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JAMBALAYA SPIRIT WORKS, PART 1, GUEST LECTURE BY Queen Mother imakhu (The khemetic tradition)8/23/2019 CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW LECTURE The Elegant Elder Masterclass/Guest Lecture with Queen Mother Imakhu Immediately DOWNLOAD AND SAVE the audio of this masterclass.
Queen Mother Imakhu, a.k.a. Pastor Elaine Lloyd Nazario, is an ankh carrying Elder High Priestess, teacher, and scholar in the Kemetic tradition. Her personal practice, Shenu-Khametic, is a branch of Kemetic religion. Queen Mother is known for her cultural reclamation research, including her groundbreaking correlative findings on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and European Elder Futhark runes. Her additional self-created oracle systems include the Shenu Circle of Fate, and COWRIE CARDS. Her newest book, "Khesu Dwau Meni: Daily Prayer Rituals of Shenu-Khametic Temple," is a faith practitioner's guide to understanding Khametic spirituality. Queen Mother's Shenu-Khametic Yoga program is considered to be the most comprehensive approach to the Nile Valley yoga origins. She proudly carries the Uas staff directly passed on to her in ceremony by her late Atef NTR (spiritual godfather) and mentor, GrandMaster Kham of the Shrine of Khpra.
Queen Mother Imakhu has been a dedicated cultural preservationist and African arts presenter throughout her entire professional career, teaching the young and young at heart. Her Drums of Compassion program has affirmed African/Latino drumming and dance with her Black and Brown students in urban public and charter schools since 2003. She is the founder and director of Shenu Art & Yoga Sanctuary, UHEMU Black & Brown Storytellers, and AKERU MultiMedia. Queen Mother Imakhu has also served as executive director of Newark Latino Film Festival and Newark Latino Artist Collective. She joins her colleagues Yeye Luisah Teish, and Baba Sule Greg Wilson in the upcoming concert tour, "The Water Brought Me Here." An ordained Interfaith minister, Queen Mother Imakhu serves on various Interfaith advisory councils, including Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s Interfaith Clergy Council. In the Khametic language, Imakhu means Reverend, or one who is in humble service. Contact Queen Mother Imakhu at her website, http://www.queenmotherimakhu.com . CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW LECTURE The Elegant Elder Masterclass/Guest Lecture with Iya Oya Dei https://zoom.us/recording/share/MpNJHlV2J_Q-G4MoLeaQRDvK0WrFmpZRw3gdlCAj_Pw Immediately DOWNLOAD AND SAVE the audio of this masterclass.
Iya Oya Dei's Bio Iya Oya Dei a/k/a Wanda Ravernell wears many hats in a life that weaves the secular and sacred and where one set of skills or knowledge informs the other. She is executive director and visionary of Omnira Institute, a nonprofit formed in 2011 whose mission is to recover and preserve the roots of African American culture by reintroducing and reaffirming the historic and psychic links to West African cultural and spiritual tradition.
The institute does this through its performing arm, Awon Ohun Omnira, (Voices of Freedom) and serves as the narrator for its performances. She has been the administrator and booking agent as well as the publicist for all of its activities since its start in 2009. A former journalist who worked for 20 years in the newspaper business at the Alameda Newspaper Group, the Sacramento Bee and The San Francisco Chronicle, she also was an activist for minority journalists including developing and implementing a workshop for minority high school journalists. “It was the spirit of one of my friends who said that I ‘obey the wind,’” Ravernell said. “I had never thought of it that way, but there were ideas that came to me and I was compelled to follow though. With all of those ideas, I thought someone else could do it better than me, had more of a stake in the outcome than me. But spirit, and Oya, had other ideas.” Beginning in 2003, Ravernell developed and implemented a Juneteenth ritual commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation including many of the faiths of the captives who would become slaves during the Slave Trade Era, including the First Nation. The same year she organized a Sunday school for practitioners of Lucumi, the West African faith tradition she follows as tit found expression in Cuba. It ended in 2006. Beginning in 2009 to the present, Ravernell developed and implemented several lecture demonstrations drawing on African traditional knowledge and applied it to African American history using a choir comprised of members of an African American church and the Lucumi community, who also provided the musical framework and expertise of the sacred drum tradition known as Bata. The choir, Awon Ohun Omnira (Voices of Freedom) is led by her husband, Tobaji Stewart, a renowned master of the Bata drums, sung liturgy for the ancestors (Oro Egun) and the forces of nature known as Orisha (Aranla). He also has intructed the choir in doing the ‘Ring Shout,’ the vestige of African spirituality still practiced in the United States by their mentors, the McIntosh County Shouters. In 2014, Ravernell led the institute in developing and staging the first Black-Eyed Pea Festival, held first in Oakland’s Mosswood Park and then on the lawn of Oakland Technical High School. In 2016, ’17 and ‘18, OI was invited by the Dia De Los Muertos committee of the Oakland Museum to create ofrendas at the community celebration to honor first the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party; men and women killed by police in the Bay Area; and support the main altar dedicated to men and male energy. Concerned about the impact of the deaths of young, black men and women at the hands of the police, Ravernell, with Tobaji Stewart, decided to bring healing through traditional music to the surviving families. They have worked with Cephus “Uncle Bobby”Johnson, the uncle of Oscar Grant who was killed by BART police in 2009 and Phelicia Jones with Wealth Disparities in the Black and Brown Community: Justice for Mario Woods campaign. Woods was killed by S.F. Police in 2015. In 2016, she led OI in reviving ‘Grave-Sweeping Day,’ a cultural observance among African Americans a few generations ago. Calling it the African American Day of the Ancestors, it has been held the first Sunday in November since. It parallels the Latino Dia de Los Muertos, Haiti’s Papa Gede celebration and the All Saints’ Day of New Orleans. It takes place at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland where the mass grave holding victims of the Jonestown massacre of 1978 are buried. Ravernell received the 2010 Negro Spirituals Heritage Award from the Friends of Negro Spirituals, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of the music. In 2015, through Ravernell, the institute received a Certificate of Recognition from California State Assemblyman Nate Thurmond. In 2018, Awon Ohun Omnira was represented in “The Sounds of Californa,” a program mounted by the Alliance for California Traditional Arts that has been archived in the Smithsonian Institute. In 2019, Awon Ohyun Omnira was invited to perform in the prestigious Ethnic Dance Festival. To do the work of the institute, Ravernell has secured funding from ACTA, Zellerbach, Akonadi, Clorox foundations, the FAITHS initiative at the San Francisco Foundation, the California Endowment, Oakland Cultural Development Fund and most recently a capacity-building grnt from TSFF. Ravernell is an active member of AOO and assists Tobaji Stewart in organizing classes and workshops with written materials, programs and outreach There was a break in the recording of today's class. I regret the technology stalled at some point. We are making every effort to increase the internet bandwith so as to accommodate the large size of our class. Thank you for your presence and participation. Remember to engage the private learning community for this course. You may enjoy further discussion of weekly class sessions. You'll also learn about Yeye's recommended resources , as well as real-time learning experiences to gather with Yeye and other students in this course.
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important! Notice of Copyright and Permission of UseThe course content program and materials of Jambalaya Spirit Works, Part 1 (including and not limited to audios, videos, text files, and weekly class lessons) belongs to and is the copyright of Yeye Luisah Teish and, as applicable any associated guest instructors. |