Hearing And Keeping Remembering My Matrilineal Roots

It's uncommon to come across a book that offers such a wealth of information on all aspects of life in Ghana: traditional rural life, assimilating colonization, and mission education. In Hearing and Keeping--Remembering My Matrilineal Roots, author Charlotte Anokwa shares the experiences that helped to mold her into the person she is today. She introduces the people and institutions that have influenced and continue to influence her life; she shares memories of her childhood and upbringing; she describes traditional environments, including forests and foods; and she explains the use of the Twi language in the legendary Ananse stories for children and Akan proverbs. She writes...I was blessed enough to be born the last of eight, into a family, a community, and a people in rural Ghana with so much history, culture, talent and skills as well as spiritual connectedness that sharing and acknowledging one's blessings came naturally. I can only go peacefully to my grave if I carry on the tradition and share my experiences with those around me and those who would be interested in knowing... Through Hearing and Keeping--Remembering My Matrilineal Roots, Anokwa provides an easy-to-read reference for the young generation of people of African descent growing up abroad and inquiring non-Africans alike.

This is a general survey of Ghana and its people. Subjects covered include the country's regions and their people; Ghana's identity as a nation and how it faced challenges to national unity during the struggle for independence; the nature of the post-colonial state; the asymmetrical relationship between the north and the south rooted in the colonial era, a structural imbalance which continues to have a negative impact on the wellbeing of northerners and which could perpetuate inequalities between the two parts of the country; Ghana's place in the Pan-African world because of the leadership provided by the country's first prime minister – later president – Kwame Nkrumah; and its success in forging unity on the anvil of diversity. Among the people the author has covered include an African American community whose members were given some land in the Volta Region in the eastern part of the country for permanent settlement of the descendants of African slaves who want to return to the motherland. He describes it as a distinct ethnic group with the same attributes indigenous groups have and which they use to identify themselves as ethnic entities. The community has acquired an identity of its own and qualifies as an ethnic group because its members have a common history, language and culture as diasporans who lost their African identity under white domination in the United States and were forced to adopt a Euro-American culture and the English language. The author was closely associated with the founders of the African American community in Ghana, known as Fihankra, when he was a student in the United States and has written about them in some of his works including his autobiography, “My Life as an African.” Members of the general public and students may find this work to be useful if they want to learn some facts about Ghana, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence.

In this time of ecological crisis, all that is holy calls us into a more intimate partnership with the diverse and beautiful beings of this earth. In Finding Our Way Home, Myke Johnson reflects on her personal journey into such a partnership and offers a guide for others to begin this path. Lyrically expressed, it weaves together lessons from a chamomile flower, a small bird, a copper beech tree, a garden slug, and a forest fern, along with insights from Indigenous philosophy, environmental science, fractal geometry, childhood Catholic mysticism, the prophet Elijah, fairy tales, and permaculture design. This eco-spiritual journey also wrestles with the history of our society's destruction of the natural world, and its roots in the original theft of the land from Indigenous peoples. Exploring the spiritual dimensions of our brokenness, it offers tools to create healing. Finding Our Way Home is a ceremony to remember our essential unity with all of life.

In the words of Cayuga Elder Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs: “We have forgotten about that sacred meeting space between the Settler ship and the Indigenous canoe, odagahodhes, where we originally agreed on the Two Row, and where today we need to return to talk about the impacts of its violation.” Odagahodhes highlights the Indigenous values that brought us to the sacred meeting place in the original treaties of Turtle Island, particularly the Two Row Wampum, and the sharing process that was meant to foster good relations from the beginning of the colonial era. The book follows a series of Indigenous sharing circles, relaying teachings by Gae Ho Hwako and the responses of participants – scholars, authors, and community activists – who bring their diverse experiences and knowledge into reflective relation with the teachings. Through this practice, the book itself resembles a teaching circle and illustrates the important ways tradition and culture are passed down by Elders and Knowledge Keepers. The aim of this process is to bring clarity to the challenges of truth and reconciliation. Each circle ends by inviting the reader into this sacred space of Odagahodhes to reflect on personal experiences, stories, knowledge, gifts, and responsibilities. By renewing our place in the network of spiritual obligations of these lands, Odagahodhes invites transformations in how we live to enrich our communities, nations, planet, and future generations.

In the eighteenth century part of modern day Ghana consisted of the three Akyem states, yet in almost all historical works on Ghana the Akyem are presented as a single homogeneous people. The author, Senior Lecturer of History at the University of Cape Coast examines the three groups and analyses their vital role in the history of Ghana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Covering the period of 1699-1875, the study relies primarily - though not exclusively - on documentary evidence.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *WINNER of the 2021 Banff Mountain Book Prize in Mountain Environment and Natural History* *WINNER of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature* *SHORTLISTED for the 2022 BC and Yukon Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Book Prize* *SHORTLISTED for the 2022 BC and Yukon Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award* *SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Book Award* A world-leading expert shares her amazing story of discovering the communication that exists between trees, and shares her own story of family and grief. Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar), and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide. Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths—that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own. Simard describes up close—in revealing and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved; how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about their future; how they elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication: characteristics previously ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies. And, at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.Simard, born and raised in the rain forests of British Columbia, spent her days as a child cataloging the trees from the forest; she came to love and respect them and embarked on a journey of discovery and struggle. Her powerful story is one of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward. And it is a testament to how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology: it’s about understanding who we are and our place in the world. In her book, as in her groundbreaking research, Simard proves the true connectedness of the Mother Tree to the forest, nurturing it in the profound ways that families and humansocieties nurture one another, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.

The plot is situated in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Th e protagonist is a Sri Lankan woman of a mixed racial origin (Eurasian) who grew up as an orphan at a time when the island was transitioning from colonial rule to independence. Her background, her marriage, and later her change of religious identity represent a slice of the emerging ethnic complexity on the island. She not only witnesses close-up the tragedies that occur in independent Sri Lanka in the form of Janatha Vimukti Perumuna (JVP) uprisings in the early 1970s and 1980s, the Sri Lankan government’s brutal suppression of them, the terrible ethnic riots of the Sinhalese against the Tamils, and the rise of the Liberation Tamil Tiger Eelam (LTTE) and their terror tactics, but she also experiences other struggles coinciding with the political fate of the nation and its own self-infl icted calamities. Th is makes the aim of the book somewhat ambitious, as it intentionally sets out to be a personal witness to issues of colonization, the constitutional fl aws of an emerging nation, power-mongering politics, racial and ethnic tensions, emergent religious/political identities, and gender discrimination.