N. Fadeke Castor

Our willful failure to reckon with the nation’s history of violence to the land, to Indigenous peoples, and to African people and their descendants has led us to dismiss and disparage their important ways of being and knowledge systems. Black Spirits Matter: Locating Spaces of Spiritual Marronage (BSM) will explore how we can envision – and reach – a liberated future by centering Afro-Indigenous spirituality and ways of knowing. Sacred praxis and the dynamics of fugitivity and resistance central to the history and practices of Afro-Indigenous peoples helps us imagine an ‘otherwise’ future where we walk in the world with each other as kin, as relations, that are always already free. BSM asks: What informs our collective spaces of liberation? How do we recognize pathways to our “otherwise” futures? Importantly, once we envision this liberated future: how do we get there? In this project, I bring Black feminist methodologies grounded in Cultural Anthropology into conversation with Indigenous Studies and Religious Studies to answer these questions raised by the multiple crises of the current moment (from climate change to racial violence).