By Sophia Brown
All opinions are my own. The opinions expressed here belong solely to me and do not reflect the views of my employer. Images sourced from Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and Library of Congress Open Access.
Why Remembering?
“They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was…” (“The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison)
Just as the river tries to “remember where it used to be,” we, as humans, are often subconsciously trying to remember where we have been, who we are, and why we are here at this moment in time.
In this moment of great change, each of us has an ancient technology at our disposal to help us stay centered as we move towards a just economy: remembering. What we choose to remember and how we remember are pivotal in our resilience.
Recently, and particularly over the last six months, there has been a deep erasure of history within multiple federal agencies, continued book banning, I.C.E raids, attempts to defund public broadcasters, the dismantling of federal systems, and executive orders that have shaken philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. The United States’ continued denial of our nation’s history, a history marked by genocide, sexual violence, stolen land, and systemic racism, has led us to this moment. As a people, we have lost touch with our collective memory—the shared memories of past events common between a specific group—and without it, we run the risk of hindering our collective consciousness. When individuals and systems deny, misconstrue, obfuscate, or rewrite historical facts, they inhibit our ability to collectively remember the truth. By practicing the necessary work of remembering, we can unearth clear truths and use them to center reconciliation, accountability, and reimagining as we innovate the economy we wish to see.
As Toni Morrison stated, imagination and innovation have long been linked to remembering. Today, many regenerative land stewardship practices we utilize, like crop rotation, cultural burns, and companion planting, are ancient practices of the Global Majority being re-incorporated. In these trying times, I am remembering Black folks and what has been transformed and innovated through struggle: CDFIs, CSAs and community land trusts all have roots in the resistance and resilience borne from the Civil Rights Movement. Reverend Herbert Brown of the Black Church Food Security Network recently wrote about the connection between food sovereignty, ancestral wisdom, and remembering, highlighting the “revolutionary” acts of Black people in the South who controlled their own food systems. He advises: “If you are trying to process this moment or wondering where to go from here, it is imperative you recall lessons of old.” Remembering these ancient ways helps us meet the current moment—and in particular, helps us strengthen our resistance and resilience to the polycrisis we are living through.
Therefore, it goes without saying that many of the ideas and concepts I outline in this piece are not new and have been taught by folks doing this work for years. I have deep gratitute for that work, and as we navigate the current political and cultural shift, I offer the following remembrance practices to help guide and ground you in your work shaping a more just economy.
Remembering the body:
Our bodies are intricate archives. We are connected to our ancestors before we are even conscious, and their knowledge and experiences live within the fabric of our DNA. Recent research states that people’s lives begin in their maternal grandmother’s womb. Therefore, the body is the perfect place to start as you reflect on your relationship to money.
Whether you grew up financially poor or financially rich, everybody carries money trauma. Resmaa Menakem writes in My Grandmother’s Hands, “History matters, and an awareness of it puts our lives into a context. A disdain for history sets us adrift, and makes us victims of ignorance and denial. History lives in and through our bodies right now, and in every moment.” To do the collective work of remembering, individuals need to first listen and tend to the stories we are carrying within us, and there are many ways to bear witness to the stories in our bodies. As financial activists, innovators, and change makers, the work of witnessing these stories is essential. What do you carry that needs to be tended to, listened to, or seen? How might bringing these stories into the light liberate you?
Systems carry stories too. Using philanthropy as an example, Edgar Villanueva describes the history of wealth in this country as “steeped in trauma” that permeates throughout philanthropic institutions. He shares: “The process of healing from that trauma is central to decolonization. Acknowledging our woundedness is key.” I invite us to think of foundations, for example, as living bodies—and to look for the wounds within these bodies that must be uncovered and cared for in order to build more equitable and just institutions.
Tools for financial activists interested in deepening their relationship to the body:
- Our ancestors drew upon drumming, singing, and chanting as tools for catharsis, and research has caught up to this ancient wisdom, noting these practices indeed soothe the vagus nerve and lower stress.
- EMDR therapy, meditation, dancing, and breathwork are additional tools to help tend to the trauma our bodies remember.
- Workshops, courses, and organizations such as the The Embodiment Institute, the Trauma of Money program, Somatics of Money, and the Strozzi Institute for Somatics offer practical knowledge and tools to help unlock deeper self-awareness and healing. Treating the inner work as sacred is the first step in creating the external conditions that honor the divine nature of all life.
Prompts for financial activists:
- What is something your body is calling you to remember?
- What is your money story? What is the money story of your family?
- Where does your money trauma sit in your body, and what does this feel like? How does it show up in your financial life? What tools can you call on to soothe it?
Prompts for institutions:
- If we think of your institution as a body, what is it asking you to remember? What needs tending to?
- What are some “somatic” institutional exercises that could improve clarity, alignment, or body/institutional awareness?
- What is the money story of your institution?
- Where does money trauma sit in your institution, and how does it show up? What tools, operations, or practices can tend to it?
Remembering land:
We are made up of the same molecules as the soil and stars, and therefore carry eons of memory rooted in the natural world within our bodies. Colonization shifted our relationship to land by transforming ecosystems into commodities to be consumed, profited off of, and extracted from. Over time, colonial practices stripped Indigenous and Black Americans of a sacred connection and resource through years of land theft and removal, violence, and racist policies. We have grown increasingly disconnected from the land we reside on and have become more comfortable acting as landlords than stewards, neighbors, or kin. But if we are the land, then it stands that harming the planet is harming us, and there is evidence to support that living in relationship to the land is mutually beneficial.
There is a growing movement of doctors who are prescribing time in nature to their patients and witnessing the improved health outcomes that result from this practice. The Jubilee Justice Black Farmers’ Rice Project works with Black farmers to grow regenerative specialty rice using fewer seeds and less water to produce 50% more yield than conventional rice production. Rice is a grain that has deep roots in West Africa and was first brought to and cultivated in the U.S. by enslaved Africans; growing rice in right relationship with the land simultaneously creates more product, more intentional land stewardship, and helps to heal the traumatic memories of extraction that the body and land remember.
Tools for financial activists interested in deepening their relationship to land:
- Have a still and quiet moment in nature and see what you notice. Drop into all five of your senses and observe how this makes you feel.
- Move financial capital to regenerative land projects led by people of the Global Majority, such as Acorn Center for Freedom, Acres of Ancestry, Amah Mutsun Land Trust, Black Farmer Fund, the California Tribal Fund, the Earthlodge Center for Transformation, Jubilee Justice, Rootwork Herbals, New Communities Inc., Potlikker Capital, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Soul Fire Farm, and Temple of Two Waters.
- Rematriate land. Resource Generation and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust have toolkits on ways to contribute to land return efforts and integrate rematriation into your everyday life.
- Offering acknowledgements, and supporting land taxes are additional practices that center accountability and help to build stronger relationships with your local indigenous communities. Justice Funders has a great resource for foundations interested in supporting land taxes for Native nations.
Prompts for financial activists:
- What is your personal history to land and the land of your people? What is the history of the land you live on? What are tangible ways to connect with both?
- What are the visions and struggles of Indigenous people/tribes in the area you live in or have access to land in? How can you show up in solidarity?
Prompts for institutions:
- What is your institution’s financial history as it relates to land?
- What and how might your institution invest in land projects?
- What is the history of the land(s) your institution was founded on?
- What is your institution’s historical relationship with the Indigenous and Black communities around it?
Remembering your people:
Knowing the stories of your ancestors can help you find new and different pathways for healing yourself and your lineage. The movie Moana (2016) illustrates this beautifully. In the beginning of the film, we get a sense of Moana’s intrinsic love for water. We also see her grandmother encouraging her to follow this feeling, nudging her to listen to the calls of her spirit. As Moana ventures out on a perilous journey, she finds a hidden cave with ancient ships from her tribe, and she exclaims with elation and relief: “We were voyagers!” Something subconscious within her remembered and guided her towards the water, towards the caves, towards these ancestral ships, and towards this discovery. By remembering the history of her people, she enables her grandmother to peacefully transition into the realm of her ancestors, where Moana is continually guided by her grandmother’s spirit. “The water chose you,” her grandmother says to her. Really, the water was always within her, waiting to be seen.
If I ruined Moana for you—I’m not sorry. It’s almost a decade old, and you should definitely go see it, as well as Moana II. But I wanted to uplift this example because it illustrates how deepening our relationships to our bodies deepens our relationship to our land and ancestors. It enables us to listen to the whispers of our spirit and tend to the seeds already latent within us, waiting to germinate, be watered, and be brought to life.
Time is not linear. What you do today can have a lasting impact on your past and future lineages and non-blood related family, as we see in Moana. This is critical as it relates to extractive capital and repair. By calling on our ancestors and remembering them, their lives, and stories, we have a beautiful opportunity to experience healing in tandem with them.
Tools for financial activists interested in deepening ancestral relationships:
- Talk to your people about your people. Learn their names and stories. I started my genealogy journey with my elders and then through genealogy systems.
- For white folks and others interested in wealth redistribution, this could mean starting reparative genealogy or participating in ancestral money workshops.
- Learn from others that have started the work of ancestral repair.
- Learn to give money directly to peoples impacted and/or harmed by your lineage.
Prompts for financial activists:
- What are some gifts you’ve received from your lineage or non-blood related relatives? How do you use these gifts in your daily life?
- What histories have you uncovered about your family lineages? How do these make you feel? How do these histories relate to your personal investments and spending?
- Does money earned through extraction show up in your lineages? Where might there be opportunities for financial reconciliation or repair?
Prompts for institutions:
- Who are your founders, and what are their stories and histories?
- What have you uncovered about your institution’s history?
- Where are these historical strengths highlighted in your portfolio? Where do historical harms show up in your portfolio?
- Where does money earned through extraction show up in your institution’s history?
- Where are there opportunities for historical repair? What might that look like in your work?
My experience of remembering:
For me, the act of remembering has taken me on a spirit-filled journey. Listening to my body has helped me remember and metabolize my own trauma and the traumas of my ancestors and access love on a deeper level than ever before. It has also helped me grasp my fears and limitations related to money as a child of the Great Recession. I have worked on being less afraid of losing money, trusting everyday it will flow back to me.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I fell into an ancestral portal of cooking meals for my late grandmother. I cooked her sponge-like cornbread recipe and stewed okra and tomatoes. The experience made me feel like we were eating together. This seed blossomed into an interest in genealogy research, and, eventually, I joined a farm training program where I learned how to make the herbal remedies and medicines of my ancestors.
Remembering my ancestors and their stories has helped me realize I am a cultural memory worker, storyteller, and archivist. This journey has sparked my curiosity around the lingering effects of my family’s relationship to land and money which have caused persistent tension and rifts within every generation of my family’s descendants over the last 80 years. But alongside these legacies of pain, I have also uncovered lasting legacies of love. My ancestors and elders have long-practiced the work of building a just economy; in their economy, love is the currency, and community care, abundance, and mutual aid are central. Because of them, I try to replicate these loving systems, and the active practice of remembering guides and grounds me on my journey as a financial activist.
For white folks, remembering can be a tool for deep healing and repair—a tool to help unlearn the myths and false narratives that uphold white supremacy culture. As the Truth Telling project reminds us, remembering can be the beginning of a deeply necessary historical accountability process.
For folks of the Global Majority, remembering can be a tool of resistance against colonial frameworks. It is an opportunity to remember what was. Author Akwaeke Amezi highlights the impact of colonization, stating “things that were real for millennia became unreal because white people showed up and violently said that they were make-believe.” But we can reclaim and recenter these realities by re-indigenizing as we innovate. Through remembering, we can find a renewal of ourselves, the land, our people, and the rich stories guiding us to step into our own power.
The water is calling us. The flooding is here.
Additional organizations in cultural memory work, storytelling and remembering: Array, Art.Coop, Blis Collective, The Center for Cultural Power, Changing Frequencies, Comfrey Films, Georgia Dusk, Kashif, Open Television, Reparations Narrative Lab of Liberation Ventures, Mirror Memoirs, Ohketeau, Pōhāhā I Ka Lani, Telepathic Rhythms, The Truth Telling Project, Wildseeds Fund, and ZEAL.
Sophia Brown (they/them) is a relationship builder, storyteller, and an apprentice to purpose. Currently a Senior Associate with Mission Investors Exchange, Sophia works with national experts to create and deliver equity-centered impact investing learning development for practitioners and ecosystem stakeholders.
Sophia brings over a decade of experience working in the private sector, philanthropy, and direct service work. After working as a Senior Consultant at Deloitte, Sophia started a consulting practice to support organizations seeking to approach transformation with intention. They have worked with a variety of clients in both the public and nonprofit sector on growth strategy, survey design, workforce transformation, and DEI data analytics. Prior to this work, Sophia worked in grants management at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Sophia has a deep interest in ancestral land stewardship practices, cultural memory work, and black queer and trans histories. They are based out of Los Angeles, California.
