Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer promotes an ethic of “becoming indigenous,” a relationship in which one cares for the land as if one’s life depended on it. Though Kimmerer is Potawatomi, she includes traditions from many Indigenous tribes.
Though I am a stranger in this land, and though my ancestors did not contribute to the decimation of Indigenous populations, I benefit from this dispossession—as many of us do. This uncomfortable reality initially drew me to Braiding Sweetgrass. Throughout the work, I was struck—at times spooked—by the uncanny echoes between the insight Kimmerer provides and my own experience with Afro-indigenous epistemologies. Thus, I offer Native American and Afro-indigenous folkways as potential catalysts toward “becoming indigenous.” These traditions can drive the spiritual and linguistic regeneration needed to build more sustainable futures amid global climate catastrophes.
This ethos ungirds my poet laureate project, “The LAnd Remembers,” a series of intergenerational, ecopoetic, generative writing workshops co-led by Black and Indigenous writers and artists, aimed at interrogating more equitable relationships between the self and nature.
The first beat, the first Afro-indigenous echo I offer, is that of land as ancestor, land as kin. Among the Akan of Ghana, dirges function as ritualistic and poetic facets of traditional funerals. Going far beyond Western constraints of elegy and eulogy, these dirges are part poetry, part song, part choreography, part dramaturgy, and part worship. Ghanaian folklorist J. H. Kwabena Nketia was the first to record, transcribe, and critically analyze these dirges, publishing his findings in Funeral Dirges of the Akan People. One of the most common features of the dirge is naming the genealogy of the deceased—thus situating them in an ancestral, if not eternal, lineage. Nketia uncovered that, in addition to naming “human” ancestors, dirge singers often listed the body of freshwater that fed the deceased as a kind of ancestor, blurring the line between human and nonhuman, linking the liquid between blood and water. The quality and strength of one’s river is believed to reflect the quality and strength of one’s health.
My “Water Elegies” workshop, part of “The LAnd Remembers,” foregrounds this Afro-indigenous practice and invites participants to engage in a mix of persona, personification, and documentary poetics, requiring them to research the indigenous name(s) of the body of fresh water that feeds them. They are then invited to write “water ode” ghazals, in which the indigenous name of the water serves as the radif.
Next in our workshop series, after venerating the many ancestries of water, we also consider the voices of trees. In Sweetgrass, Kimmerer introduces the Anishinaabe belief of trees as “standing people,” noting, “Our traditional thinking had it right: maples are people, people are maples.” The sentient maples of the Anishinaabe are in conversation with the Yoruba orisha of wood and drumming, Ayan Agalu. Among Yoruba traditionalists, drums are mouthpieces through which the divine communicates to mortals. Additionally, it is widely believed that sacred drums will only repeat the sounds they have previously heard. Thus, the final step in the drum-making process, according to Amanda Villepastour, is to leave finished drums along high-traffic crossroads in the community —crossroads, markets, etc.—so they might learn the language of the people.
During the 2025 Earth Day poetry workshop we hosted as part of “The LAnd Remembers,” I presented this Yoruba belief system alongside the Tongva creation story of Quaoar, who is said to have created the world through song and dance. I hoped these transcultural mythologies would encourage participants to be more sensitive to the music and rhythm that animates our natural world. This workshop was held in El Segundo’s Imperial Strip & Memory Tree Row park, a park replete with trees planted in honor of deceased loved ones. The workshop was thus split into two parts: writing and planting. During the writing portion, I introduced the group of nearly one hundred participants to the poetic techniques of turns, metaphor, sensory language, and personification. In celebration of Earth Day, they were then tasked with writing poems that incorporated the five senses but from the perspective of a nonhuman entity found in the park. Each of the five senses had to interrogate memory in some way.
To facilitate the final portion of the workshop, I partnered with master gardener Barbara Boland, whose research and restoration efforts have helped revive the once-endangered El Segundo blue butterfly (Euphilotes battoides allyni). Boland shared that this butterfly relies on a single host plant, sea cliff buckwheat, which has been decimated by industrialization. So, with trowels and seeds in hand, we began the work of ecological re-indigenization. Participants took turns planting native buckwheat in the restoration garden, which is embanked on the park’s western slope. In this vein, ink went far beyond the page: Poetry met praxis.
Finally, if we are to believe Audre Lorde’s argument that “poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought,” and if we are to believe that poetry contains “fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas […] the conceptualization of any meaningful action,” then a return to indigenous epistemologies might just inspire our communities to radically imagine more sustainably. In the aftermath of a year of fire and flood, such radical imagination is needed across this nation, but especially here in Tovaangar. As the old African proverb states, “When you pray, move your feet.” In other words, though we must begin on the page, we cannot stay there.
Works Cited
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Lorde, Audre. 1993. Poetry Is Not a Luxury. Osnabrück, Germany: Druck- & Verlagscooperative.
Nketia, J. H. Kwabena. 1955. Funeral Dirges of the Akan People. London: Achimota.
Villepastour, Amanda, ed. 2015. The Yorù̀Bá God of Drumming : Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wood That Talks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.