This creation Interstellar Prismatic Compass pays homage to my Intergenerational Afro-Indigenous Black Loyalist Roots, which draw upon traditional & contemporary patterns and symbols in African Nova Scotian quilt making practice which for generations have held the Freedom Codes, Ancestral Lineages, Communal Stories of a People, and the Compass which calls us home. In this piece I am sharing patterns and symbols of: Flying Geese, North Star Underground, as well as the Akan Adinkra Ananse Ntontan (Spider Web), and a series of dulse (duhls) seaweed symbols.

The piece acknowledges how colonial acts of forced displacement were thwarted time and time again because of our deep connection to source, which guided our innate sense of direction to get to where we needed to be in order to reclaim our freedom in relationship to seasonal cycles and divine celestial timing.

There are 8 sets of Flying Geese patterns which represent the four seasonal transitions and how our ancestors would follow the direction of the geese when they began migrating North in the Springtime. Repetitions of Ananse Ntontan (Spider Web) to honour how our blood memory was interwoven in our oral stories, stories that cultivated collective webs of resistance along our liberation journeys. The North Star Underground is a symbol of the abolition movement of finding freedom in Kanata, or what we now know as Canada. Polaris, known as the North Star, sits more or less directly above Earth’s north pole along our planet’s rotational axis. As the Earth turns, every other star seems to spin around the axis, tracing out a circle in the sky, but the North Star appears to stand still. Finding the North Star gave our ancestors purpose, and kept them envisioning revolutionary dreams for the generations to come. Finally the Deluse Seaweed is a reminder that freedom is a journey not a destination, the land that was promised to us was intentionally not the most fertile, we would need to return to the sea which was saturated with our rage and sorrows for the nourishment and healing we needed to survive.