Ancestral Technologies and Afrofuturistic Remembering

As I learned from erin dale mcclellan, Indigenous medicine wheel technologies are ancestral tools that can ground and connect us - to the Earth, Spirit, ourselves, and one another. Often, they are rooted in the four directions and/or the four elements. I didn't know it at the time, but the immersion in the Before Yesterday We could Fly exhibit was a practice in witnessing these tools in action.

Back home, as I began writing about the Black Women at Home Project's first field trip, I was drawn to seeking on my bookshelf the book The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community by Malidoma Patrice Somé. It provides a way of seeing ourselves through the Dagara medicine wheel. In this tradition, Earth is the center—the axis and origin that holds the other elements in balance.

The exhibit is a speculative history and imagining of Seneca Village—the vibrant 19th-century Black community that was destroyed to build Central Park. It asks: what if those families had been allowed to stay and thrive?  As I remembered, we didn't just view an exhibit; we circumambulated a cabin of memory and imagination.

Elements of the Afrofuturist Home

As we entered the exhibit, we moved through a video installation and then circled the rectangular cabin. Each of us paused in the different directions—East, West, North, and South—to take in the artifacts. So present were the elements that sustain all of life.

Earth: The kitchen and hearth sat at the center—the portal for time travel. This is the space where we arrive, long to be, and depart from. It holds the promise that when we get back there, all will be well again.  Home.

Nature: Peacock feathers and woven textiles connected the home to the natural world. The painted wood cabin walls were once trees—housing us, protecting us, reminding us that we are not apart from nature; we are a part of it. 

Fire: The energy was electrified. Soft yellow light mixed with vibrant reds and blues. As we moved, the energy traveled through sound waves. It was a pilgrimage of remembering (the Ancestors), imagining (our descendants), and being present (meeting one another anew).

Water: On the North-facing wall sat the apothecary—shelves of glass canisters holding roots and herbs. It was a space of healing, soothing and peaceful, "like the rivers and the lakes that we’re used to."

Mineral: A display of Venetian glass gave us pause. The raw materials for this glass were extracted from North Africa and the Middle East, traded to buy Africans from Africans. We stood in the tension of how the brutality of extraction produced beauty that lived alongside our Ancestors as refined items of use.