Tag Archives: Coronavirus
World Indigenous Peoples Day 2020 and de Gullah/Geechee
The 2020 theme for the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is COVID-19 and indigenous peoples’ resilience. The aim is to highlight how the preservation and promotion of indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge and practices can be leveraged more fully during this pandemic. The leaders of the Gullah/Geechee Nation have been focusing on the continuation of their culture and are promoting the traditional knowledge and practices..
Queen Quet of the Gullah/Geechee Fighting to Keep Alive a Cultural and an Ecological Family
While the Gullah/Geechee Diaspora is broad, the Gullah/Geechee Nation is the political, cultural and spiritual home of the Gullah/Geechees today–and it faces an uncertain future due to overdevelopment, sea level rise, and worsening storms.
Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine is Chieftess and Head of State for the Gullah/Geechee Nation and the Founder of the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. She has been working to keep Gullah/Geechee culture, language, and traditions alive while also fighting for human rights and self-determination for her people.
Gullah/Geechee Riddim Radio Resonating the Signs and the Sounds of the Times
Over the many years that this broadcast has aired, it has presented the history and current events in the Gullah/Geechee Nation and also celebrated the continuation of Gullah/Geechee cultural traditions. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and through the days of the on-going protests over the lives of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, Queen Quet has continued to share the details of the stories that continue to unfold in these changes times.
Corona Chronicle 7-Pandemic, Protest, and PTSD in the Black Community
PTSD is being compounded due to the on-going replay of lynchings and murders of Black people in the midst of a pandemic while hearing politicians in Washington DC that are safe indoors tell the people that they need to keep the protest going so that something can change. My thought is how is all that we are witnessing via television and social media while being concerned about going outside due to the coronavirus changing our collective psyche?
Corona Chronicle 6-Trying to Find Peace Where Black Death Rest
Yes, my people in Minnesota are in the streets and the buildings are burning because of the death of Brother George Floyd. I couldn’t stand there too long watching the flames without hearing the song “Ohio” start playing in my head. I thought of the bloody sixties and how this is another summer that will go down in the history books as one where Black blood ran hot in the streets including the blood of Brother Ahmaud Arbery. I thought of how the people had no time to think about whether or not they would die from infection from COVID-19 because we had to consistently try to find ways to stem off Black death from the virus of racism that has infected and affected America since the colonies began to form.
Corona Chronicle 5-Black Folks Fighting to Stay Alive
The virus of attempting to hide our Blackness so that we would be protected has infected and affected the Black community for generations, but it hasn’t protected us as we see in this moment where racial profiling is still killing us. COVID-19 complications are killing us. Running, driving, and walking while Black is killing us. Self-hatred and lack of compassion for other Black people is killing us. So much so that the NAACP has launched the #WeAreDoneDying campaign. Unfortunately, unless Black people truly stand up and fight together in unity no matter our age, geographically location, or financial stand in global society to protect the lives of ALL Black people from these continued lynchings and the verbal and written lynchings that we do to one another in order to advance ourselves, that campaign will only be a hashtag in the digital world while more Black death comes in the real world.
#GullahGeechee Giving Tuesday
Due to the massive financial losses due to COVID-19, the Gullah/Geechee Nation’s leaders are calling on all of our supporters to assist with contributing to and sharing the on-going “Gullah/Geechee Land & Legacy Fund” link during #GivingTuesday on May 5, 2020.
Corona Chronicle 4-Let There Be Light
“Spiritual discernment reveals that we are now in the dawn of a new era..and that new methods are waiting to be brought forth. In the coming commerce man will not be a slave to money.”
Corona Chronicle 3-Gullah/Geechee Seeds of Survival
While at home on the family compounds, folks are learning more about their family histories and land legacies which I pray leads to them valuing the land, family, and community even more. They are learning what their elders went through to hold onto the land and the methods that they used to survive and make it through many other storms and hardships and how in the midst of all of them they could still sing, “Trouble don’t last always.”
Gullah/Geechee Safe and Healthy
Part of my blessing has been sitting on community committees with partners at MUSC-the Medical University of South Carolina. My first steps into that institution happened over two decades ago when I was asked to come and do a keynote address for mental health professionals. I was to assist them with cultural competency since they had to work in the Gullah/Geechee community. The Q & A that day was as life changing as my presentation for the APHA. The dialogue gave me insight into the vast differences that people of various cultures have regarding stability and how that balance is to be maintained. Some continually seek outside measures through pleasure, drugs-legal and illegal, thrill seeking or risk taking and others go seeking inside spiritually, but sometimes miss the mark and think that is also an external action. Thus, they walk into and out of churches, synagogues, mosques, and locations of spiritual rituals unchanged and off balanced. I was there to help the doctors to be more receptive to overstanding spirituality and the Gullah/Geechee community and how this helps with mental stability. It was about trust. Trust in GOD. Trust in spirit. Trust in who is delivering the message. Trust in their cultural legacy as it relates to who is bringing the message.