The Cedar sat down with artist, community leader, and North Minneapolis resident Kenna-Camara Cottman. Learn about Kenna’s collaborative journey to bring The Griot Series to The Cedar’s hall, the joys of Kwanzaa, and the beauty and resonance of Black liberation.
The Cedar: This the first event of the Voice of Culture’s series? How did that come about? How did you come up with this concept?
Kenna: I do radio at KFAI, and that intersected with Shasa [Sartin], because we have some family and community in common. Shasa was working at The Cedar, and so we started to just intersect more. When the leadership changed, I think I reached out to be like, “Hey, welcome, new leadership. What do y'all want to do?”
I have had my eye on The Cedar Cultural Center for a while as a venue for things that I like to do, which is cultural arts and their oral tradition. Many different cultures have an oral tradition, but I'm a Black American. We just talked, me and Mary [Brabec] and Robert [Lehmann], we just talked about what could be. Part of what I work on in the community is more access and engagement for the Black community specifically, communities of color and local communities.
The Cedar Cultural Center is a good example of an institution that is embedded in a community, but doesn't always draw from that community. There's a lot of international and national acts that come through, and then people come to see those acts who can pay for the ticket. I was like, “Okay, well, what nights are less used and what ways can we inhabit the space more just as people?” So that's kind of how it came about.
Where that intersects with the work that The Cedar is doing is the Griot series. That's how we were able to intersect.
The Cedar: What was the concept behind this specific show? What artists will be sharing this space that night?
Kenna: The Griot series is a gathering of folks that practice the oral tradition. Like I said, many cultures have an oral tradition that's based on the poetry or the artistry through embroidery or passing down stories from elders to young people. There's so many cultures that do this in different ways. The Griot is the West African oral history. Because we have ancestry from West Africa, we carry that oral tradition into our Black American experience. There's many different manifestations like drumming, dancing, singing, storytelling, and visual art. The reason it's a series is because it's a periodic gathering. We're not going to do it just one time. Each time we gather, we'll have a different invited circle of cultural artists. For this first one, which is coming up on Monday, December 19th, because it's for Kwanzaa, I've invited the WE WIN Institute to come up and share with us. They're a nonprofit that works with young people around literacy and African American cultural pride. I invited my very good sibling, Jayanthi RaJaSa, who is a singer and oral historian.
We have Auntie Beverly, who happens to be my mom, but is also a well-respected storyteller in our community. Then we have Jordan Hamilton, who is another good sibling who works in the visual artistry realm of the cultural arts. We're going to have a circle where the different invited groups, including Voice of Culture Drum and Dance, which is my group — we'll all have a chance to share what we do. Then there'll be a jam session where the drummers will lay down a beat and the singers will sing and the dancers will dance and the storytellers will tell and the artists will make art. The people that come don’t have to just passively observe; they can participate. We're also going to have the marketplace with Ujamaa, which is the principle of cooperative economics. So we're going to have people like Soul Speak Expressions and Bayou and Miku and Dukka Yamama, Atiyano, like all these are different artists who are going to be setting up their tables and they're going to have the products that they make or the art that they create. It can be like a gallery walk/marketplace. Then we have Brother Lonzo, who is our Griot for the night. He's a young person who's been raised up in this culture who's going to be telling his story and serving as an MC. Each person will invite someone else. That's who we invited for the Griot Kwanzaa series that's coming up. We're going to have some refreshments from Tamu. We're going to have some chai and some Kenyan donuts that people can purchase, as well as like, the theater has little snacks and stuff.
Then the next one is going to be in February. It's going to be Black History Month, so we're going to invite different artists to fill each of those slots. Then we'll do it all over again. We want it to be like a very circular community interactive night. It's less of a sit down and watch or stand there and watch, but more of being in a circle with folks that practice and then maybe learn something.
The Cedar: Can you talk about diaspora and being in America? Why is it important for you to continue these traditions and tell these stories?
Kenna: I'm focused on Black liberation. I do that work through the practice of cultural arts. These are the ways that Black people have pretty much created all of the culture around the world, and being able to walk in that cultural power, because a lot of the messages towards Black people are negative. I operate from a spirit of abundance that my culture is actually very rich and very healing and super healthy in the ways that even we need to change the perpetuated culture. We create our culture moving forward. The changes that we need to make around how we're going to break those cycles. Even though we still celebrate our traditions, we're still shifting it. All I can say is in the work of Black liberation, Black people being truly free, it's important to me to create Black space for Black people to do Black things and for me to operate with Blackness as a default. I feel everybody benefits from being in Afrocentric environments. I used to be a classroom teacher and while I didn't have all Black students in my class, I created an Afrocentric environment for all of the students to go through.
That's kind of what I'm doing in my community. As well, I'm trying to create an Afrocentric environment that values and loves Blackness. Because I'm an artist, that's the tool that I have. If I was a business person, I would be doing business. If I was a scientist, I would be science. But I'm an artist, so that's what I do.
Kenna-Camara Cottman. Photo courtesy to DigieMade Photography.
The Cedar: Do you feel that you are a curator for these series or is it more community?
Kenna: I think “point person” might be more accurate just because I'm the one talking to The Cedar and writing the text back and telling everyone what time to show up.
I try to operate in circles. I bring these opportunities. For example, we had a bill put together for this and then something happened and somebody had to drop off the bill. I went to the other artists and I was like, “Yo, what should we do?” We brainstorm and problem solve and come up with, “Okay, let's have Brother Lonzo to do it.” Curator is a term that is more Eurocentric. When you think about museums and people pillaging and stealing stuff and being like, “Hey, come look at this.” I am a gatherer, even gathering or harvesting might be another word that could take the place of curation. I'm harvesting because when you harvest, that's because you planted it and you tended to it the whole time. I'm going to my community, “Y'all, we got a slot,” and people are like, “Okay, boom, put me on.”
The Cedar: What does Kwanzaa mean to you, Kenna?
Kenna: Kwanzaa is a contemporary observance. Black people, we're in a constant process of trying to reclaim any parts of culture that may have been lost or stolen or slipped away. Kwanzaa was created in the ‘60s by people being like, “What can we do this holiday time? There's not a lot that's amplifying things that we value in the Black community or that we maybe think we should be valuing more.” That's why they created Kwanzaa to lift those ideas up, like unity and the Ujamaa, the cooperative economics and the collective economics and seeing beyond just capitalism. Our resources are our creativity, which is Kuumba. There's different principles that Kwanzaa is lifting up. I'm not so super dogmatic. It's a holiday. We don’t have to observe it exactly right. Kwanzaa to me is more about a reclamation, especially during this time of year when a lot of capitalist values are being pumped. That makes people even more depressed. Kwanzaa is not about that at all. It's about coming together and lighting candles and memorizing their part and all of those things that bring us joy as a people. That's what it's all about to me. Technically, it's a holiday from December 26 to January 1, and you're supposed to light a candle every day and all these different things, but the main thing for me is — Kwanzaa means first fruits of the harvest. What have we been tending to all year? We've been doing the after school programs, doing the sports, doing the parenting, pouring into our community. Now let's take a time in the year to really celebrate and lift that up.
These events are to be a monthly thing. I was really thinking about the amount of work I'm even putting into this first one, and I'm like, “Dang, can I do this every month?” So I looked at the year and the different milestones in the Black community. We're going to switch it to Kwanzaa, Black History Month — in April there's going to be some folks from Uganda coming through. We're going to host them, and then we're going to do Juneteenth, [then] Black August, which is all about prison abolition and again, more Black liberation. Our year won't be like the Gregorian calendar. It will be like the Black milestones for when we will have the Griot series.