Ep 10: Sankofa: Go Back to Build Forward

"Either I'm going to complain, I'm going to leave, or I'm going to do something about it." Episode 10 of Shack & Mu is in New Orleans, where culture is not decoration. It is the strategy. Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali and Dr. Sacoby Wilson open on Amiri Baraka's line that an artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people, then sit down with Rashida Ferdinand, founder of Sankofa Community Development Corporation in the Lower Ninth Ward. Food comes first, because in this city food is history you can eat. On Sankofa's land that history is growing: field peas and purple hull peas, okra, hibiscus for tea, thyme and basil, tomatoes, chickens laying fresh eggs, beehives making honey. The point is not just access to groceries. It is owning the ground your food comes from. The organization takes its name from the Ghanaian concept of going back to your past to build your future, adopted after Katrina when the resources promised to the Lower Ninth never arrived. Then the land itself. Four generations of her family have lived in that neighborhood, and her grandfather's house stood three blocks from the wetland park Sankofa restored. Go back a hundred years and this was marsh and swamp, so the restoration was less about building something new than pulling away what had been laid on top of what was already there. The people who know it best live on the block. Elders who grew up playing in that water were naturalists long before anyone handed them the word, and some are park rangers now, guiding tours from memory. Art runs through all of it. She is a sculptor and a potter, and the clay she works with comes out of the ground at the park. Everybody is an artist, and the creative act here was sculpting the land itself. The episode closes on how the model travels: education programs, school partnerships, and a way of working other neighborhoods can pick up. In this episode - (0:00) Amiri Baraka and the role of the artist - (0:19) Red beans, gumbo, and the history in the food - (0:57) Katrina, petrochemicals, and other hazards - (1:22) Meet Rashida Ferdinand of Sankofa - (2:59) Why the name Sankofa - (4:02) Field peas, okra, hibiscus, chickens, bees - (4:53) Nature's supermarket and owning your food - (5:11) Looking across the Lower Ninth after Katrina - (5:28) Complain, leave, or do something about it - (6:02) The vision has to come from the community - (6:15) Four generations, three blocks from the wetland - (6:45) What a wetland does for a neighborhood - (7:10) The elders who were naturalists first - (7:47) Getting kids back into nature based spaces - (8:42) The soil has memory: art and the work - (9:19) A sculptor whose clay comes from the park - (10:30) Scaling the model past the Lower Ninth - (11:13) Honoring what the land used to be - (12:11) Partners doing the work alongside them - (14:08) Power to the people **Key takeaways** - Sankofa means going back to your past to build your future. The name is not a slogan, it is the method. - Ownership beats access. Growing field peas, okra, hibiscus, herbs, eggs, and honey puts the food supply in community hands. - The wetland was always there. Restoring it meant removing what covered it, not inventing something new. - The experts live on the block. Elders who grew up in that marsh guide the tours now, teaching from memory. - Everybody is an artist. She digs the clay for her pottery out of the park she helped bring back. **About our guest**Rashida Ferdinand is the founder and executive director of Sankofa Community Development Corporation in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, and a ceramic artist. Sankofa runs food access programs, gardens, and the Sankofa Wetland Park and Nature Trail. More at sankofanola.org. Go back to get it. Learn what your land used to be, find the neighbors who remember, and start with what you can grow. **Follow Shack & Mu**Listen: Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | YouTubeSocial: Instagram | TikTok | Threads | Facebook