Becoming a Black Feminist Explorer Under a Well Known Sun

Field Note No. 0: Epigraph

“I’ve never felt like I was making any of this up — not the name Earthseed, not any of it. I mean, I’ve never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation.”
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Field Note No. 1: Acknowledge What Holds You

Take a breath before you begin. Pause to reflect on your present infancy. No matter your age, you must recognize that in relation to the universe and every idea that shapes you, you’ve only just arrived.

To be an explorer is to be aware of your surroundings and take honest stock of your expertise. But to be a Black feminist explorer is to know your place across timelines—to recognize yourself as a novice in the face of what came before. It’s then that every fallen leaf becomes an elder, every tree trunk an altar, and every theory-thick forest you wander, an inheritance to dwell within.

Folklorist, historian, and Harriet Jacobs Project Director Michelle Lanier teaches us that the land is an archive, holding the truth of what bloomed, what stayed buried, and what awaits remembrance. But in order to cite the land, you must first arrive to it. This is what Michelle Lanier and Curator-at-Large Johnica Rivers modeled in early 2024, when they led nearly 70 Black women scholars, artists, and cultural workers during the Sojourn on a pilgrimage to the land that once held Harriet Jacobs. It was in Edenton, North Carolina, that this group of Sojourners came to understand the land not as a backdrop, but as a central figure, a witness and keeper of memory, holding testimony in its roots, and carrying the stories of those who once walked its fields, waters, and woods. To properly cite Harriet Jacobs is to cite the land as well.

Field Note No. 2: Go Slow and Dig Deep

Exploration is not a race. While prizes are often awarded to the first and the fastest, Black feminist explorers understand that what’s sacrificed by speed isn’t just the garden trampled beneath your wheels, it’s the people you leave behind, both living and ancestral, who filled the tank ahead of the trip. Citation is a collective practice, one that gathers the living and the dead. Even as you sit alone with your thoughts, it’s worth asking, “Who is in this bed of flowers with me?”

Building right relationship with ideas requires trust—trust that is energetic, ancestral, and communal. As adrienne maree brown reminds us in Emergent Strategy, intentional adaptation and slowness are necessary strategies for sustaining movements, relationships, and ourselves.

Intentional adaptation, in this context, means adjusting your pace and practices in response to what is revealed over time. It means understanding that relationships—with people, land, ideas, and memory—cannot be extracted, consumed, or rushed. It is a refusal of urgency that prioritizes understanding over output.

Slowness invites us to take responsibility for the inheritances we carry and to ask: How might I adapt my approach to honor what is here? What might I need to unlearn to move in better alignment with those who came before and those who will come after?

Field Note No. 3: Reduce. Reuse. Don’t Regurgitate.

The world is a noisy and congested echo chamber, polluted by staleness and redundancy. In a climate of endless repetition and a rush to reinvent, Black feminist citation offers a practice of clarity, intention, and rootedness. It reminds us to reduce the noise, carry forward what endures, and refuse to regurgitate what has not been felt, honored, or understood.

To cite is not merely to name, but to build bridges across the ideas we inherit. As author and lecturer EbonyJanice reminds us, citation is not only an academic tool, but a spiritual, political, and communal practice—a living act of acknowledgment. It honors the lineages of thought that shape us and insists that we move through the world with gratitude and accountability.

In this way, citation becomes a refusal to perform intellectual labor as hollow spectacle, and a refusal to discard what has held and carried us. It is, ultimately, a practice of intentional connectedness.

Field Note No. 4: None of It Is Yours, But All of It Is Ours.

The playground is often our first site of learned sharing. We learn to pass, to take turns, and to hold what we have together. This field note invites us to extend those lessons beyond the monkey bars and into our practices as thinkers, makers, and cultural workers. Ideas, like land, are held in common.

In this spirit, Lauren Olamina—Octavia E. Butler’s prophetic protagonist in Parable of the Sower—teaches us about shared survival. As she gathers the first members of Earthseed while the world around them collapses, Olamina and her community pool their resources, drawing strength in numbers as each person adds something vital to the whole.

Citation is a way of naming the collective. It refuses the myth of the lone genius. It reminds us that nothing we hold is ours alone—everything we build, we build for and with one another.

Field Note 5: Move with Reverence, Not Conquest

Christopher Columbus taught us nothing aside from violence. Just as there was no “New World,” there are no new ideas. The impulse to move through land and language as though you discovered them is conquest.

To refuse citation is to erase. To unname those who have shaped your thinking is a form of harm. It severs the delicate threads of history, kinship, and accountability that keep our intellectual and creative ecosystems alive.

Black feminist practice teaches us to move with reverence. To speak the names of those who cleared the path, planted the seeds, and held the line. To understand that survival is rarely solitary, and wisdom is rarely self-made.

On Season 14, Episode 1 of the survivalist reality show Naked and Afraid, Shanika Malcolm became not only the first Black woman to survive 21 days in Chiapas, Mexico, she was the first survivalist ever to do so. As many enter the challenge with aims of “making this jungle their bitch,” Malcolm took an approach yet unseen on the show. While her partner sneered at her strategy, Malcolm spoke directly to the land as an ancestor, asking for her presence to be accepted, and to be supported in her efforts. She moved with gratitude, prayed for the souls trapped in the forest, and sat with “grandfather fire” to keep warm. The earth became a living witness to and co-creator of her survival.

Field Note 6: Sometimes, No Notes Are Needed

Before beginning her presentation at the Black Feminist Summer Institute at Duke University in August 2024, distinguished professor emeritus of performance studies Dr. D. Soyini Madison asked participants to put down their pens, close their notebooks, and just listen. What she offered wasn’t meant to be immediately transcribed or summarized. It was meant to be felt.

In a world obsessed with capturing and cataloging, what does it mean to sit with what should not—or perhaps cannot—be written down?

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the fictional elder Baby Suggs preaches to her congregation gathered in The Clearing, “a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what, at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place.” Here, Baby Suggs called forth the children, the men, and the women, to laugh, to dance, and to weep. These teachings—this sermon turned song—weren’t written in the margins of any text. They were carried in the bones, hearts, and mouths of those who heard them, becoming gospel in the bodies of their descendants. This, too, is citation.

Allow this field note, and those before it, to serve as a permission slip, an invitation to move differently. To acknowledge those who clear the paths we walk and plant the ideas we inherit. To practice citation as a form of connectedness, not academic obligation. To root our exploration in lineages of care, reverence, and collective memory. To embrace slowness as a strategy and to recall that nothing we build is ours alone.

May we move accordingly.