rooted in Alkebulan/ Arawakan traditions, wisdom and perceptions. Professor Bello specializes in Ayitian Ourstory and linguistics. She has taught in many parts of Afrika, Ayiti, and the Americas from kindergarten to university levels, including at the State University of Haiti. She is the founder of Fondation Marie Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur Dessalines, popularly known as FONDASYON FELICITEE (FF), named after the Empress consort of Hayti, and wife of the revolutionary Liberator and founder of Hayti, Empire of Freedom, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines. She is the author of, among other publications, SHEROES of the Haitian Revolution, highlighting the lives of ten among the women who marked Ayitian incredible Ourstory with their significant roles in the nation’s journey to freedom. Professor Bello is based in Ayiti and serves as advisor to key eldership councils.

Jean-Daniel Lafontant is Hougan and founder of the NA-Ri-VéH Vodou temple in Haiti. In addition to running the temple, Jean-Daniel is an advisor to the DAWO Vodou Association and a Gwètode member of KNVA, the Haitian National Vodou Council. His area of specialization focuses on the production and promotion of Haitian culture. In 1987, he created ANAE, an association specialized in the promotion of Haitian art and crafts influenced by Vodou. From 2014 until today, he does consultancies in the field of Haitian art and culture in Haiti and the United States, and works intermittently with several cultural institutions (universities, media and museums). In 2018, Jean-Daniel co-organized “Pòtoprens”, a seminal Visual Arts exhibition inspired by Vodou at the Pioneer Works gallery in New York and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami.

Abstract: Flood disasters are one of the most prevalent disasters in Africa, America, and some other parts of the world, with recently some of the worst flood disasters in history. According to ‘Floods in the WHO region’, during the past 30 years, flooding has killed more than 200,000 people and affected more than 2.8 billion others worldwide. Some of the biggest are the hurricane-related floods in New Orleans and the Omiyale flood disaster in Ibadan, to mention a few. Globally, it is increasingly becoming difficult to tell the difference between natural disasters and human-made disasters, as both the causes and impacts of climate change and environmental disasters are exacerbated by human actions and inactions. It is therefore imperative that musicians and composers use their arts to educate humans about social responsibility and advocacy towards nature and environmental sustainability, even in the face of technological development, commercialization, and industrialization. As a onetime victim of flood disasters (twice while growing up) and now a vocalist and music composer, my presentation will explore the intersection of Yoruba spoken word and an original musical composition (with English translation displayed) that addresses flood disasters in Yoruba land. Utilizing the rich cultural heritage of the Yoruba people, my performance will seamlessly blend live poetic vocal narration in Yoruba language with a snippet of my originally composed music, titled Omi yaya (Flood), in the background, creating a multisensory experience that captures the conference’s discussion on environmental concerns. The presentation will invite all the conference participants and future recipients of the conference to engage with the rich cultural nuances that shape responses to environmental crises in Yorubaland and how they align with similar experiences globally.

Bio:

Gbenga Falana (The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa) Gbenga Falana is a musicologist, vocalist, and versatile music composer, currently pursuing his Master of Music in Composition at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He holds his bachelor’s degree in music (with a specialization in theory and musical composition) from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria (2018). Gbenga has worked with various educational institutions in different regions of Nigeria as a music instructor and educator. He is also a junior research fellow at IFRA-NIGERIA, the French Institute for Research in Africa. Gbenga’s research interests encompass a broad range of topics, including musical composition, orchestration, church music, ecomusicology (music and environmental studies), and African art music. He is currently a graduate assistant in the composition area at the School of Music, University of Alabama.”

Abstract: Many religious and cultural tenets which have for centuries sustained ecological equilibrium in Igbo society, southeastern Nigeria reside in indigenous Igbo knowledge system and are exhibited in musical philosophy and practices. Unfortunately, environmental norms preserved in indigenous Igbo sacred music is yet to receive deserved scholarly attention despite acute land degradation in the area, and global interest in environmental sustainability. Sadly, the worldwide community is deprived of the perspectives of ecological justice enshrined in Igbo music. I therefore aim to access how indigenous Igbo sacred music advocates a sustainable environment. I intend to have and informed understanding of how it creates meaning and gives expression to Ala, the mother-earth goddess, in mediating the ecology on which the society depends, in the face of rapid land degradation. I employ ethnomusicological research methods – fieldwork and analysis of concepts, musical structures, social and cultural contents of chosen Igbo sacred songs. The feminist motherism theory and the ecomusicological approach which intersect at concern for environmental sustainability and social process are used to critically examine and interpret sacred songs as it pertains to land degradation in Igbo society. I argue that lyrics of Igbo sacred songs promote cooperation, reciprocity and justice which are embedded in the interaction of the proverbial Kite (Milvus migrans) with the Eagle (Haliaeetus vocifer), and supervised by Ala. These constitute the bedrock upon which conceptualizations of land and wellbeing of Igbo society are situated. Through its transdisciplinary conversations between environmentalism, music and ecology, it is hoped that insights gained in this paper may motivate increased actions for ecological restoration and sustainability in the face of current environmental crisis. It may also help to bridge the divide between different sacred arts, and allow the quest for a flourishing, equitable social future and sustainable global ecology to materialize.

Bio:

Ijeoma Iruka Forchu, Ph. D. (Ethnomusicology); Senior Research Fellow/Senior Lecturer. Institute for Development Studies/Department of Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka I have over the years worked intensively in Igbo music and developmental concerns including Igbo music and gender, Igbo music and environmental sustainability, and Nigerian music and other social and economic issues. I am actively involved in creating new knowledge and insights, and disseminating them within and outside the academic world through international and local conferences, and local and international journals, book chapters and book publications. For more than thirteen years, I have been imparting musical knowledge and developmental studies’ knowledge and skills to music and developmental studies’ students, respectively. I supervise and help students develop research skills, enabling them to successfully undertake research projects. I have also been participating in organizing workshops, seminars and conferences, thereby helping to bring scholars together, and enhancing collaborations and dissemination of research output.

Abstract: For Black Sacred Arts Conference, scholar, artist and heritage preservationist Viktor Le Givens and interdisciplinary cultural producer, healer and mystic Roman Norfleet co-facilitate a sonic eco ritual drama entitled Mudfish. Mudfish is an interdisciplinary sonic intervention featuring the musings of multi-instrumentalist Roman Norfleet of Be Present Art Group and Viktor le Givens of Southern Android Productions. The project is aimed to explore “how do we call in the sweet waters of change and transformation into our lives? More specifically what offerings and cultural algorithms must be devised in order to calibrate our social imbalances?

In the cultural archive of Benin West Africa the sacred mudfish is said to represent resilience, prosperity, peace, fertility, and primordial wisdom. During extreme drought the mudfish can traverse land and burrow into the mud as it then goes into a dormant state, or temporary death. When the rainy season comes, the mudfish emerges from its dormant state and begins to swim and animate the rivers again. Metaphorically the mudfish is often used to represent Afro Atlantic Spiritual consciousness, a well spring of energy that ebbs and flows depending on the climate and conditions of the time. It goes without question that we are in a time of drought, punctuated by global warming, political wars, financial instability and exacerbated natural resources.

Bios:

There is magic, reverence, and mystery in the spaces, objects, and writings of Viktor L. Ewing-Givens, a multimodal performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to re-con- textualize the seemingly mundane into the spectacularly sacred. Though the form is different, Givens’s work is a continuation and adaptation of the methods used by storytellers, like Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, who find truth in their bodies and use the whispers of archaeological sites to piece together Afro-Atlantic pasts. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with precolonial and postmodern spiritual technologies, Givens works to fabricate spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual (re)memory. He is the founding creative director of Southern Android Productions, an ongoing cultural research project that explores the healing and creative powers of ancestral archives.

Roman Norfleet (1988 n. American born) is an interdisciplinary cultural producer, healer and mystic that uses sculpture, music composition, performance and social organizing as instruments in exploring his committed interest in spiritual and social development.  Originally hailing from Lockport, Illinois, Roman’s formative years were spent immersed in the vernacular traditions of the Baptist Church where his parents Mose Ella and Rev. Robert Norfleet attended and provided Roman the foundation to seek spiritual enlightenment on his own. His development journey led him to Los Angeles where he lived in an Gaudiya Vaishnava Ashram and studied Hindu/ Vedic Philosophies of Swamini Turiyasangitanada (Alice Coltrane) with her students. These years of deep immersion into his spiritual practices greatly influenced the way Norfleet approaches music and provided expansive insight into the sacred power of sound.

Abstract: In his 2021 article, “The Sacred and the Profane: Wisdom and the Practice of Healing in Orisa Medicine,” Dr. Kola Abimbola argues that, although Orisha devotion is normatively conceptualized as a religion or spiritual practice, it is more appropriate to understand it as a medical (or healing) tradition. Yet, within academic and popular discourse on Orisha Devotion - in its many manifestations - there’s a lack of consideration for Osain. As the Yoruba divinity of herbalism, Osain encapsulates the terms on which humans can, should, and do engage with plant-life and nature more broadly. In one way or another, that engagement largely involves healing or medicine. This paper extends Abimbola’s thesis by analyzing Lukumi contexts and practices in which Osain is invoked and/or deployed, based on observant participation and ethnographic research.

Even though each orisha is associated with particular plants, all plants belong to Osain, and thus, the world does too. He was in Cuba before the Yoruba people were enslaved there. Buoyed by the aforementioned practices, descriptions from the continental and diasporic literary corpuses gesture toward Osain’s pantheistic nature or omnipresence. The details about this orisha are encoded in narratives and songs. By juxtaposing the varied characterizations of Osain (Yoruba/Isese and Afro-Cuban/Lukumi) and his arrival in Cuba, this paper also oers a testament or an explanation as to why Osain is so vital to contemporary Orisha devotion and the discourse surrounding it. Together, the extension of Abimbola’s thesis and the testament to/explanation of Osain encourage the critical re-evaluation of personications or embodiments of herbalism and healing in other Africana “religions.”

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Chad Kehinde Graham (University of Delaware) is an emerging scholar-practitioner of Africana Studies and Africana Religions, as well as a student of Afro-Cuban Orisha Music. He holds a BA from Howard University, an MA in Religion from Temple University, and is completing his MA in Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. His thesis explores the role of the environment in the the reconstitution of Yoruba sacred music - and thus the broader spiritual tradition - in Cuba. His other research interests include Material Culture Studies, Environmental Studies, and Historiography. Chad has received grants or fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Center for Material Culture Studies, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Outside of his intellectual work, Chad is an instructional coach, working with college and high school students interested in becoming teachers.

Abstract: In her experimental poetry collection, Zong! (2007), M. NourbeSe Philip visually portrays the Atlantic Ocean not just as a historical site, but as a protean material—duplicitous as language and unreadable as the human body. Many of her poems, at rst glance, seem inscrutable—words and even split syllables are strewn across the page in wave and current patterns. The predictable poetic “line” is completely dissolved; an attempt to read the poems aloud yields stammers and slurs, with occasional glimpses of the brutal history they obscurely document. In this paper, I show how Philip, a self-described “seer, sangoma, or prophet” of the African diaspora, ritually sacrices words to testify to the Zong massacre (194). In the cuts and stammers of the poem, Philip refuses to coherently narrate the deaths of over one hundred and fty Africans who were thrown overboard the slave ship, Zong, when drinking water ran out. Moreover, Philip composes the collection by tearing apart words from the Gregson vs. Gilbert court case, in which the ship owners demanded insurance compensation for lost “cargo.” Dissecting the deadly semantics of this oceanic scene, I claim, Philip “reach[es] into the stinking, eviscerated innards” of language looking for “signs and portents of a new life” (193-4). By sacricing words instead of bodies, Philip exposes the brutal artice of capitalist logic, which writes Black bodies into a system of exchangeable value. She oers instead broken performances in which the “meaning” of Black bodies remains elusive, yet as inescapable as thirst. Building on work by Christina Sharpe, Joshua Bennet, and others, I ultimately elevate Philip’s work as an embodied mode of ecological and theological theorizing that refuses to secure the meanings of bodies, oceans, or futures. What emerge instead, through the physical intensities of her fractured incantations, are specters of unrecovered bones at the ocean’s bottom and the waves in which the dead remain—an ocean all too human.

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Sally Hansen (University of Notre Dame) Sally Hansen is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Notre Dame’s English Department. Her dissertation, “Sounding Stigma: Graphic Poetry, Mysticism in the Flesh, and the Marked Body” explores visually disruptive poems that are meant to be heard, not just seen. Graphic poets use visual techniques like collage, scrambled typographies, elaborate rhythmic notations, and redaction—they physically mark language to disorient normative modes of reading. When performed live, graphic poems’ unpredictable stammers and slurs dramatize violent histories in which bodies are racially and sexually marked. The dissertation feels through these sensory entanglements toward what Fred Moten calls “mysticism of the flesh”—the polyrhythmic performances of the dispossessed. Hansen completed her undergraduate in English Literature at the University of Virginia, and a Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music. Her work appears in ASAP Journal, Hopkins Quarterly, and Fare Forward.

Abstract: Part of the first comprehensive study of music among Ugandan traditional healers, this paper examines how traditional healers in southern Uganda work at the intersection of music, plant medicine, and relationships with patron spirits to wield influence within ecologies of well-being. Ugandan repertories of ritual action, including song, help define such ecologies more expansively than naturalists or wildlife ecologists might. Ecologies of well-being include not only physical domains human bodies, flora and fauna, but also their underlying and closely linked spiritual features. Here, at the nexus of the human, the more-than-human, the plant, the animal, and the complex spiritual world, healers called basamize and baswezi articulate the analogy between individual and society in the social domain and between organisms and their environment in underlying, homologous physical and spiritual domains. Kiganda and Kisoga repertories of well-being called Kusamira render boundaries between these domains porous, linking people with other people, with powerful plant medicines and animal familiars, with the places where these powers dwell, and with the spirits who dwell therein. Repertories of well-being actively invite the influence of these powers, attempting to shape their incorporation into bodily and spiritual substance. These musical repertories contribute to the interdependence of such domains through indexical functions deployed through dramatic rituals involving spirit mediums, references to the royal enclosure, sophisticated notions of twinship, and a human-spiritual-animal morphological continuum. Doing spiritual work in this context involves singing and drumming, the creation of power objects, and exchanges of hospitality for blessings. All embed music in a tightly integrated cultural logic that integrates humans, animals, crops, and plant medicines into ecologies of well-being.

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Pete Hoesing (Dakota State University and USD Sanford School of Medicine) Peter J. Hoesing (Pete) is an ethnomusicologist and research administrator who serves as Associate Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Dakota State University. A faculty affiliate of DSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, Hoesing also serves the Ethics and Humanities Faculty Section at University of South Dakota’s Sanford School of Medicine as Director of Medical Humanities. He previously taught at Grinnell College, Claflin University, and Florida State University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 2011. Hoesing’s book with University of Illinois Press (2021) and his award-winning documentary short examine the music of Ugandan traditional healers. His other research and teaching interests span Africa and its global diaspora, especially East African expatriate communities and popular music in the Americas. His research has garnered generous funding from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Krebs Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, UNCF Programs, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and the South Dakota Humanities Council.

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Khristian Howard produced the visual art for the panel “A Theology of Migration and Black Sacred Arts.”

Bio: Khristian Howard (Baylor University) is an author, advocate, and artist. She currently serves as the Assistant Director of Community Relations- Health and Education in the Office of External Affairs at Baylor University. There she plays a pivotal role in building bridges between institutions and community. Ensuring essential health resources and educational opportunities are accessible to all. Howard also services as Waco ISD Education Foundation board member, Waco chapter NAACP member, a cohort member of Leadership Waco through the local Chamber of Commerce, and a board member for ARNOVA’s Community Grassroots Association section. She frequently organizes community service opportunities for her department. Howard is a graduate of University of Georgia and Baylor University’s Diana R. Garland School of Social Work. She began her journey as a visual artist in high school. 

Tracey Hucks is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. 
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Abstract: Blacks have lived and thrived in coastal communities in Eastern North Carolina. This paper examines how the theologies of Blacks living in these communities were and continue to be shaped by the natural world. This paper examines the ecotheologies of Blacks living in Wilmington, North Carolina, and on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, specifically Roanoke Island.

This paper answers the questions: How has living on an island that was only accessible by ferry until the 1950s (and is still considered remote and rural) shaped the past and current expressions of spirituality, faith, culture, and an ethic of environmental stewardship? How has living near the water shaped the theologies of these communities? What are the historic expressions of spirituality in these communities, and how are they practiced today? Through ethnographic research that includes participant observation, interviews, and archival research, this paper examines how the natural world, specifically living on an island (in the case of the Outer Banks, and living near the ocean (Wilmington), has created a spirituality that has water as a central connection across the faith traditions practiced in these communities. Before the end of the Civil War, Roanoke Island was home to one of the first free communities of African Americans in the South. The blacks that are “native” to the community claim both black and indigenous heritage. The faith blacks practice on the island combines African and indigenous spiritualities/ practices with Christianity. Though Wilmington is 4 hours from Roanoke Island, the similarities of the eco-theologies of these communities are striking. In addition to having similarities in their spiritual practices, these communities were home to some of the earliest black boatbuilders, black watermen, and water women, and an all-black life-saving station.

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Michelle Lewis (Duke Divinity School) In 2013, Michelle became the first person of color to graduate with joint degrees from Yale School of the Environment (M.E.Sc.) and Yale Divinity School (M.Div.). She also received a Sacred Music and the Arts certificate from the Yale ISM. Dr. Lewis completed her doctoral work at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Her research has spanned using gardens to create sacred spaces in communities, the effects of greenspace on hospital patient outcomes, and how the natural world shapes the theologies of black coastal communities. She is ordained in The United Methodist Church and serves Roanoke Island Presbyterian Church. She is a former United Nations advisor and has done conflict work in the Middle East. An award-winning filmmaker, she founded the Peace Garden Project, a 501c3, and the Outer Banks Environmental Film Festival. Michelle is a native of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Abstract: Inspired by Abbey Lincoln’s 1998 album Wholly Earth and taking its title from a lyric in her composition “Learning How to Listen” on that recording, this presentation places Lincoln’s career and life in the context of what Kameelah Martin calls “conjure feminism,” a holistic, matrilineal knowledge tradition cultivated by Black American women rooted in Afro-Atlantic spirituality. Contextualizing Lincoln’s work in this way continues Martin’s work in recovering erased matrifocal histories of Afro-Atlantic life in the United States and offers new perspectives on jazz music as part of Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions of conjure/hoodoo. I recast recent scholarship on Mary Lou Williams in this light and align it with current examples, such as Teri Lyne Carrington’s advocacy and pedagogical work at Berklee College’s Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.

I also place the womanist ecology Lincoln invokes in Wholly Earth in the context of “fugitive science” (Rusert 2017), adding that Lincoln’s “pedagogies of listening” are not just for appreciating and performing music, but rather are part of conjure feminism’s caretaking and worldmaking traditions. Following the poetics of Lincoln’s lyric, I foreground the compassionate and empathetic stewardship inherent in her approach, emphasizing ideals of communal care over the phallocentric individualism that typifies much of jazz history. In support I offer up Ana Maria Ochoa’s critique of Steven Feld’s acoustemology, suggesting that Ochoa’s “acoustic multinaturalism” better reflects the adaptive attentiveness to the natural and spiritual realms that Lincoln promotes on Wholly Earth. I draw on other examples of this attentiveness, including from Indigenous and Afro-indigenous artists such as Mali Obomsawin (Abenaki Odanak), Matana Roberts, and Sumi Tonooka. In conclusion I pose questions about the ethical implications of applying Lincoln’s pedagogies of listening asking “if we are stewards of our ancestors’ songs, how do we care for them and those who sing them? And what kinds of listening might we need for others’ songs?”

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Mark Lomanno (University of Miami) Dr. Mark Lomanno is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Trained as an ethnomusicologist, jazz historian, and pianist, they specialize in holistic and interdisciplinary approaches to music that incorporate ethnography, historiography, performance practice, and music theory, as well as embodied perception, environmental humanities and sustainability studies, and improvisation studies. Geographically, Lomanno’s ethnographic, performance, and scholarly work are based in the Afro-Atlantic world, especially in the Canary Islands. Lomanno’s publications include chapters in two recent edited volumes (Intimate Entanglements: Vulnerability in the Ethnography of Performance and Playing for Keeps: Improvisation in the Aftermath of Crisis). In Summer 2024 a volume they co-edited with Daniel Fischlin, titled The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Co-Creative Worldmaking, will be published in Temple University Press’s Insubordinate Spaces series. Lomanno also maintains the blog “Rhythm of Study” (rhythmofstudy.com), a public forum celebrating jazz musicians’ work in the arts, academia, and community activism.

Abstract: Conjure Feminism is an evolving theory of Black women’s intellectual legacies of spirit work (divination, healing, dream interpretation, herbology) that informs their everyday existence—from childrearing, food ways, and material culture to folklore, gardening and death practices formulated by Brooks, Martin, & Simmons.  Conjure feminism is a fluid concept, but at its source builds from specific African-derived tenets. Conjure feminism is an epistemological framework that privileges Black women’s sacred knowledge and folkloric practices of spirit work. It provides Black folk the cultural fluidity necessary for survival in a world where race is a socially constructed fiction with real world consequences. The Divine Feminine is its source of knowledge and conjure feminism, arguably, is a type of activism. Spiritual systems such as rootwork, obeah, conjure, Vodou, Candomblé, Palo Mayombe and others are understood as freedom practices. Conjure feminism, above all else, ensures the survival of Black lives—gender notwithstanding. It is deeply womanist in this regard.  Most importantly, it is ancestral work that creates genealogies of knowledge and other ways of knowing that are inherited, transmitted, and bequeathed among women of African descent. Conjure Feminism names a specific lineage of Black women’s spiritual interventions and knowledge that has evolved and continues to embed itself in their creative practices. Whether imbedded in the oral tradition of ‘telling lies’ or in the cinematography of the series like Queen Sugar, Hortense Spillers and Marjorie Pryse argue “that however fleetingly history recorded their lives, there [exists] a women’s tradition, handed down along female lines.”  I dare to offer a name for it and advance the intellectual and intertextual discourse around conjure feminism. As curators of the path, it only makes sense that it appears in Black women’s creative output. I explicate exactly how and where it is manifesting in contemporary creative works and how its application deepens and expands Black Feminist theoretical groundings.

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Kameelah L. Martin (College of Charleston) Dr. Kameelah L. Martin is a Professor of African American Studies and Dean of Graduate Studies at the College of Charleston. Her scholarly expertise sits at the crossroads of African Diaspora literature(s) of the U.S. and Caribbean and folklore studies. As a cultural studies scholar, she is trained in the African American literary and vernacular traditions with emphasis on twenty and twenty-first century prose.  In 2013, Palgrave McMillan published her first monograph Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, & Other Such Hoodoo which engages how African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman figure primarily in twentieth century fiction. Dr. Martin is also the author of Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics: African Spirituality in American Cinema (Lexington 2016) which explores the treatment of the priestess figure in American cinema.

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the ec(h)o-poetic (re)productions of Caboverdianidade that may lead to further questions on Blackness and Africanidade as experienced through the afterlives of slavery, famines, revolutions in Cabo Verde and explicitly expressed through poetry and music. Music echoes poetry and vice-versa; thus, I take these two as interlinked in the cultural production of Cabo Verde. I utilize a combination of “structures of feeling” via Raymond Williams (1977) and sentiment–thinking—with the sensibility of Saudade/Sodade, a form of deep yearning for something or someone that is not that or does not exist—as modes of reading and understanding the ecological circumstances that position Cabo Verde “on the frontlines of existential crises.” I rely on these two modes to make sense of Cabo Verdeans’ relationship with climate change, highlighting an ec(h)o-poetic orientation in the relationship between climate crises and survivance. Methodologically, thinking with structures of feeling and sentiment-thinking considers “meanings and values as actively lived and felt,” which are the core aspects of geo-sonic experiences (Williams, 1977, p. 132). I rely on these modes to speak to the emergent articulations and orientations in light of capital extraction through the colonialization of the islands and the establishment and facilitation of the Atlantic Slave Trade. In attempting a sonic and aural orientation to geography via Williams, I engage Batuque poetics that flow with, through, and by Cabo Verde and take animated sensibilities such as refuge, mourning, healing, and pain alongside pleasure as structured/ing sounded resistances to Portuguese imperialism and imaginaries beyond. My analysis thus works on mapping out an “affective landscape” that resounds in an Afrodiasporic space by emphasizing Batuque as an echoed ecological sounding that reverbs Caboverdianidade with Africanidade resistance.

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Sibahle Ndwayana (University of California, Berkeley) Sibahle is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research explores the role of sound—in its production as music and as African Diasporic Black expressive discourse—and how it (re)shapes how we understand the geographies of the Black Atlantic. He examines how Cabo Verde’s drought-ridden interiors and globally connected shores (re)produce geographic imaginaries through the interconnections of music, poetry, sound, and place-making. He explores ways to map out affective landscapes emphasizing mourning, longing, and pain alongside pleasure. Outside academia, Sibahle enjoys cycling, painting, catching up on reality TV shows he missed many years ago, attending to my plants, and learning to crochet.

Dianne M. Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University. View full bio.

Abstract: The oceans, and indeed water in its various forms have and continue to shape Vodou epistemologies,and Ginen, Vodou’s most sacred and mythical space is at the centre of these debates. In Vodou cosmology, Ginen is the home of the Lwa, the divinities which guide and protect humankind, Ginen is also the home of the ancestors. However, Ginen also serves as the space where Vodou knowledge which is known as Konesans is accumulated for the benefit of humankind. According to Vodou tradition, Ginen is an Island oasis located anba dlo, meaning under water. In this context, anba dlo refers to cosmic waters, a recurring motif in the Vodou tradition, which further stresses the symbolic and literal importance of water in Vodou, as access to Ginen is granted by submersing under the sea or other large bodies of water. Whilst there is a growing body of literature on Vodou which have highlighted water’s importance in Vodou rituals such as libation, Ginen as a cosmological space located anba dlo and responsible for knowledge creation is understudied. Addressing this gap in the literature, this paper posits that Ginen is not only a cosmic abode, but a process through which Konesans can better be understood inside and outside of Vodou milieus. Drawing from the scholarship on Afro-Caribbean religious traditions, oceanic epistemology, and Afro-futuristic studies, I seek to highlight nature’s importance in the creation of Vodou knowledge, and how that knowledge is rendered accessible. Similarly, I seek to explore Ginen’s role as a cosmological realm of unlimited and potent imaginative powers, powers which are key to the reimagination of Vodou’s sacred futures as they develop.

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Steveen Ulysse (University of Glasgow) Steveen Ulysse is a Postgraduate Researcher in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, his research mainly focuses on the exploration of Vodou as form of modern cosmopolitanism, and its links with other Afro-based religious traditions, highlighting how these traditions shape certain identities, particularly in the diaspora. Steveen is also interested in exploring the Turks and Caicos Islands’ Gullah Geechee heritage, as well as ideas around ‘home’, and identity making. Steveen is a Postcolonialist interested in exploring ideas from the Global South, and their importance in shaping distinct modernities.

Abstract: Sacred forests are ecologically unique landscapes that play a significant role in the cultures of many traditional African societies, Nigeria included. Sacred forest refers to the designated specific areas seen as imbued with powers beyond those of humans: home to mighty spirits, sites linked to specific events, sites surrounding temples, burial grounds, or cemeteries housing the spirits of ancestors that ethnic minorities or indigenous peoples have preserved and protected to honor their gods, spirits, or ancestors. Considering this, the paper discusses the confluences of sacred forests in African traditions and the mediating role of practices (reverence for deities, sacredness, taboos, governance) related to the spiritual dimensions of sacred forests in the human-ecological environment interaction sustainability. It examines the relevance of “Sacred Forests” in Nigeria and the spiritual ecology of sacred landscape mythology. Based on ethnographic research design, data was generated by oral sources, textual analysis of Nollywood movies, interviews, and an inventory of sacred forests in South-South Nigeria. Findings about ancestors, myths, beliefs, sanctions, and taboos (forbidden) were vital strategies used to preserve the ecosystem (forest, species, animals) in South-South Nigeria. Findings suggest that traditional authorities used taboos to regulate the ethical and sustainable use of the environment and its resources. Notably, activities that most African communities considered taboo are clearing of sacred forests/bush, felling of forbidden trees(based on the belief that blood would ooze out of the tree), hunting of animals, eating totem animals (turtles, parrots, and eagles, fish or sacred animals); excavating graves for burial without traditional authorities’ permission; washing clothes in streams and collecting water with silverware; and fishing during forbidden seasons and sacred days. The paper argues that sacred forests have historically been connected to sacrifices, initiation rites, and deity worship. Sacred forests are deeply spiritualized, indicating human-environment relationships where visitors seek supernatural solutions to their predicaments. South-South eco-spirituality is a manifestation of the consciousness and experience of the sacredness in the ecology,’ and the community’s practical struggles for restoring the earth’s ecology and for humanity’s sustainable living from its resources. Fear of the gods, cultural significance, and places of worship kept sacred forests intact.

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Samuel Umoh (University of Hradec Kralove Czech Republic) Samuel Umoh is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Hradec Kralove. He holds a Ph.D. in international relations and a master’s in history and strategic studies. Before his appointment at UHK, he taught colonial History, History Education, and cultural heritage at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has a strong interest in the culture and heritage of the indigenous people. He is a recipient of the Coimbra Scholarship Program for Young African Researchers and a funded research visit to the University of Duisburg. Samuel is also a member of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, the United States Institute of Peace, the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM), and the Institute of Security Studies (ISS).

Abstract: As collaborative research partners, Rising Star Church, Freedom Church, and Truett Theological Seminary are developing a community garden as a context to engage persons in biblical discipleship. We center the garden and a garden-based, biblical discipleship model to seize an opportunity to explore new ways to experience discipleship in churches led by Black pastors. Our garden creates a space for an immersive study of scripture and fellowship with each other and the land. How we engage with the land informs our communities about practical biblical stewardship, particularly God’s command for creation care and care for our brothers and sisters across different faith communities, generations, and socio-economic statuses. How we care for adamah (the land, ground or soil) becomes a lens to view spiritual development. How the ground develops incites our imagination for spiritual development. The stages of soil development mirror seasons of spiritual maturity. Like the soil, spiritual development has stages such as additions, losses, transformations, and translocation.

Our work highlights what Jennings calls movement away from the land, [away from discipleship], and towards self-sufficiency and mastery. We seek a countermovement towards a new model of discipleship. Forced to migrate away from the land, African Americans have often conflated the oppression of slavery with the oppression of the soil. These migration patterns expose the historical tensions amidst social and environmental justice, and other forms of discipleship. Our work connects communities and a generation who value the soil with a middle aged and middle-class generation that has migrated away from it, while also implementing values in a younger generation who has yet to encounter the land in a meaningful way. In this presentation, we underscore the purpose, principles, process, and practices illuminated in this new discipleship model to help individuals return to sacred spiritual and community practices that honor the Creator.

Bios

Robert White (Freedom Church) is a pastor, public speaker, motivational coach and leadership strategist. Robert is passionate about individuals’ understanding and living out their God given purpose.  His passion for individual’s to understand the gospel is evident in his passionate delivery of scripture and his strategic approach to evangelism and community engagement.  Robert serves as the Lead Pastor of Freedom Church in Bedford, TX, a growing, diverse, and multi-generational church.  Prior to planting Freedom, Robert served as the Youth and Young Adult pastor at Cornerstone Baptist Church.  Robert has served as Associate Director of Evangelism for the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Robert studied Business Administration with a Finance concentration at California State University Dominguez Hills in Carson, CA.  Robert is currently pursuing a Master of Divinity from Baylor University’s George W. Truett Seminary. Robert is married to Marisha White and is the proud father of two daughters, Makenzie and Makayla.                    

Ralph S. Emerson (Rising Star Baptist Church) is a pastor, speaker, and author. Ralph’s ability to be biblical, practical, as well as culturally and generationally relevant has opened doors for him to speak across different platforms nationally. He graduated from Florida A & M University with a BS in Business Administration and is currently pursuing theological studies at George W. Truett Theological Seminary. He announced his call to preach on July 15, 2001, and began preaching under the leadership of his father, Pastor Ralph W. Emerson Jr. of The Rising Star Baptist Church in Fort Worth, TX. There he served as youth and young adult pastor, Executive Pastor of Next Generation Ministries, and church Executive Pastor. In October 2023, he was installed as the Senior Pastor at Rising Star Baptist Church. He is happily married to his boyhood crush and best friend, Chanesia. They have two children, Orien Christopher and Eden Gabrielle. 

Abstract: Abdias do Nascimento, a Brazilian scholar and activist whose body of work embraces the eco-spiritual significance of Afro- Brazilian religious practices, believed that “African spirituality offers an approach to life and nature that speaks directly and clearly to the world of feelings inside all of us”. Nascimento`s art was mainly expressed through a political- cultural lens towards a deeper appreciation of the various African influences in Brazilian art. He also focused on Orixás as expressions of the otherworldly connections between beings and the biosphere. Through analyses of selected paintings, this paper illustrates connections between deities as forces of nature and Matriz Africana practitioners against the backdrop of dire ecological concerns.

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Zainabu Jallo (University of Basel) Zainabu Jallo is a Post-Doctoral Researcher and lecturer in Anthropology at the Universities of Basel and Bern, Switzerland.