Author Archive: Gullah/Geechee Nation
Honoring the Peaceful Rest of Our Gullah/Geechee Ancestors: Queen Quet Leads the Gullah/Geechee Sacred Site Protection Project
Approximately 3,200 individuals have now been identified within 50 of the 52 known burial sites on St. Helena and Warsaw Islands. Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, is undertaking the enormous work of researching these individuals through the “Gullah/Geechee Sacred Site Protection Project,” a collaboration between the Beaufort County Planning Department and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition.
This is far more than a cemetery survey. It is an act of remembrance, cultural preservation, historical restoration and sacred responsibility.
Living Water, Living Legacy and Living Resistance: September in the Gullah/Geechee Nation
September begins with prayer, but prayer must move our feet, strengthen our voices and guide our hands into action. Throughout this month, the Gullah/Geechee Nation will be filled with opportunities to worship, celebrate, learn, remember, organize and defend the sacred Sea Island homeland.
Gullah/Geechees Flow into Living Water and Sacred Responsibility: World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation
This year’s World Day of Prayer observance carries particular significance for the Gullah/Geechee Nation. At Noon Eastern Time on September 1, 2026, Queen Quet, Chieftess and Head-of-State of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, will provide the keynote address for Creation Justice Ministries’ online World Day of Prayer and Season of Creation webinar. Queen Quet will share the spiritual and cultural relationship that Gullah/Geechee people have maintained with water from generation to generation.
From Combahee to Angola: A Gullah/Geechee Journey in the Footsteps of a Souljah
We gathered. We protested. We poured libation. We demanded that the ancestors be properly acknowledged, studied with dignity and returned to the earth. We fought against allowing another building to erase them beneath concrete and steel.
As I stood beside the African mother, father and child represented there, I felt protected. I felt a throng of ancestors standing with me as I touched the baby’s hand.
Black Philanthropy and Sowing into Gullah/Geechee Land and Legacy
Here in the Gullah/Geechee Nation from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, our ancestors transformed the Sea Islands and coastal lands into places of cultural continuity, spiritual grounding, economic independence and self-sufficiency. After centuries of enslavement, they purchased land, built praise houses and schools, established farms and fisheries, and created family compounds in which Gullah/Geechee traditions could thrive.
Today, the same land that sustained our ancestors is under tremendous pressure from escalating taxes, heirs’ property disputes and partition sales, destructionment, climate change impacts, cultural exploitation and displacement. When Gullah/Geechee land is lost, we lose more than acreage. We lose access to sacred burial grounds, fishing and farming traditions, family compounds, community gathering spaces, native foodways, linguistic landscapes and the living environment in which our culture has endured. This is why Black Philanthropy Month must move us beyond celebration and into action.
Gullah/Geechee Nation Appreciation Week 2026: Hunnuh Mus Tek Cyare de Root fa Heal de Tree
Throughout the Gullah/Geechee Nation stretching from Jacksonville, North Carolina down to Jacksonville, Florida and inland to the St. Johns River, lies a rich cultural legacy that has endured for centuries. Every year during late July and early August, communities across the region come together to celebrate Gullah/Geechee Nation Appreciation Week.
Saving de Gullah/Geechee Witness Tree at Sol Legare
The center of the Gullah/Geechee Nation’s flag is embossed with a Gullah/Geechee family tree that consist of human bodies that are intertwined and rooted in the soil of the Sea Islands. The oak tree is a powerful symbol within Gullah/Geechee culture—mirroring the sacred tree rooted at the very center of the Gullah/Geechee Nation’s national flag. Protecting it represents a refusal to allow the physical markers of our heritage to be erased. “Save James Island” folks have made it clear: “You can’t replant history.” The historic live oak tree at Sol Legare cannot simply be replanted either. It is truly a witness to what our ancestors of Sol Legare went through and now it is a witness to the encroaching destructionment no longer in the distance across the creek from Mosquito Beach but right under its own branches. However, like native Gullah/Geechees, webe de tree planted by de rivers of wata. We shall not be moved!
Purposeful Planning of the St. Helena Gullah/Geechee Multipurpose Center
Thirty years ago, I made a conscious decision to ensure that St. Helena Island would be the base of operations for the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition which is the oldest organization in world history that has “Gullah/Geechee” in its name. When I founded, the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, one of our missions was to ensure that authentic Gullah/Geechee culture would be supported not simply verbally but politically and financially. So, I am sure that the ancestors that were fighting to protect St. Helena from being destroyed by a four to five lane highway expansion and against what I consider “destructionment” were smiling when the Beaufort Open Land Trust purchased the parcel of land at the intersection of Sea Island Parkway and Polowana Road in order to secure it for the St. Helena Island community. That parcel could have been a supermarket, the library location or the post office location since all of these were proposed in the past. Now there is a feasibility study being done for this to be the location of the St. Helena Island Gullah/Geechee Multipurpose Center which many natives of St. Helena Island requested years ago.
Gullah/Geechee Famlee Weekend 2026 Brings the Global Gullah/Geechee Family Home to Historic St. Helena Island, SC
Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, invites the community to gather at Penn Center for a powerful weekend of cultural reconnection, creativity, rhythm, foodways, art, ancestral legacy, and Gullah/Geechee family unity The Gullah/Geechee Nation invites the world to the epicenter of Gullah/Geechee culture—historic St. Helena Island, South Carolina—for Gullah/Geechee Famlee Weekend 2026, a two-day …
Gullah/Geechee and SCELP Fighting Racial Discrimination Case to Protect Cultural Protection Overlay District
Queen Quet continued, “I have reviewed the complaint brought by the Plaintiffs in this case and recognize that they seek to destroy and invalidate the CPO so that their “destructionment” can move forward. The lawsuit is being made under the guise of claiming that the CPO is a race-based law. This is inaccurate and a misrepresentation. That accusation is legally unsound, historically inaccurate, and sociologically reductive. It collapses Gullah/Geechee culture into race and thereby erases the very heritage, land-use traditions, spiritual practices, language, kinship structures, ecological knowledge, and settlement patterns that the CPO was designed to protect. No one of any race or culture can violate the CPO law! We have the right to protect the environment and to continue to peacefully exist as native Gullah/Geechees and anyone that has come to St. Helena Island to live benefits from the healthy environment of our beloved island. We binya and ain gwine nowhey!”