Walking With Audacity With Mumu Fresh

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Jay dot Ill, a production of My Heart Radio. Ladies and Gentlemen, Jill Scott presents Jay dot Ill with my sister friends Age and I'm Jill Scott. Hold on, y'all, I think that's somebody calling. That must mean it's time for what's on your heart? Okay, So we're sitting here with my mona you sef. I'm looking at it, my moona you sef, my moona you sef. I've been saying it wrong for years, my motor. Sorry, sorry, I'm just I can't participate in this joke because people jack my name up so much that Joe refused. I refuse. I refused to participate in this laughter. No, I'm just rejected. Is easy. Come on, man, listen. People people call me Gil okay, yes they do, know they will. I promise you. I promise you as as I got two feet. Some people call me Gil. I promise you because my father is Gil Scott. You know that, right right? I heard that. I heard that. Before I heard that, I did. I heard that. When the first that came out, people were saying that a lot. They said he was gonna redo the bo Yeah. Look, I'm sitting here I'm looking at everything there is to say about my mona you saf and I'm like, all right, do we do this before what's on your heart? Or normally that's how it happens. Okay, So that's what we'll do. Okay, droll drop it. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with my Mona you Seth, also known to some as MoU Fresh moo Fresh, is a critically acclaimed Afro Indigenous singer MC okay, MC songwriter, activist, workshop facilitator, and audio engineer who's been called a quadruple threat by Black Thought from the Roof and groundbreaking OSCAR winning artists by Common. But I'm gonna just tell you like this. I'm gonna tell you like this. When it comes to Sanganka, Momo is not a game to be played with. When it comes to m see and listen, you want somebody that can tell you as a story and paint you a picture. See you can smell the fruit, you can you can taste the sunshine on your lips. Okay, why right, we're talking about MoMu Fresh. This is a Momo fresh everybody, And the question is this what's in your heart? Thank you? Thank you for the introduction. You better be introduced. Oh man, welcome. First of all, thank you. I'm excited to be here with you all. You know, I have so much respect for all of you all. Whenever I see you anywhere out in the streets, you know, at a concert or wherever we are, it's just my heart talking lot. Yeah, my heart lights up, you know, because I see myself in all of you. You know, the journeys that you all taken. I've listened to you all through my own you know, things I've gone through in my own life. And um, I've been uplifted by your lyrics, by your voices, and just the support that you all have shown to me all these years. I never have to take that for granted, like it's a big deal to me, for real, Like it I get all emo about it. But what's on my heart? You know, if I could just be can ton't speak honestly. I just came back from a retreat, like a spiritual healing retreat, and uh, we spent so much time. They're talking about embracing my expansiveness and not shying away from it and kind of unlearning all of the things I've been taught by the music industry. All of the things I've been taught by patriarchy, Like if you just are in this business long enough, you're gonna take some abuse and some lashings that you're gonna deal with, you know, and really redefining your own value and your own worth and not having your value be defined by someone else's inability to value you. I spent three days out in the woods, just sleeping out in the woods, laying on mother mother Earth. You know, Um, really just reconnecting with my center, like with who I was when I was four years old, you know what I mean, Like that kind of joy and optimism for no reason at all. You didn't need a reason to like have a good day, you know, every every day it was just a good day because you woke up and it was fun and you're curious and you're just excited to have breath blowing through your lungs, you know. So, Um, I'm I'm feeling good about the reclamation, reclaiming my own narrative, my own story, my own joy, my optimism, my childlike wonder about just redefining what this next leg of my journey is gonna look like for me. And the fact that, um, you know, when you trail blaze. There is not a path before you, and you gotta be courageous and just because you haven't seen something done in a particular way that you plan to do it, like maybe you are the one to do it, maybe you open that door for somebody else, maybe maybe you set the precedent. And I feel like so many times in my career people've told me you can't do it that way, it's never been done, like if it won't work. And I was just always thinking, like how would you know? You know, you're talking about something that doesn't exist yet, and you know, like there are lots of things that before they existed, people thought it was like craziness and now it's commonplace. And so yeah, I spent a lot of time talking with the healers that was there at the retreat about about that really really embracing it like with audacity mm hm. And you know I cried, you know, I had to had to have a whole journal of all the people I had to forgive. My forgiveness journal is long, you know, and really like the gratitude helped me forgive them because I said, I'm grateful that you you played a part in my learning. So that I could be here standing in this moment stronger and um wiser, like more whole, like unbreakable, like I know what I made of Yeah, and just you know, I left the retreat yeah today and I just I don't know. It's just a feeling I had of like it's just a strength that I and it just feels you know. It was a new moon, so we did, we did the ceremonies during a new moon, and so yeah, I feel good. That's what's in my heart. I'm ready to walk with more audacity than I had before. I love that word. I love, I love I love audacity to be bold and courageous enough to do with the fun you dude, I love you. Audacious movemo like I'm looking what is that? Yes? Inspired, inspired and motivated? Yes, yeah, the audacity I'm telling you if it's it was. It was so transformative and not like I became a new person, just I just reminded. It was like a reminder of who I already am, you know, and not not waiting for permission to be like all of you, not like you know, because people like parts of you, like hey, this piece is palatable, We'll just take that piece. Those other pieces might be a bit much, you know, and um, but that's not expansively. Expansiveness takes all of those pieces and it's like this is the whole. We all don't know what it means to be holistic all of this. It don't work with this this this one piece. You know, it might work for you, but it don't work for me. Yeah, I just I feel like I'm growing a you know what I mean. It's like I've really had to sit in those in those meetings and really be honest with myself about the amount of times that I allow people to um to to talk me into smallness, you know what, I hate, to really talk me into this little, this little box, into dimming my light to make other people feel more comfortable around me, and you know, to not offend people with with all of who I was. And it's like, you can't not offend a person that's insecure, Like no matter what you do, it ain't even it ain't on you as in you like you're very big, and it's gonna be offensive to a person that's insecure and don't really want to stand in the God flow. They don't want to look at the God flow. That's happening, you know, and so but I had to take responsibility for my part in enabling them by by playing small. You know. Damn that's what ma'am. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Today, thank you. We're gonna take a quick break and then it we'll be right back. When you said holistic, when you said that you don't even understand talk about it, you said a thing right there. You said a lot of things, but you said a thing right there for me because when you said that, we do tend to live in these pieces. You don't see ourselves as whole people. And so we decide which lane we're going to show, and we either demonize or romanticize the other parts of ourselves. And we do not have a realistic vision, a hole partial vision. We have a partial living, a partial existence. And when you said having a holistic existence, that touched me. I'm gonna walk away. I think, I'm I'm I put that one in my bra today. I talked it. Yeah, I talked at that one right in my bra. Girl. We hear so many times somebody calling somebody a hole. You know what I mean? Hey, hold, what's up? Hohle w h o l E hole? Okay, Hey, hold, but I'm gonna tell you, I just got hit by what you said about the piece of you when you just say people can only digect certain pieces of you and then you end up apologize. I literally just had to happen to me on Friday where I had a physical reaction to watching the movie amongst the months, a mixture of the crowd, and I yelled out and then I said I'm sorry, y'all. And my friend said to me beside me, why are you apologizing? And I was just we we've all done it, apologize or trying to make somebody else comfortable, you know, because they can't handle the all. Well, this is it's a new season. Why why are we this way? Why? Why? What I mean, listen, listen. I wasn't actually going to say it. I wasn't going to say it, but what I met give me a group of women and that we can all agree that we felt this. We're all very different women, We've all had very different experiences in life, yet this is the thing that we find find and it's all been told to calm down. We've all been told to yeah, you know, quiet up, We've all been told that that's right. Maybe you need to dress that down just a little bit, like we've only told these things just so I oblige, Jill, I have to make sure I'll go ahead and say it. Why is it that we feel this way, ladies? White supremacy? Supremacy? This is why? Why supremacy? Well, we're talking about here is something that's very apparent. You know, we're dealing and looking at a woman who is multi talented, she's very layered as a human being, she's well educated, and on many levels, she's Indigenous. With my saying this American Indian, is that fair? And my saying it correctly Choctaw, she's Chokti Indian, has grown up practicing and learning about her herself and her people. And it's such a beautiful woman. Like when you see MoMu Fresh, You're like, wow, look at that. You know what I like? Is that? Right? Her? Is all of these things and the idea that someone would even a company or an industry would even attempt to put you in boxes is just insane. It's it's just insane. How are you moving through all of this, all of all of the confines um that people are putting on you? How are you moving through this to create work to create music that you were proud of to create. They're exciting to you as an artist and as a whole person. How you doing this, mommy? Well, you know, it really was a decision that I had to make, and it was based in faith over fear. It was based I had to have a conversation with myself to say, the world ain't give it, so the world can't take it away. So I know that my blessings don't come from man, My money don't come from man. Man didn't give me my gifts, so how can man take it away based on how they feel about me or what they think I should have shouldn't do. Right, It really really really came from me sitting at my altar and prayer and affirmative prayer and affirming my vision for myself and blocking out their noise because it's really what I had to realize. I had to unlearn what they taught me about myself because then their voices is a part of my affirmative prayer about myself. So now I'm willing it into being just because they have now integrated themselves into my subconscious mind, you know, and when I removed them from my subconscious mind, I am unstoppable. They can't do nothing to me. They're powerless, they weak, really, you know. But it was I had to make that decision. And that's why I sat in my in the circle this week and I forgave myself for contributing, you know. I mean, I always tell black people that we contribute in white supremacy. It doesn't work without us. It doesn't work without us agreeing. We got we agree when we feel inferior, when we feel when we feel like may if I changed them about me, they'd accept me, then they're not gonna accept you. Then it's not. White supremacy isn't logical. Patriarchy isn't logical, you know what I'm saying. So it really was me having to make a decision to stop, to stop being afraid, to stop feeling like, well, if I give them a little more what they want, then maybe they'll know they're not. So this decision I had to make was, you know what, I got one life to live. I was born here for a reason. I came in here to do something for God and gotta to do with y'all. And I'm gonna fulfill my destiny this way. I'm gonna fulfill my purpose. This way, I'm not gonna ask you for your permission. I'm not even gonna look at you like I ain't even thinking about you. I'm removing you from my subconscious, from my belief system. I'm removing all of your beliefs, that everything you know that I used to subscribe to, like all that stuff, I'm moving it away from my mind and I'm focusing on that vision that I decided that I'm I decreed right before I was even born, before I incarnated into the flesh, what I come here to do, what I come here to say? All right, well I'm that's what I'm doing. That's what I'm doing. That's between me and God and every anybody else. You don't even matter. And I promise you, I promise you. When I started making that decision and sitting in my prayers, sitting in my power, feeling that way, my finances got better, the creativity got better, all of the you know everything I needed to make stuff work. I'm still independent, but we're moving like we like we got a budget because God keep opening up doors that no man can close. When I started believing that my goodness didn't come from men and only come from God. My my abundance don't come from man. You can't. You ain't give it, so you can't take it away. But that was a real transition of getting my sub conscious mind to be an agreement with my conscious mind. Because you can say everything you want, right, we talk a good game because we're intelligent. But if your subconscious mind don't believe what your conscious mind is saying, there is this cognitive dissonance, and all you'll see in your life is a back and forth, for back and forth. You go a little for it, you know, a little forward and go a little back. There'll be this fighting, this in fighting until we sit down with ourselves, unlearn those things, make amends, make peace, sit with the truth. What is the truth? Right? And there's a therapy I do called cognitive behavioral therapy when you write down the lie. This is what's in my mind right now, I'm hearing the lie of the programing is running over and over again. I'm gonna write down what the lie is and I'm gonna look at it, and my conscious Michael saying, now you know that don't make no sense, all right, So what's the truth. This is the truth. This is the truth. And I'm gonna repeat it. I'm repeated over and over until I believe it, until I rewrite that tape. And I'm committed to it, like I spend every morning doing this because we have been taught to hate ourselves, to hate our expansiveness, to hate our femininity. We've been taught to hate everything that God assigned us to do. And that's the only way we can be taking off our assignment is if we agree to it. Here here, my good people, my good people. UM, this is this is one of those times where you're welcome to continue welcome, you know, listening, and yeah, you're welcome. You're so welcome. You're welcome to continue listening. If I had in my way right now, I would just rewind from the beginning. This is this Isn't that again, y'all need depressed that Roll that back, roll that back. This is something that I am going to listen to over and over and over again. Like what you're doing and what you're expressing, Um, the information and the clarity you know it is. It's a job, people, it's work. Yeah, we'll be back after the break. I was just sitting here thinking, I was like, how much work has move put into get into this place, because in my mind, where you just came three days ago was a refresher you just needed to be. So I'm so curious when the work just it's just started, when you realize you had, if it started at a point real talk like yeah, where I looked in the mirror and I did not like what I was seeing. I was like, that woman there is bitter. That woman there is blaming other people for not seeing her, But why don't youse? Why can't why can't she see her? That woman right there feels victimized instead of empowered. And I really I could blame people if I want it, but it won't do no good. It's not like they're gonna they're gonna see my pain and treat me different. No, they're not. You know what I'm saying. They're gonna see it and saying she's better. Yeah, they're not gonna look at the circumstances that created that. They're not gonna look at the injustices that you've had to endure silent. They're not gonna look at all the times you had to swallow it to make sure that you could that you had because you had to sacrifice for other people. They're not they don't care. They don't care, and you know what, it's fine, but love it. It's not for you to care. It's not it's not right, It's okay, you know what I'm saying. I really had to like take time off, like I stopped working. I was like, I gotta stop working because I'm I don't feel well. And this is how sickness starts. When you're forcing yourself to do a thing that everything in your body is screaming saying no, I don't want to do this. This feels like rape. This this feels like violation. This feels like denial of myself. It feels like a denial of God. It feels like I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. And I had to stop everything, and I just started. At first, I went to this past life regression class and to start to I said, who was that before I came here? What I come here for? You know what I'm saying. And I started, I just started like searching for teachers, people who have been on this path to understanding themselves. I started, you know, with Wayne Dyer, with Joe Despenser and I'm doing different Abraham Hicks and different meditation immortalities and tuning for killing and and going within. But I'm a tape those conversations that I have with myself with some of the most powerful I would sit with myself and argue for hours, right because you know, we argued for our limitations and I had to keep going. But is it the truth? Though I hear what you're saying, I hear how you feel mood, but is it the truth? And is it the only way? And what in me is so attached to that thing that I'd be willing to suffer abuse to have that thing? And why who told me that it was? It was more valuable than me? You know what I mean? Like, those are the conversations. And I would write this stuff down and read it over and really tussle with myself in my mind to to rewire that stuff. And the brain is a machine and there are ways to rewire this machine. And I mean I did it. I probably started this real hardcore, like because I just got to a place where I was like, yo, I don't like this person and I love me, Like you know what I mean. It's like when you get the point where you I don't know your best friend, your mother, your child. You're like, I don't like cute, and why what's broken about this thing? Because the thing is it's like you. You can't leave you, you know what, unless you leave this physical plane right and even still the soul. You can't leave your soul, you know what I'm saying. So it's like I'm stuck with me. So how do I fix this? Because nobody else is gonna fix it? Nobody else cares enough, they don't know how, and they can't. It's my assignment. So what do I have to do? What do I have? You know what I'm saying. It's stripped down, take everything, like I went to the peerod. It's like I'm not wearing no makeup, i ain't getting my nails done, I'm not leaving the house. I'm I'm I'm writing all over my walls, like, oh my god, all my walls had written all over them. And so I'm wrestling with myself about what things I want to unlearn? Who taught me this? Honestly? Because I studied at the when I was a teenager, I was a part of this program in Baltimore, like a street theater arts program. That taught young people about the signs of domestic violence. And when I tell you, I see it in the music industry. You wear everything I learned at the House of Ruth. I see those same characteristics and behaviors and cycles and patterns in the music business, and so I can identify and that's abused. That's not healthy. You need me to feel like I'm worthless, so then you can pay me less, you can get me to do what you want me to do, and I can feel like, Okay, I guess, I guess, I gotta you know. I remember one of my earliest memories of somebody in the music business who I was learning from. They told me, hey, look, you're not special. Don't think you're not gonna get raped. Everybody gets raped in this business. It's just about how much vasiline you can negotiate, right. But they told me that, and I just thought to myself, like, that can't be healthy, that can't be right, you know, and only we can right that wrong. Is the reason I mentored so many young girls get into the music business, helped read through their contracts with them. We don't have to be this way. It does not have to be this way. We can change how business is done, we can change the ethics and the code, and we can. We don't have to keep perpetuating this because now you can't even find where it's starting. You don't know who the master is. You know the slave is because how it feels. But everybody is re mimicking these slave master dynamics with each other, and it just doesn't have to be this way. And I just got to a a point where I was like, I want out. I don't even want to do music if they got to feel like this, like I'm cool, you know what I'm saying, I'll do something else. And there's but there's you know, there's also so many ways to you know, the phrase gett a cat. You know, I always say to vocalists or artists in general, like, look, you know there is a Nina Simona, and there's a Diana Ross, you know what I mean? Like there is a Yasine Bay, and there's a Drake, there's a there's a title of the Creator in between. There's there's a whole bunch of different kinds of ways to establish and to take care of yourself and to share your heart and soul with with other people. It doesn't always have to fit into a particular box to do it. You just have to figure out one that you don't fit into a box, and two that you're willing, willing, able, and capable of making a sustainable life for yourself. It is possible. It can be done. I see it all the time. Oh girl, I'm I'm here. Oh I'm here. I'm fully present in the moment. I think that, you know, she was just like, there's there's a ya, there's all kinds of different ways to do this thing. But I think really what I'm taking from this moment with Mono is just that you know, the self is you got to carry the self everywhere you go, and that this business, this business is built on a very sordid and twisted view of the self, you know, whether it be whether it be positive or it be negative. It's like it just thrives on a on on this crookedness of the way that you would see your off through whatever filter that they decide to give you, whether it's a romanticized one or demonized one. And so if you're not already dealing with that enough in the world as a black woman just period walking the street, and then you enter an industry that thrives on it, and so to push back on it has to be intentional, and then maybe it's intentional in ways that you not really ready to say you're doing. Like so people it's working for, they may be doing some of these things that MoU is doing, but they may not have the words for that, you know what I'm saying. But I think it's really important that she's putting words in language to it, because what it means is that that that that thriving under these circumstances means that you have to be intentionally and consistently pushing back. And if you're not pushing back, then you are in essence feeding the beast and and and not in a way that's just about other people, primarily for yourself. And that to me is to me, I am absolutely in alignment and feeling exactly where she's coming from, because these are the things I sit with all of the DA's with all the time, and that I'm that I've had to figure out and it's still in the process of figuring out. And this is what I love also to about this space is that it does not mean that you can never figure it out, that you can never this is like an ongoing process, and that really you have to have a certain amount of of experience to even begin to think about it this way, so to even know what you don't want to have to have things to look back on and reflect, you know. And it hurts my feelings that someone thought that they were telling you that by telling you that you must accept violation, you know what I mean and that. But but even though it hurts me, it doesn't surprise me because we've all heard the same version. Well we've heard the same version up above the story, and at least you got more, at least you got warned about it. But it's interesting to me because you know, as we dive into so many different ways that we've been programmed on this show, like move for real, this is we on some deep two. But also remembering that, and I feel very asia and saying is that when it comes to the music industry, it was built on this white man's model, and it seems like it's continuously still in that box. Even when a black person becomes the heavy cast label or creates this error or whatever, it's still within this white It's nobody's trying to change the whole thing. They're just trying to excel within it. I really hate that because it happened to you. Then you perpetuated with the next you know, with the next artist. I I can't bear that. That that bothers me so because you've been done dirty and somebody took your masters or you know, they they had you on a two year promo tour. You know that you signed up for, you know, and not making any money while they're collecting best believe that. You know that you go around, you advance yourself, and then you do the exact same thing to another artist, Like, oh, that drives me absolutely insane. And that same model. That's what I'm saying, you still you still playing in white Man games. That's what I'm saying. It is because we lacked the vision to really see it be a different way. You know. The one thing I love about I recently did this thing about abolitionism, right and about reimagining, Like I love the idea of reimagining a thing that you've never seen be away and you know, because that's what I feel like we lose. That's why I started with the childhood wonder when we could just imagine, when we didn't know what the rules were nobody told us well this is standard, right, you don't know what standards, so you get to just imagine it the way you want and then do it just like that, you know. And that's what I feel like the place that I'm at now, even with the music video content that we're creating, we're create like many movies and and I'm definitely like an anthropologist in my my heart, like I'm getting to do everything I've always wanted to do without anyone saying, like, you know, black people don't want to think that hard, which is something I've heard many times. Uh, And and really creating this art from this imaginative place that hasn't been done before, and it's it hasn't been um there are no stipulations around there, there's no boundaries around. I don't have a time frame, I don't have a you know. And it feels like childhood again. It feels like joy. And that's what I was searching for in the moment when I wasn't feeling joy. Remember when an album was worked for a year, could be two, could be three, you know what I mean? Because art, it doesn't true, art doesn't necessarily jump on people. It's gracious, it opened yourself as has wide open arms. I love that you use the word imagination, because you know, the word of the day is radical imagination. Is that we're all giving ourselves an opportunity to think, to think outside of the box in a way that says that the box doesn't even exist. So I'm not even thinking outside of the box by I'm not even acknowledging the box in order to think outside of it. I'm creating from from the gut, from the Mud, and that I'm not I've had this conversation with my children, as my children have experienced obviously this year, this uptick and so much conversation around race and politics and things of that nature. And they're young, and they're on social media, so they always responding. And I said to them, and so they might respond with anger, or they might decide to be in the comments and shut down a racist or this, that and the other. And I told the kids, I said, you know, let's think about this. We don't want to accept these systems, but we also don't want to be in perpetual response to them, because that is also that is also being focused on the white gays and focused on these systems gays that we're always responding. We're always in this perpetual relations with and reactionary with these systems. And what your radical imagination does is it says that I it's a note for me, dog, I rejected all actually engaged. You know what I'm saying. I'm not gonna engaged with you on this at all. So I am going to take you out of the equation. And you said this many times during when you were speaking about what was on your heart, about how You're like, I'm removing myself from that conversation. I'm no longer going to think of myself in relationship to these to these systems. I'm thinking about myself with myself at the center. That's the conversation we have had here quite a few times. Is on a metaphysical level, the most valuable asset that you have is your attention in what you would put your attention on increases. Right, So if you don't want a thing to grow, you have to remove your attention from it, you really do, and focus your attention on what you do want to grow. Your attention is fertilizer, you know what I mean. And that's why, even even in terms of the activities I was doing around forgiveness because it was like, I can't even give you none of my heart space, you know. I mean, I could wish you love. That's amount about the amount of heart space you can have, But I can't harbor. I can't harbor no resentment towards you. That's that's valuable real estate I could be putting towards another creative idea. You know what I'm saying, and that I'm t it is the most liberating experience I have ever had. I mean, I just pride tis of joy and I was laughing and crying at the same time because it's so freeing. I don't I am mad at you. I gotta be mad at you, for you did the best that you could at the place that you was at in your journey. And that's it. I think of these words, these words that you're using, think of these words that you're used, and feels I am free, so good. We'll be back after the break moment. Please tell us how all of this transformation and study and paying attention really that's what it is, you know, paying attention to yourself. How is that evolved into into your new creative What's what's going on your music? Man, So I have really that mine one of you stuff. Frost is a wellness brand outside of just music. I'm a wellness brand, and so everything that I'm writing about is about our collective wellness, you know what I mean. It's about getting to that place where we're more well. So the topics that are covered, like, that's what I can get passionate about. I get passionate about, like being able to write about a topic that I haven't written about before, prospective vision scope shaping. You know that doesn't for me? Like I love that so like the song concepts of titles, Like one of my favorite songs is called north Star. It's the song and viato that I feel most proud of. And I'm such a like I'm a really creative person. Normally I just create and then you know, keep kicking out, keep it moving. But then I actually got to sit and look at it and be like, what's that? I feel that's proud. It's like, I feel really proud of it. It started out as a conversation I was having with my son on his way to school, and he was saying because the first time going to public school, and his dad was saying, telling me, should go to public school. And so he's like, all right, I'll try it out. You were home schooling for so long. Yeah, yeah, because you know I don't. I don't. I don't want you to take my word with son. You know, if you think maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, go ahead, baby, try it out. You know I'm not. You know, the prison ahead. And so he wanted to go try it out and let maybe a weekend. He said, Mommy, I feel so different. I feel so different than everybody. I said, you welcome, He said what I said, I worked hard at that. Huh. If you're blended right in, you know what I'm saying. Why do you think I took you all around the world? Like why you think I put you in certain circles and the sacrifice that I have made, certain gigs I didn't take to make sure that you could stay with me or you could have you know, I started him in a math and science program at four, you know what I mean? Like he he was able to like experiment which is really gross to me, but experiment on a human brain that has seventy of its original water at at six years old? Like, why do you think I did all of that I'm saying, why get you into coding at five? Like? He speaks like four or five different coding languages now right, I don't know if it's supposed to say speak, but you know what I'm talking about. I'm like, like, I know what away, Yes, I said, why why do you think I did all of that? It's not for you to be the same. It's not for you to blend in. It's for you to have the opportunity to to be expansive, to to be all that you can be to you know what I mean. I said, But you gotta he said, well, nobody else is like I know, baby, But you gotta understand that the righteous rose a lonely one. The words are told my only son, the week will fold and come undone, the strong will grow, will leave them up. First I started writing this Perst, and I said, you gotta know that in this life, it's not gonna be a whole bunch of people agreeing with the righteous path. Right when you are one of one, You're not gonna find a whole bunch of people that you can may be identify with, the people that can say, oh, yeah, they've done it before, or maybe they have maybe they haven't. But you gotta. You gotta be able to be self referring. You gotta use that intuition inside of you. There may not be a co sign for what you feel is right inside of your gut. There may not be you know, everybody else may be doing all doing the same thing, and something aside. He may be like, I don't know if that's right. You gotta go with you. You're gonna be you know what I mean that the leader that part. You gotta be a leader. You can't be a follower. So we're having that whole conversation driving to school, and I said, but this is a good lesson for you though, because you gotta go into the world. And then because I want you to really be able to know your voice from everyone else's here, the internal whisper inside of you. The more you follow it, the louder it will get, and God will never steer you wrong. So I started writing a song called north Star. I was sitting with me and d Smoke was having this conversation. I was telling about my son and I said, you know, we use escaping from slavery, we use the north Star as a guiding system, and imagine walking on foot from like Georgia to Canada following a star. Think about that kind of faith. You gotta have that kind of brilliance first of all to even know right. And then there were these colded quilts that would be put up at at safe house along the way to show you where you were in the path, like, I mean, that's where you come from. What are we talking about? And in this life, people will try to confuse you about who you are with your capable of and you gotta remember all that we've overcome. We're resalient, were unstoppable, unbreakable, right, I don't know, my sonody like a little. My mother gotta give me this long history lessons, you know. So I started writing that song, be so thafeful. So they all fuss about the lessons. They can't say, don't say that around my mother. But whatever. So we set the time period eighteen sixty four, and I was real intentional about there are no white people in the video. There is no for no, no oppression scene. All you see is our greatness. All you see is us with the coded quilts, with the you know, looking at the stars, are seeing us as astronomers. You see us escape and you see you know what I mean. You see us in towards victory. You see us on horses gallantly like it's the same time period. I made sure that all of the wardrobe and was from that time period. The poetry in the beginning came from a quilt from the eighteen hundreds. But you only see our victory. You only see our victory. And and that's what I mean by when you put your focus on that's what increases you only just it ain't that the pain ain't there or you want focus on the victory. And that's what you give power to. And it is the piece that I am most proud of. Everything I've done in my career is so well executed. And I also included my indigenous culture. I had my son in full regalia of a grass dances regalia. I had ah, you know, a headband with the snake our our Choctaw, the symbol for our tribe is a diamond back snake, and I have it before you even dumped dumping this. Can you tell us how you even became aware about my culture of your indigenous background? Yeah, exactly. So. In nineteen seven the eight there was the Freedom of Religion Act was passed for Native Americans to be able to practice the culture. Up until that point, it was illegal for most people if you lived in the South, like if you didn't live on a reservation. Right after Andrew Jackson moved all of the Native tribes off the East coast. Right, So one of my ancestors, I guess my my grandmother's grandfather was walked to Oklahoma during the Indian Removable Act, and he walked himself back. But when he got back, all his land had been sold and the Census Bureau reclassified anybody that was still there is colored. So everybody just became colored. Natives on the East Coast as far back dating as um William what is his last name, he's the person who founded Fake Found. The European who fake founded James. Now, when he describes the natives that he encountered there, which were like the Tuscar, Royer, the Maharan, and not Away, he says they look like Ethiopians, They're similar to he calls them dark angels. Right. So a book called by even been certain call they came before Columbus talks about Africans who had already been to the United States, South America and the Caribbean hundreds and hundreds of years before Europeans were here, right, there are a lot of similarities between traditional African culture and traditional East Coast Native culture. So my family, like most families, were not allowed to practice the traditions. I have friends who are not beho that. Maybe they're in their forties now, they can remember doing sweat lodge ceremonies and having the FBI shoot shoot bullets into the sweat lodges. If you all studied the Battle of Wounded Need, if you if you learn about Leonard Peltier, like the original Wounded Need was over the ghost dance. They killed him for for for dancing, for doing the ghost dance. So my mother and my grandmother, as soon as it was legal, they went back to relearn the culture. They always knew they were Chocodall, like they talked about it in the family. You know, it's just like a happy stance, like it didn't it wasn't anything to make a big fuss about it. Just they knew they was Choctaw from Mississippi. But when the Indian Movement Act was passed, then it was like we can go back and learn the culture. So by the time I was born, they was already so deep in it that I you know, I grew up dancing in pow wows and competed in pow wows from the time I was five until I was fourteen. I supported my mother her vision quests. I supported my system her vision quests. I've been out to Sundance. So I was just knee deep into these traditions like at any given moment, Like that's how my childhood was. At any given moment, you know, my mother could say, Hey, you know, pack up, We're about to go to such and such for a full moon ceremonial or womb lodge or like when I came into my cycle, right, we had to have a womb lodge. We had ceremonies around around your blood, you know, when you would bleed outside into the earth. So many the foods that we learned to cook the way you know, we harvested things like all that stuff. I grew up like that. You'll never know, right because I may not always present like that's the kind of but that's the kind of childhood that I had. That even though I grew up partially in Baltimore City, but my mother always you know, kept me close to the earth, and because I was home school, she would give me credit. I get school credit for that. She'd be like, go help your grandmother build the sweat lodge, you know what I mean, Like, and I get a class credit. Go help, you know, play and do some b work. I had to make my hair ties for the so u you know, or sometimes the hide, the deer hide. We'd be like, I don't know, she'd be stretching it or something, go making drums whatever, and she just give me class credit for that. Then when I went to public school, to gave me a zero for everything I learned in homeschool. But yeah, so that was just my reality. It wasn't until I got into the world, starting to going to public school, I realized like, oh, nobody else lives like this. Oh we grew up was some weirdos stuff. This is not normal for anybody else. I was won't go through so many emotions. Are all a lot of jealousy, A lot of jealousy, A lot of jealousy. I'm sorry, it was really I want it's just what a blessed existence. Oh my god, we're taking this ancestry test right right right, It's true, and that's beautiful. Because you said nineties seventy eight, which happens to be the year and that I was born. And so you're thinking that just in the forty two years that I've been on this earth, that people who predated every other person that's in one in this land, we're not able to legally practice their own religions, you know. And it's like and that they've only been able to do it for as long as I've been here, that language and everything. And I'm sure you've seen on social media about the boarding schools, right the last boarding school was closed in the nineties, Like it was. The boarding schools were created to force Native people not to know their culture anymore. You couldn't speak your language, you couldn't you had to cut your hair, like they was hoping that you would forget all of your customs, separating the children from their past, they would adopt them out different places. When people get offended by the term colonizer, they they they really get in their bag about colonizer, which which like, okay, it's the it's systematic how this thing works. You separated people from their language, you separated people from there from their religion, you separate the elders from from their children. They did it with the Aborigines, is done with the the the indigenous people here in the United States. It's done consistent. It's so consistent. Like at this point, you know, the tactics, Homy like you to see how does how does they is gonna play out? So so owning oneself and that wholeness thing, you know, one, yeah, might as well go ahead and get involved and find out who where you're from and who your people are. And then once you do that and do some research into that, and and maybe make a trip and go see some folks and eat some food and listen to some language, and listen to some music, and and share and and learn and teach your children. What a beautiful way to exist, move move it is. And I want to I want to point something out to about about this because you know, um Mamuna said that this this was her whole life. You know, she was born into cultural practices and understand these things. And yet still as a woman, she had to be extremely intentional about pushing back at this world and the pasis she has to occupy. And that's knowing much more than anyone else on this call about the culture and that and then that says something about how how difficult it is to to be yourself and to know who you are under these circumstances that you can even have the kind of jump start that Mamuna had and still have to go through the very specific work and self work that says, I gotta push back at these things, and even more so, I think for you, because you can't unsee what you've seen already, and so to have that kind of exposure to who you are and then experience this world and this country and this industry the way that it is is in absolute contradiction to that. And so you know, I pray for you, and I'm so grateful that you are in this earth, that you're in this growth with us, because we have we have to be able to look at at at you and listen to you and other folks like you, and and use that as an opportunity to learn and to hear you know what I mean, learning it here. And that's one of the many things about a podcast is you after this said, you have to listen, and you you did. You did a great when you continue to do this great thing, you did a great thing out draining, cause I want to say to cause you got so much in there. The programming is very pervasive. And my mother and he loves have a TV in the house when I was growing up, and it's still very, very pervasive, and the constant programming of not enoughness still was present even with the culture, you know, because everybody's colonized. Even within Native circles, there's a lot of anti blackness, you know what I'm saying. So although my birth certificates say I'm Native, my grandmother will stand next to you and be like, you know what I'm saying, she's Native, and it will still be you know, I still had to deal with that as a child growing up, with people saying she's too dark to to you know what I mean to be, to dance, to win to you know, all that all that silly stuff, because people are colonized, and you gotta understand that the term five dollar Indian comes from the time when white people could buy into any tribe they wanted to for five dollars and become the head. So it's yeah, it's a lot of work to be done. It's a lot of work to be done, and they bring their anti blackness with them everywhere they go all around the world. You know what I'm saying, that's just fascin that Natives aren't aware of their own history. And I mean, I know we're the same way, but wow, in my mind, I just thought that all natives understood that. But this is why, this is why we have to be very careful to understand the anti blackness is bigger than particular groups of people. And that is a thing that will it will bounce this little self all the way around and even within us as black people, and black people are very happily will participate in anti black people will participate in it. Oh, It's it's a thing, it's a system, it's a thing. It's always has to be under attack. And I think sometimes we get into this individual and and I will say this for myself and even as my experience as being an African American, we have a tendency, because we don't know a lot of our culture, to romanticize relationships with culture, to romanticize Africa, to romanticize native culture, and we will romanticize seeing them as a whole without seeing things as this whole, this whole experience. It's also being mindful of what is what is black culture and what is a stereotype that's been perpetuated again and again to make us think that this is how we are. We have to be very mindful of that because what is what is real and what is not mm hmmm, Well, a lot of people will say that the culture is real, it's it's the black part that's the social construct. But we we call black culture something a very real life, a real deal lived experience that we that we know and understand, and that we know one understand without anyone that any other black person having to explain it. We just know it, you know. And I had a conversation with a friend earlier today just about how, you know, we can never leave our Africanness behind. We bring it with us and put it and insert it into everything that we do. Just why black church feel so different than white church. It's like because we we take our Africanness everywhere that we go and we say, oh, this is a oh this is where I am. Let me insert who I am into where I am. And that's why wherever we go we leave this indelible mark and that begin it creates culture. So when you think about church culture, you think about anywhere that black people quote unquote quote unquote black people find themselves. You will find a thing in which we have inserted who we are and built on it. And that's why we recognize it. That's why we recognize it everywhere we go. That's why we know it and figure out what is that little little thing. Yes, it's the centering of that thing we know in our core. Dear friends, I just want to say I love you all and appreciate you and respect you immensely. Thank you so much Mo Muna for for being here. You are a gift, so so grateful that you. Everybody caught queen of culture. Everybody queen of culture. Let's say it again. Visual about this, this journey on being whole. It's the wholeness of it all. And anywhere you can take a lesson, I hope that you have to. There's no way you ain't. You ain't working with me all this time without finding some lessons in and this thing here, Okay, So grab them, hold on to them, investigate, do your research, and get involved in yourself and your wholeness. Thank you so much for listening to a Jay dot ilta podcast. Blessings, blessings and more of them. How do you eat an elephant? One by a tie. All Right, y'all, Eve's here, which means it's time for the resources. Mamuna gave us so much game this episode, but first by and stream her new album, Queen of Culture. The visuals for the song north Star are beautiful and the song is just as stunning. All Right, a few other things. For most of us, there is plenty of learning and un learning that we can do when it comes to indigenous people's and what we now call the United States of America. That means that you're going to have to do more digging on your own. But here are a few things that came up today. So Indian Removal Act, signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in eighteen thirty, authorized the president to negotiate removal treaties with tribes east of the Mississippi River, leading to the forced removal in genocide of Native American peoples the Choctaw or Mumu's tribe. They originally lived on lands in what is now the southeastern US. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the U. S Government ran boarding schools that took Native American children away from their families, stripped them of their culture, and forced them to assimilate. Lastly, Mumu mentioned the book They Came Before Columbus, The African Presence in Ancient America, written by Ivan van Certema. In it, he talks about the similarities between cultures in Africa and the ancient America's contact between the continents, and descriptions from firsthand accounts of the era. I'll leave links that you might find useful in your research in the episode description. Hi, if you have comments on something we said in this episode called eight six six. Hey, Jill, if you want to add to this conversation, that's eight six six three nine five four five five. Don't forget to tell us your name and the episode you're referring to. You might just hear your message on a future episode. Thank you for listening to Jill Scott Presents Jay dot Il the podcast. This podcast is hosted by Jill Scott, Layah st Clair and Agr Graden Danceler. It's executive producers are Jill Scott, Shawn g and Brian Calhoun's produced by Laya st Clair and me Eves Jeff Cope. The editing and sound design for this episode we're done by Christina Larenger. J Dot ill is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcast from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. H