I’m so excited to be joined today by Archivist, poet, prophet, conjurer, novelist, alchemist, master educator, community arts organizer, and culture keeper Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond.
Dr. Redmond is the co-founder of Fannie Lou Hamer House, a migratory artist residency, and is the founder of The Community Archive, a non profit where she teaches communities how to collect their elders’ oral histories.
Dr. Treasure talks about poetry and music, Hoodoo and Ashe, being radicalized, and together we define our Witchcraft through a lens of revolutionary optimism. Treasure says, "OF COURSE YOU HAVE TO HAVE AN ANCESTRAL PRACTICE, BECAUSE [without it] ALL OF THESE [spells] ARE JUST CRAFTS!"
LISTEN NOW
And check out some of Dr. T's musical history!
Find Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond on PATREON, on INSTAGRAM, on YOUTUBE and on THE WEB. Buy her book of poetry, "Chop"!
"My name is Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond, and I am the founder and Executive Director of The Community Archive. My roots are in two places: Meridian, Mississippi where my mother — a visual artist — raised me to be a reader and lover of African American literature, and East St. Louis, Illinois where my father — a poet and photographer — created the world’s largest collection of images of Black writers which is now housed at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. My parents taught me to be a culture keeper, and as such, an archivist of community stories.
Archival work is Black feminist work. It is an act of communal mothering. It is an act of conjuring in the tradition of hoodoo, where the ancestors are always called to account.
When the writer Alice Walker recovered, the remains of folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, that was archival work.
After the Ferguson uprising, in 2014, I created a podcast, entitled Who Raised You? in collaboration with my friend, Jia Lian Yang. It is an archive of stories of activists, educators, and creatives, who all took part in direct actions and protests during the Ferguson uprising.
In 2015, I delved into poetry as an archive I completed chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer, which is a poetry book in the voice of Proto-feminist, civil rights warrior Fannie Lou Hamer.
In the midst of the pandemic, I created the podcast The Memoir My Dad Wouldn’t Write, which is a conversation with my father, Dr. Eugene B. Redmond. The episodes are exchanges that talk through my fathers 85+ years chronologically. We cover his incredible life as a Black Arts Movement poet, one of the architects of black studies, and more.
Presently, I am collecting the stories of descendants of survivors of the 1917 East St. Louis Race massacre.
An archivist is defined as an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value.
Here at The Community Archive we center the stories and history of African-American and African diasporic communities."
