Monica Montgomery delivering the keynote at Dancing With the Ancestors.
At the Dancing With the Ancestors gala, I had the honor of opening the evening with a keynote for a room of Indigenous, Black, Brown and global majority people who refuse to let ancestral stories go quiet. Below are the messages I most want to carry forward, followed by the full remarks.
Key messages:
“We remember fiercely, so that the next generation inherits more than survival. They reclaim their power.”
“At DiasporaDNA, we believe in healing through heritage. We practice it through four inseparable strands of our work:
Arts | Archives | Ancestry | Activations ”
“Heritage is not something to be remembered in private. It is practiced in public, so that it becomes medicine, so that it becomes law.”
“Nothing about us without us.
Don’t be palatable and polite when the circumstances demand otherwise. Show up, stand up, rise up again and again and again.”
