“The future of indigo can be a redemption story, one that brings hope to a people, to a culture, to an archipelago of islands.”

We came together on Sapelo Island through a vision of how heritage agriculture could help try to save a culture; we came together because Cornelia Walker Bailey had this vision, and this vision required us to work together. We started this work from the conviction that geography, culture, and history are always dyed, stitched, and sewn into our textiles—old and new—and tell us stories that many times we miss. We may miss them because the long history of alienation blocks us or, sometimes, because we are just too anxious to remember them. Other times, we just cannot bring ourselves to recognize what our textiles tell us about ourselves or who we want to be—because of the memories they invoke, the neural pathways they open, or the pain and violence they conjure, especially for many Black people in the United States. Pondering ancestral connections, many people, Black and white, situate crops, labor, technique, technologies, adornment, and fashion with enslavement and oppression. Indigo, a plant with multiple medicinal and cultural purposes, straddles historical trauma on Sapelo given its connection to enslavement and freedom as we grow it now in the spirt of preserving Gullah Geechee culture.