about kale
storykeeper | memory worker
hi i am kale :) i am a memory keeper based in nyc who seeks to repair our relationships to this hypersettled land on which we've experienced both bondage and freedom, greeting the spirits who peer out from the cracks in the concrete.
i am a descendant of enslaved Africans in the amerikan south and caribbean, Black Seminole resistors, self-liberated swampland maroons, and Ugahxpa people who was raised in ceremony, in a community and legacy of resistance.
i draw my knowledge of territory from both ecosystem and archives - diving deep into the realm of traditional research, then pulling out to ask elements, ancestors, and more-than-human kin which stories are ready to be shared.
oakland, ca
i was here
1986
i was born and raised in the golden fire-prone hills of Huchiun Ohlone land known as oakland, california. one of my earliest memories is the blackened sky of 1991’s firestorm, the first california fire that was so accelerated by explosive australian eucalyptus and uncleared brush that it created its own weather system.
in the wake of bay area tech class warfare, my family and community have long-disappeared from the ecosystem where i learned to listen to land.
every year, its outer edges continue to burn. i am told that the sky is a blackened ochre from august to october.
wall street, ny
we were here
2013
i washed up in new york city in the wake of hurricane sandy, eager to build a new life in the damp edges of this crumbling empire. i grieved the loss of the deer and manzanitas who raised me, and began the slow process of introducing myself to the weeds that overgrow this increasingly tropical island chain.
it wasn’t long before i recognized the extent to which this city is a graveyard - the bones and teeth and sweat and prayers of the indigenous communities who tended the swampy estuaries, the African laborers who were forced to deforest the lush deer-filled woods, the child laborers churned up in factory machinery and tossed unceremoniously into the potter’s fields that were paved over to build city parks and parade grounds.
it was a few years more when i understood this city as a re-emerging ecosystem instead of a stretch of dilapidating infrastructure. suddenly i could recognize the medicinal plants scaling the crumbling brick walls and the hawks soaring between skyscrapers.
we live in a place.
how can we track what’s changing if we can’t process what has already happened?
how do we know where we are if we don’t know how we got here?
where are we?
how did we get here?