Transcript: QUEEN QUET on the Survival of Sea Island Wisdom [ENCORE] /248
Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Queen Quet, originally aired in November of 2018. In this episode, Queen Quet and I discuss how the Gullah/Geechee are navigating some of the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode.
Queen Quet So we have to continue to keep things in their faces. We have to continue to make them hear it and see it until they realize when I'm talking, it’s you talking. When I’m seeing, it’s you seeing because we're connected to each other the same way the bodies of water are connected to each other all around the world.
Ayana Young Queen Quet, Marquetta L. Good-wine is a published author, computer scientist, lecturer, mathematician, historian, columnist, preservationist, environmental justice advocate, film consultant, and “The Art-ivist.” Queen Quet was selected, elected, and enstooled by her people to be the first Queen Mother, “head pun de bodee,” and official spokesperson for the Gullah/Geechee Nation. As a result, she is respectfully referred to as “Queen Quet, Chieftess and Head-of-State for the Gullah/Geechee Nation.” She is the founder of the premiere advocacy organization for the continuation of Gullah/Geechee culture, the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. Queen Quet has won countless awards for being a woman of distinction, for her scholarship, writings, artistic presentation, activism, cultural continuation and environmental preservation. She was the first Gullah/Geechee person to speak on behalf of her people before the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland and at the United Nations COP 22 Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh, Morocco.
The Gullah Geechee are descendants of enslaved Central and West Africans, who remained isolated along the inland coastal area and Sea Islands between present day Jacksonville, North Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida. The remote location of Sea Islands produced kinships that extended beyond immediate bloodlines, enabled the continuation of African cultural traditions and Indigenous practices, and cultivated a strong land-based heritage amongst Gullah Geechee. Following the Civil War, former slaves obtained abandon and federally confiscated lands, and often lands that they or their ancestors were previously enslaved upon, legally through purchase and community sanctions. In doing so, not only were the Gullah Geechee, the first group of African descendants to own land en mass and the United States, but they also escaped the legacy of landlessness and sharecropping, that remains pervasive in other areas of the South. By obtaining land and being able to pass it down to their descendants, the Gullah Geechee were able to continue their centuries-long relationship with the land. In 2000, they were internationally recognized as a Nation.
Today, the Gullah Geechee nation is facing some of the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene at once: climate change, resource extraction, corrupt and negligent government bodies, land theft, encroaching development, and exploitative tourism. Amidst this all, the Gullah Geechee Nation has firmly held on to their cultural heritage and traditions while remaining committed to continuing and strengthening their coastal and community resilience.
Queen Quet, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. I'm just really beyond excited and honored to be speaking with someone who has such a strong connection to their ancestral landscape and the seascape, and a profound knowledge of climate and coastal resiliency. The history, culture, and many of the threats faced by the Gullah Geechee Nation contain so many intersections that we must explore and address if we want to build just and resilient futures during these times of transition. So thank you again, Queen Quet and welcome to the show.
Queen Quet Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Ayana Young So, before delving into delving into Gullah Geechee coastal resilience in the face of natural disasters, I’d like to give our listeners more context about some of the threats faced by your Nation in regards to land theft, development, tourism, and gentrification. As previously mentioned, the Gullah Geechee Nation has a history of Black land ownership, but I also understand that these titles of land remain ambiguous and can be a liability given that there are multiple heirs. These predatory developers have seized upon this opportunity to acquire land for resort destinations like Hilton Head and members of the Gullah Geechee Nation have struggled to hold on to their land as undeveloped waterfront property is considered some of the priciest real estate in the country. The notorious Hilton Head Island was the first to be developed, requiring the removal of 300 Gullah Geechee families. Now one can find ancestral graveyards in the grounds of gated communities that tourists and retirees refer to as plantations. Can you share with our listeners what simultaneous land loss and development has meant for the Gullah Geechee Nation?
Queen Quet Yes, it has been quite a long journey because as you mentioned, Hilton Head Island which the world knows as a golf resort and people see on television all over the world, they have no idea that beneath all of that false grass that's placed there to remain green all year long, are literally, the blood, sweat, and tears of people of African and Indigenous American descent, called the Gullah Geechee. And so when the island was actually first somewhat discovered in this Columbus-esque style, to become an area first to be where Charles Frazier and his friends could come to and actually go and hunt, and then when they cleared out the woods they said “Well, what else are we going to do here?” And then their friends started thinking they'd compete, and the more that they came, they decided, “Well, we came by boat, now we need bridges, and we’ll bring our friends over.” So now as their friends come in, you have all these people of African descent living here, so what are we going to do with them? Well, then they either wanted you to work for them, or sell them your property. And so people started losing not only the areas that we live in, but the places that we had as sacred grounds for prayer, healing, and spiritual practices. They started losing areas where our natural herbs that we use to heal the body grow. We then started losing the actual environment itself, where any of the sweetgrass or any of the things we'd known to be natural in Indigenous vegetation were, because in came clear-cutting.
So with this clear-cutting, we are literally in a hurricane zone. So this allowed more winds to rapidly get into what did remain on the island. It then started to erode the Earth itself, because what we are on Sea Islands is a maritime forest. So the maritime forest is abutted then by spartina grass, which is then abutted by oyster banks, people started finding that the oyster banks, which we just opened up the shellfish season here again this year, a lot of the oyster banks had to get closed around these gated areas, because now the pollution, the runoff, and everything was going into the waterways. So when we look at it, about land loss, land loss isn't just coming because of sea level rises, winds, and other things. But it actually came with the storm of people coming in overbuilding, building right into the marsh line, building right into the seashore, and telling us, who are the Natives, that we were just emotional individuals when we said that that's inappropriate, it's not sustainable, it's not going to be something beneficial to the environment, because you're going to disrupt the ecology. And when you clear cut, then you have no buffer when the storms come, and all of the things that come blowing in literally and figuratively, with the storm are going to have a direct hit on you. And so now we're dealing with what was an onslaught of people coming by boat to the very Earth itself, now throwing itself on land with you having sea level rise and storm surges that are putting water up on land.
We're just now dealing with flooding that's leaving the area that's been going on for over a week on the heels of a hurricane. And so we've seen this disruption to our lifestyle and land loss happening, not just because people were displaced, people were murdered and killed for their land, in the case of Hilton Head and Charleston in various areas, but also by the erosion of the land because of what got built on it, that's now contributing to other factors in the environment that ultimately all contribute to the climate change dynamics that we're seeing us lose land, lose trees, lose farm areas, and things even more rapidly than we ever would have thought of 50 years ago. And so it is a really pressing matter. It's a pressing issue, as you mentioned, our burial areas are usually on the waterway and so we've even seen sacred ground such as that getting taken underwater, areas that did not hold water before are holding them now. And so we're seeing a number of things, including the predatory laws that county governments put in place where someone was now living on say Hilton Head, and their land tax had only been $50 a year because someone built a resort next to them, their land tax would go up 100%, 200%, 300%, 500%, in some cases in one year, and that wouldn't sound like a lot of money to some people. But if you were only accustomed to living from the waterway, and from the land, and you were looking to pay $50, where do you get 500 times that much? And so people got displaced because of taxation, as well, and so the loss of ownership has come in so many different ways to heirs property with piercing the veil, as you mentioned, where predatory destruction as we call them, I don't call them developers, I call this all destruction that they do come in and figure out, “Well, maybe there's an heir that's the 25th cousin, and if I can buy that interest out, that person's all the way in Arizona, that person's in New York City, that person in Texas somewhere and they're not going to move back. If I offer them $1,000 for their property, I can get in I can sue the rest of the family that lives on that land, since they won't sell it to me. I'll sue them off of it.” And so then they go to court. There's no decision that can be made other than the judge saying, “Well, let's have a forced partition sale and sell the land.” So the Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition has been fighting now for 20 years against these issues and so that we can keep our people who still have their land here on the land, but then teaching people how to sustain that land has become even more trying over these years.
Ayana Young Thank you for going deeper into all of these pieces. It's just so disgusting, what were you calling them the disruptors?
Queen Quet Destructionaires.
Ayana Young Ugh yes, that’s so good. And it's just it's so disgusting, the tactics that they are using to steal this land and the sheer gosh, just disrespect the people and to the land and the lack of forethought with climate change. I mean, I was just reading that the Recorded sea levels at a tidal station in Charleston, South Carolina show over a foot of sea-level rise in the last century, and sea levels have been gradually and continuously rising along the North Carolina coast for the past 30 years. As ice sheets and glaciers melt in the Arctic, how is the Gullah Geechee Nation fairing? How will the melting of ice impact your nation in terms of tidal flooding and storm surges?
Queen Quet We'll see that's been the biggest issue in terms of what you say the lack of forethought, because when people talk about glaciers, and we live here in the Southeast, we live in the Atlantic Ocean, no one has ever seen a glacier, unless they've seen it on YouTube, on a video, on a photograph, or postcard. So that doesn't seem to them to have anything to do with them. And I feel like a lot of the people moved here, we said we’ve been here - the rest of these people come here, and so in our language, there are terms for this, we are the “been heres” and these new people are “come heres” and when they come here, they have no knowledge of the ecology and balance in the Sea Islands anyway. So that's why they feel they can build on shifting sand that has tides, high tide, low tide, spring tides, and now king tides, and they think it's going to be sustainable. I'm an engineer. I'm a scientist. So trying to tell them that you will cause sinkholes, you will cause other things that are not going to be sustainable. These politicians don't get it. And so when you start to talk to them about the glaciers, and you talk about the Arctic, they're looking like that's not part of my constituency, that's not in my voting districts, so who cares? It’s the tourists coming that I need to satisfy, and it's about making more money.
So this mentality of destructionment goes well beyond concerns for the whole globe, it is so limited in terms of its perspective and the people that are lawmakers have literally had to see their own homes and their own businesses and their own golf courses get flooded, when there was no hurricane for them to stop saying that we were emotional Natives, to now at least pause on that and to also hesitate to say that there's no such thing as climate change, or that it's a fraud. Many of them are simply ignoring the issue because I hate to have to say this, it sounds ages, but it's realistic, many of these people live in gated retirement areas. So for them, this is their last hurrah, these are their last days, and they’re not really concerned about us or the next generation that’s coming. They want to live out their days however they want to do it, even if that's just trying to attempt to count more money as if they need more money, or we can eat money. Well, guess what, even if you have a treasure trove of money, we have seen enough flooding here and tides rise so rapidly, that it can float away - your treasure trove. And so that's the thing that we have to get them to look at is how does this connect to you, don't think of it as something so far away, and that's up north, and that's on the west coast, those glaciers on over here, you got to look at the world, it's all connected, the water bodies are connected. So we have to get people to understand that our bodies as human beings are connected, we also are made of water. So we don't try to look at this and examine what the scientists are telling us about the levels of water and how it's getting higher and higher and how we need to keep the waters pristine, so the oceans don't acidify, we need to take it personally and think about how much seafood you want to eat if you did come to a beautiful pristine area, on the water on an island, would you want acid in your food, because that acid would be in your person, when we start making it more personal, we cause them to pause and we cause them to hesitate to say that we're just emotional, or that we don't know what we're talking about, or that somebody is trying to pull a hoax. And so we have to bring it down to their level as much as we'd like to bring down the waters right now. And so we really have to meet these folks where they are. But remember, many of them aren't going to listen because they feel like well, these are my final days. And this is just what I want to do.
Ayana Young Oh my goodness, I'm just imagining the people behind the gates just counting their money as the ship goes down and just feeling exactly like you were saying that these are the end of their days and they want to live them out, like how they want to live them and they don't care about what happens to other people in the area or the future generations and they have no forethought. And I was also just really shocked by the government's lack of intelligence when it comes to climate change. For example, research has proven that the torrential rainfalls that accompanied Hurricane Florence were projected to be 50% worse than they would have been without global warming. The rainfall not only led to flooding but also polluted water and soil. You know, it's clear that climate change and global warming are strengthening the force of natural disasters. Yet government agencies have in many ways, declared that they do not care about those who are impacted by said disasters. In 2010, a North Carolina state commission report said that sea levels could rise as much as 39 inches by 2100. Yet in 2012, North Carolina passed HB 819, which sought to ban local and state agencies from using scientific predictions of accelerated sea-level rise. You know, the bill itself was criticized by a majority of people across the country, but the state's business interests prevailed over public safety and well-being. So I'm just wondering, do you believe it's possible that any branch of the government will be able to successfully address the aftermath of natural disasters? Or is there just blatant disregard a clear sign that communities must begin to localize and think about how they're going to respond to their own regional natural disasters?
Queen Quet Well, the interesting thing is that I agree with what you're saying, what you just posed, is that communities now have to realize why many of us have been out here on the front lines, and now join us on the front of the shore, and actually creating our own plans and implementing those plans to actually enact the things that are even in very Paris Climate Agreement, because the elected officials cannot see. And so but the thing that has happened, I'm a person who's a firm believer in Divine Order, and I do believe that there is a Creator of us all. And I feel like when you don't listen, and there are so many signs at some point, then the sign is going to be actually driven down hard in your own front yard, and that is what just happened with Hurricane Florence. The same state North Carolina, that you just talked about the laws that nobody in the country, much less other parts of the world could believe that they would enact some years ago. Now, they are dealing with the worst flooding, the worst environmental injustices, and pollution they have ever seen in that state, not just on the coasts, not just on the Barrier Islands, but also inland North Carolina. And they did not even admit to the national news that there were many communities of people displaced ever since Hurricane Matthew, and so many of those people hadn't even returned, or were living in dilapidated homes as a result of the previous storm. The biggest problem I've seen in all of this has been just as you said, they have no concern about the people, but they're always calculating the cost of the real estate that they're losing. Before the storm had ended, before the flooding even came, they were already, declaring states of emergency and then estimating how many billion with a “B” dollars they were losing, and that was based on real estate, when people's lives and cultural heritage are more valuable than any real estate. So how do you put a price on that? How do you calculate that? I'm a mathematician by degree and I bring that up in every meeting that I go to about these things, especially with legislative members, most of the environmental groups that call conferences together, bring people in to meet, they invite these people that are elected offices in the Carolinas, in Georgia, in Florida, and they don't show up. So that tells you that you can not go to your state dome or to Capitol Hill and look for help. We are the ones that we've been waiting on. Just like after a storm, in the storm it’s your neighbors, it’s your family and your friends that are right around you that you have to rely on to help get you out of a home or get you back in your home, get you down this road, off this road, over the river, through the creeks or whatever you have to do to share food, get lights on, and to survive and thrive. That's what Gullah Geechee have always done here in the Gullah Geechee Nation.
So for us, it's not something new. That's why everybody calls us resilient people. How do you adapt? How are you being resilient in the face of this? I mean, the politicians aren't paying attention to you? Well, we never expected them to, because they have also been the ones that always set the laws in place that would displace us, disrupt us, and did not ever value our lives because we were people of African descent. So why would they do it now? Again, what they value is what they can exploit, and if they can exploit the land to make it another place, that somewhere where people recreate, that's of more concern to them than the people who live there all the time. And who had a traditionalist, they have to live from this land in this water. And right now, we can't live from the water if the water is polluted by coal ash that they found has spilled into it, and so on. So that tells you where the mindset is, the mindset is about being about dollars, and not about the people themselves. And so we have to get together on the grassroots level and work with other people that are willing and able to actually see what is going on, and that actually have concerns for this generation and the next and that is not a politician necessarily make. Politicians will promise you one thing on one side of town and promise another group on the opposite end of the spectrum, something on the other side, the next out of town. So we have to come together on the shoreline as people who really recognize the reality of the world we are in right now and we have to get these kinds of people that are in office currently out of there and get people in that have the same mindset and have the eyes to see that the waters have risen. The winds have spoken. It has been ordered for them to actually read that handwriting that used to be in the wall that's now mounted in the front yard with water surrounding it. How can you say that the predictions were wrong in this case, when your street you can't drive down you need a boat to roll down it right now.
Ayana Young I have so many thoughts and questions swirling around my mind as you're so passionately explaining these issues, but one thing I was thinking about is just the resiliency of the Gullah Geechee Nation. While life as we know it is expected to intensify under climate chaos, the Gullah Geechee Nation is a community that has long been familiar with storms of the East. I mean, almost 150 hurricanes have hit the area between 1851 and 2013. So I want to ask you to share what the storms have brought with them, both in the magnitude of their power, but also in terms of the resiliency and knowledge that they've provided. And I have a second part to that question, but I think I'll save it so I don't get too excited.
Queen Quet Wow, 150 storms, I never even realized that was that many. And then you said that was only up to 2013. So that doesn't even count, Matthew, and Irma, and Florence and all of their buddies and family members that have come to visit us over the past five years, and this season alone. And so when you mentioned this about what we've learned, one of the things that we've learned is how important intergenerational knowledge is because I know how to protect myself. I've stayed on St. Helena Island, which is my home island, and I'm a native of St. Helena Island in South Carolina. And so we have been the eye of the storm many, many times. And we feel very blessed that we weren't with Florence, because at one point they did say it was coming toward us. And then it shifted. And I've been in Hurricane David and Hurricane Floyd and you know, the list goes on and tropical storms as well. But I knew what to do because I had elders in my family, including my mother, who had been through other storms, and so they always told us stories of how the family gathered together, and how what they did and how high the water rose and sometimes having to run from one house they were in to get to another house that was on higher ground. And how fortunate they were that they did it because when they got back to the house they left the windows had been blown out right onto a couch that a little child had been playing on before they left the house, you know, and all these kinds of stories. And so we know how to prepare, how to store up things all year, you don't wait until a storm is coming to prepare for the storm. So there's a lot of emergency preparedness things that we do naturally to us, that's just part of our culture that we would do on a day-to-day basis so that when the storm is approaching, it’s really just, you know, you checking off everything again, and you just, you know, retrofitting certain things to the current situation and making sure things are right at hand that you don't look at every day like you know, I've learned to buy, you know, these floating kits now to put all of our paperwork in that waterproof and air sealed and all that just in the event that we have to get in the boat and float up out of here that we don't lose all our paper and then have somebody like FEMA tell us we won't give you any money because you can't prove who you are.
You know, we learned that from Katrina and our people down in Louisiana that you could run and just leave but if you run and just leave and now your paperwork is all soaked because you were trying to swim out with it, or you just left because you had to because the storm came upon you suddenly, now what? Now the government's not going to help because they're going to claim, you can't prove that with your property, you can't prove you lived here, you may not even be able to get back into your house if you don't have ID with you. So there's been so many things from practical application and occurrence that we've been able to use as tools that we can now use to teach the next generation and to model and other communities that never experienced it, that never lived through one storm, much less than several that we've been blessed to live through and be able to remain in our houses.
And so a lot of it really, though, has to do with just living in a traditional communal community, where we help each other every day, and we share what we have every day so it’s not like all of us are like “Well, get got all of our own boats.” No, we don’t because the nice people that are in our Gullah Geechee Fishing Association, for instance, will know how to navigate to come get you and to get you out, you know, and they'll check on you. And so now with social media, then we started to develop our own platform for conveying information and relaying it to people so that if they do evacuate, we have ways to get them back in or they know when they can come back in and all that. So there's a lot of things that I've learned that a too many for us to even get into on this call, but I’ve done a number of videos on Gullah Geechee TV platform,
it's just GullahGeechee.TV, that people can go to aor find it on YouTube, and even see some of the things, or if they follow our blog at GullahGeecheeNation.com I blog about this issue a lot because as much as God has spared my life and my family's lives, I want other people to survive and thrive too, so we want to share some of that knowledge with them.
Ayana Young Oh, my gosh, wow, I just didn't, it's just so amazing to hear how you even prepare by protecting your paperwork. I had never even considered that that'd be something you would need to prove land ownership or identity. I'm just thinking about all of the insidious ways that this government will try to disenfranchise people and not help the people, their citizens even, you know, not only are you preparing to protect your life, and the life of your family, and your community members, but you also think about how the government could try to steal your land. I mean, that is just insane. So thank you so much for shedding light on these issues that the general public just has no idea about.
Well, another thing I've been thinking about is for the Gullah Geechee, water has always been a spiritual entity of sorts. You know, one did not necessarily go to the water for recreation. In fact, there's a tradition of building away from the water. So I'm wondering, how have these traditions and traditional ecological knowledge influenced or even prepared your community for rising tides and the future of natural disasters? And then also, you know, you started to speak about this. But what is the importance of intergenerational engagement in building climate-resilient communities in this new world that we've soon to arrive in, if we haven't already?
Queen Quet Well, it’s very important to have the intergenerational knowledge because the older people, we have a saying that they say, “Well the old horse knows the road, the young one must find a way.” And so we see that in this sort of individualistic society that we're in, a lot of people seem to think that the day that they were born, that they had all knowledge that exists in the world. And if they don't have it in their head, they find it on the internet, and that is not true. And so people want to Google every other thing. But what you find that doesn't make it accurate, and it doesn't come from practical application. But if you sit down with an elder in your community, they can say to you, “Well, I've lived 100 years, I literally have family members who are over 100 years old.” And they can say “100 years ago, when I was little or when I was your age, okay, this did not happen this, you do not build this here because of this. This is what exists here, and the water will come in.” There's a whole bunch of things that they could share with you that, on site, you just look at it and it’s just a piece of land, I like that spot. It's pretty let me go over here and they'll go, “No, you don't”, and they'll explain to you exactly why that's going to shift, why that’s going to change or why that is a sacred place, and you shouldn't put something like that there and so with us being people of African descent, we've held on to a lot of our ancestral traditions that you respect the elders in your community in the first place. So having the elders talk, the children listen. And then if they allow you to talk, then you share knowledge you have. So our Elders, don't get on the internet. But I can teach them what I do, and how what they can teach me I can pass to another set of people elsewhere, that are younger, of my age group, my peer group, and how it can maybe benefit all of us.
That's one of the ways that some of the Gullah Geechees who work in emergency management elsewhere, found out and checked in with me during last year’s storms, were saying “Queen Quet, where are you?” I started getting emails and Facebook messages. “Where are you located?” And I'm like, I'm actually on the island in the eye of the storm, so they’re like “Oh, my God, please, if you can continue to get in touch with us, please do.” And so it takes all those levels. It takes the people younger, who say well, “Oh, we know this new modern technology.” But you can't eat that phone when you're out of light and you're out of food for days, do you know how to go out here and feed yourself? Do you know what herbs are out here that you can eat when the rain stops and the wind stops blowing and it’s safe for you to be outside? You know, do you know how to chop wood? Because you may have to build a fire, you can't turn the oven on now. So now what do you do in those circumstances?
So it's very important that intergenerational knowledge is there because there are we do build away from water, water is always seen as sacred to us. We go to it for spiritual nourishment, and for physical nourishment when we're going to fish, but we do not go, whether you're fishing for souls or fishing for food we go there, but we don't just go there to play around lay around, we don't surf, you know, you might have one or two Gullah Geechees around here that ever learned how to surf or anything like that because they were in the military, you know, but there are not things that we go out there just to play with the water, we respect the power of water and we respect that as a healing entity spiritually and physically, and so that the elders taught us that. We wouldn't know it, I wouldn't know it, people younger than me wouldn't know it if our elders hadn't told us that. And so now we can bring in more modern technology to help us to harness that power and get clean energy here, and things like that, that they don't know about because this kind of science wasn't taught when they were in school, you know, didn't exist in some cases, like computers like you and I talking over today, you know. So these are important things, us sharing knowledge in both directions, it being circular. Everything about the Gullah Geechee community is about connecting in a circle and if you ever see the Gullah Geechee national flag, you see that there's a golden circle around a tree and that tree is human bodies intertwined. And people often hear me state the slogan of the Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition that the ancestors spoke into my spirit. It was not a Gullah Geechee proverb, and people are going around the world saying that's what it is, it's a proverb of now, but it came from me, actually, “Hunnuh mus tek cyare de root fa heal de tree." So you have to get those tools sometimes to dig deeper, and the people who dug before - they have them already. So why are you trying to make them? All you have to do is sit down and listen and learn. And not only does the wind speak to you sometimes, but also the elders definitely will if they realize that you value what they're saying.
Ayana Young God. I completely resonate with being able to respect the Elders and the land enough that you can hear them speak, you know, if you actually slow down and listen. And this is just not spoken about enough as a mandatory practice, especially now, you know, we really need to reconnect with that. And my next thought is, you know, I'm wondering if you found yourself frequently having to push back on the narrative that the Sea Islands region is unprepared for climate change due to socioeconomic status? Do you believe this is reflective of a larger trend in which climate scientists and officials actively choose to ignore Indigenous data sources?
Queen Quet Yeah, I do think it is a trend that they tend to ignore Indigenous data sources and ten to ignore the Indigenous voice, because most Indigenous communities are oral communities. So we sit under the oaks and talk to one another right on the shoreline, and we share that way, and then talking is an active process because if I speak, you have to listen in order to really hear me. And so really, that's why a lot of young kids say “Do you feel me?” And that's what you want to do, you want to be able to feel what the environment is giving to you and its message as well. And that's what Indigenous people do, because we are locked in. As I say to people, we are inextricably tied to the land, the land is our family and waterways, our bloodline. So you don't want your blood poisoned, you don't want to kill off your family. So in order to respect that you have to be in a position of not just hearing, but listening, being part of an active process of choosing to listen and then once you have listened, taking that into account and taking it back and being accountable and that is not happening with most people in these legislative meetings, and these legislative meetings, they’re number crunching, and they're trying to figure out the next big way to make money and so the Traditional Knowledge goes out the door because we don't necessarily do PowerPoints, I call them death by PowerPoint after you see five or 10 of them in a row and nobody remembers anything that was on any slide. And so there it is that you have people doing PowerPoints, you have people doing reports, you have executive summaries, those reports, and oral communities don't do that. They may come in with something as simple as “Hunnuh mus tek cyare de root fa heal de tree." and then go sit down. And that would be it. Everything is in that proverb, just like an oak tree is inside of an acorn. But we got to sit and take time to watch it grow. We can't rush it to its end. And what we're doing is getting rushed to our end of the Earth by people who won't slow down, listen, and acknowledge that there is such a thing as Indigenous and traditional knowledge. And that it should be a part of your reports, but maybe your reports don't all have to be written, maybe they need to be oral reports or maybe they need to be something that others can hear so that they can listen to it and they can feel something and that might make them change. Because when you can connect to people's spirits and as souls, that's the real impact that we need and that's the real climate we have to change, the political environment that only speaks to the written as being valuable and only speaks to the Anglo version of the written that is valuable, and not that of People of Color.
Ayana Young I love that you've said that for the Gullah Geechee the land is your family and the waterways, your bloodline. And so if the waterways and oceans are threatened, so is the Gullah Geechee culture, and I'm wondering, what will vanish from the ethnosphere if you can no longer remain in your place of becoming and belonging? What do you have to say to those who claim culture is carried on our backs, independent from the soil beneath our feet or the water that washes upon us?
Queen Quet I would say to that person you’ve never lived here on the Sea Island, because yes, as much as culture, you only carry your culture on your back like it’s a backpack, once you unpack it somewhere you can lose items along the way. Whereas for me, it’s my very DNA, it is my body itself. So yes, wherever I go, I'm still Gullah Geechee, but what about the rest of how we continue to perpetuate it in the next generation? I can take a cast net with me to New York, but I'm not about to cast into the Hudson River and eat anything that comes out of there. And there may be laws to prevent me from doing so in the first place. So you cannot say that you can lift up a group of people, and their very culture that built America from the very spot where the foundation of it was poured, and place it somewhere else, and have it be the same place and have it be the same expression of that culture. So from the ethnosphere, something would be wiped, something that is valuable to world history, not just Black history or American history, but to world history, that of Africans that were kidnapped, doing the crime against humanity, but yet having the strength and the survival mechanisms to remain, and to then recreate their cultural values in a way they created a new nation on a coastline, you cannot pick them up from there, put them in an urban, environmental, suburban environment, and expect it to be the same expression of that, in fact, it would be the very genocide and elimination of that. And so I would want them to show me how somebody who has never watched the sea rise on its own, and go back down on its own and watch a sunset across the shore, feel that that's the same thing that I could do if I went on and moved out west and was amongst the mountains, and having to peek up into the sky above the mountain before me to even see the sun go up or come down and tell me how would that be the same, it wouldn't, I would have to adapt, I'd have to change, I'd have to be someone other than who I was, which means my children would be someone else, my grandchildren would be somewhere else, and their culture would be something else. And so we need to realize that there is a value in keeping these individual traditions and cultures of coastal people around the world intact and the way you do it is by fighting together to protect the land, and to do all that we can to reverse our behaviors on land, that are causing the negative impacts that we now find under the outcomes of climate change.
Ayana Young Just to think about how dominant society tries to understand the scope of natural disasters, through the lens, basically, of economic threats alone, you know nothing about the value of cultural heritage. And I'm really questioning how we can begin to understand the relationship between natural disasters, and climate change, and cultural loss, and how perhaps if we start to understand these three things together if that would, you know, shift the quality of support the communities like the Gullah Geechee would receive after a natural disaster? If we could, you know, actually, as a society, or a government or a country, really value cultural heritage, just as much as everything else. But just saying that out loud, really hearing that question out loud I'm like, we are so far from that. So far from that-
Queen Quet So far from that, exactly, yeah and you know, it's sad that we are, because when something so up close and personal as Weather Channel, now, that everybody's watching on apps and the TV and everything else, and people see it, and for two seconds and tweet, are you, okay? You know, they don't even pick up a phone anymore, and check and see if you okay. They send you a tweet, they write you on Facebook on your wall, and hope that you have lights on to see this stuff, you know, and then as soon as the news isn’t covering it, they’re not covering you anymore. They're not covering you in prayer. They're not covering you in concern anymore. And so it's very important that we get people to just feel that you are a part of other people first, and it sad that we even have to go there. But we do. Because until we realize that we're part of other people first, we're not going to realize people are attached to culture, it’s cultures that make them have the mores and behavioral patterns that they have, the things we like, and some we don't like, but it makes them who they are and then this is what makes the world a beautiful place, because we have such an array of these different cultures and means of cultural expression, including all the different languages of the world make a difference.
And one of the things that I must say to you that gives hope that there are more people than just you and I thinking that this is something important is that at the Global Climate Action Summit that just took place, this is the first major environmental meeting that I've been in, where cultural heritage actually had a cultural heritage mobilization group to form so that we can get out here and be voices in the midst of this storm of information and how to go about it, and what do we do, and how do we resource it, but actually had this voice, they're just starting to say this is an element that's missing when we're calculating the cost of what's happening with climate change, sea-level rise, and ocean acidification. We can't just talk about the environment, we are the environment, and the people who live right there in the midst of most of the hardship and who are going to suffer the most, and they call us the most “vulnerable communities” are the people you see that are Indigenous to the land who still have a cultural heritage and tact and are holding on to it with everything in their being, and we need to hear from them now. Because we cannot hear from them as a photograph or video on a museum wall in the years to come, as we say, look what we lost. Why lose it when it's here right now and you could do something by just listening to them and having them be part of putting these plans together, whether you call them adaptation plans, whether they're resilience trainings, whether we're putting together models or modules, but then fund it, because of things that people find important. They will put money into it, they will invest in it.
It's amazing to me that we had people as long as things were on the news, make donations or Gullah Geechee Storm Rebuilding Fund, and the minute the news stopped, the stats have dropped in terms of people making donations. It dropped in terms of people actually sharing the post, even though we were saying, “Whoa, wait, wait, wait, the storm moved north, but the water is still rising here.” It was on the news, so it didn't impact them anymore. So we have to continue to keep things in their faces. We have to continue to make them hear it and see it until they realize when I'm talking, it’s you talking. When I’m seeing, you’re seeing because we're connected to each other the same way the bodies of water are connected to each other all around the world. So this is a global issue. And I'm so glad that the Global Climate Action Summit brought together a new group of us that are focused on cultural heritage mobilization.
Ayana Young You're active in international advocacy and environmental circles, speaking on behalf of the Gullah Geechee Nation at the United Nations and Switzerland, as well as COP 22 in Morocco. So how has the international community supported you and the Gullah Geechee Nation?
Queen Quet It's been interesting because you know, in those big arenas, like the UN, you get a lot of perfunctory exercise reporting that goes on. So the support tends to be signing declarations, signing agreements, thanking you, pat you on the back for your interventions, and then you don't really hear anything again, but this time because a lot of what was going on was going on while a storm was being broadcast nationally and internationally, we finally got partners that went, “Oh my goodness, wait a minute, we know somebody who's been telling us this stuff was gonna happen, where are they? Queen Quet are you okay? How can we help?” So now we have people wanting to bring together resources, whether it's technological resources in their expertise, or financial resources to get things like apps and other things done for us and with us, that is happening. So it's been very slow. It's been just as slow as those sea levels rising that you mentioned earlier in our conversation. It happens so subtly, and it lifts things, and it starts to bring things with it so subtly, that that's why it's hard for people to believe it's even happening. But it definitely is happening, we now have a rising tide of people that recognize that we need to resource cultural heritage in this movement that we're in. And so it's a blessing to have folks like even For The Wild reaching out to us saying, “Well, how can we use our platform to help you to get the word out there that you even are there?” Because you'd be surprised how many people don't even know that the Gullah Geechee Nation exists at all, much less to say, help us. You can't help what you don't know is there, and so now more people with expertise, financial resources, technological resources that we’re starting to engage with, and we pray that we have enough time to put some new things in place that are going to help our communities.
Ayana Young Oh, my goodness, thank you so much Queen Quet. You know, I want to say this has been inspiring, but it's so much more than that, you know I want a better word for that. Yeah, I've just been so moved and really just stoked my fire and I just really believe that we need to break out of our silos and work together right now collectively, you know, face the insanity together and support each other and uplift one another and I just really want to encourage our audience to support your work. And thank you so much Queen Quet and I really hope to stay in touch and stay in connection into the future.
Queen Quet Thank you so much and I mean, I really appreciate you reaching out and I enjoyed this conversation. Like you said, we could talk all day. You know, I just feel like I have a new friend here and we can just on this swing with sweet tea and we could just got for it. You know I pray this won’t be our last time communicating with each other.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. The music you heard today was by the Gullah Singers, they were live recordings from Gullah Geechee TV Nation News with Queen Quet and the Gullah Geechee Nation International Music Movement Festival. I'd like to thank our wonderful staff, our editor and producer Andrew Storrs, our Research Collaborator and Writer Francesca Glaspell, our media director, Molly Leebove, and our music coordinator, Carter Lou McElroy. This episode kicks off our theme month of natural disasters. So stay tuned for the next three episodes that are following this theme. Also, sign up for our newsletter if you haven't already and rate us on iTunes. Alright, thanks so much.