Some people find their purpose. Others are born into it.
I grew up in New Orleans — the real New Orleans. The one that lives in the smell of something good cooking before you even open the door. The one that lives in second lines and front porches and the way people in my city hold each other in grief and in joy with the same fierce tenderness.
My grandfather was a Black Masking Indian. What he was, really, was a keeper of something ancient — a living bridge between the African ancestors who survived the Middle Passage, the Indigenous peoples of Louisiana and Mississippi whose land and knowledge made survival possible, and the generations of Black Southern people who wove those two worlds together into something that looked like feathers and beadwork and song — but was actually resistance. Memory. Identity. Survival.
Growing up in New Orleans during the War on Drugs meant growing up in the middle of something designed — whether anyone said so out loud or not — to dismantle the community structures that had kept Black people whole for generations. I carry those wounds. I am not ashamed of them. They are part of what made me a researcher and a writer.
What started as personal healing became a six-year research journey. The deeper I went, the more I found that our history had not been lost. It had been taken. Deliberately. And the evidence of who we were was still there — in the practices that survived in the very culture I grew up in without anyone telling me what they meant.
Roots & Rising was not a business idea. It was a necessity. Built not as an expert standing above you — but as a woman from New Orleans who grew up watching her grandfather wear feathers that told the whole story of who we are, and who spent six years finding the words to tell it to you.