AUTHOR

    Marquetta L. Goodwine, who is now officially Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, a native of St. Helena Island,
    South Carolina, is an author, computer scientist, mathematician, preservationist, and the selected and elected Head-of-State for
    the Gullah/Geechee Nation. She is the official spokesperson for Gullah/Geechees. The Gullah/Geechee people organized and
    voted to establish her position along with the Wisdom Circle Council of Elders and Assembly of Representatives. They have their
    own constitution and flag. The Gullah/Geechee Nation begins in Jacksonville, North Carolina and extends southward to
    Jacksonville, Florida encompassing the Sea Islands and the Lowcountry. The South Carolina General Assembly honored and
    acknowledged Queen Quet's leadership via Resolution S. 1458.

    Goodwine is the founder of the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, the first organization to exist to work to protect the land,
    culture and rights of Gullah/Geechees, who continue to be forced out of their island and coastal homes due to development and
    economic pressures. In 1999 she became the first Gullah to speak before the United Nations, giving testimony at an April 1
    hearing of the Commission on Human Rights in Switzerland.[1] She has since been brought back to be a participant in the United
    Nations Forum on Minority Rights which was first established in 2008.

    This book commemorates the historic
    site on the Georgia coast where a newly
    discharged cargo of captured Africans,
    still in chains, walked hand in hand back
    into the sea rather than face life in
    America in slavery. This noble event
    inaugurated the long resistance of African
    Americans throughout the South to their
    capture, enslavement, and segregation.
    In her articles, "Destructionment: Treddin’
    een We Ancestas’ Teahs: and "Holdin
    Pun We Culcha," editor Marquetta L.
    Goodwine, Director of the
    Gullah/Geechee Sea Islands Coalition,
    brings us to the heart of the contemporary
    Gullah/Geechee struggle for cultural
    survival.

THE LEGACY OF IBO LANDING
edited by
Marquetta L. Goodwine

ISBN: 978-0932863256   
212 Pages  $27.95  2002










see below for
SYNOPSIS   AUTHOR  TABLE OF
CONTENTS

    Numbering some 500,000 speakers of Gullah, a creole language many regard as the African American mother tongue, the Gullah
    people embody the purest manifestation of African American culture still in practice in North America today. Concentrated primarily in
    the Lowcountry and Sea Islands of the southeastern United States, the Gullah are tied by kinship to African American communities
    throughout America who bear their cultural imprint—if no longer in language, then still in folkways or social values. As a result, they
    have contributed substantially to the sustenance of what is most African in African Americans’ cultural identity.

    Today, even as flourishing cultural festivals draw visitors to the Lowcountry from all over the nation, this historic culture teeters on the
    brink between renaissance and extinction. Economic development by and of benefit to outsiders is ushering in a silent yet deadly
    dispersal of the Gullah population by eating away at its traditional economic base. The privacy and inwardness which once protected
    Gullah traditions has been ruptured by outside voices. Those who felt the right to study them – historians, linguists, anthropologists
    – have been joined by tourists, developers, and businessmen, whose intrusions take on material dimensions. The Gullah must
    respond, or as a people, they may perish.

    This is the first Gullah-edited work of its order, combining fiction, nonfiction and social commentary with the history of the
    people. As such, it marks an historic turning point in Gullah development, indicating Gullah readiness to self-define in relation to
    the contemporary mainstream, to promote their culture, their views, their history, and the social issues that concern them.

    The Legacy of Ibo Landing is an exciting mixture of the contemporary and the historic – something familiar, yet so memory-laden as
    to be almost exotic. Through contemporary fiction, 16 pages of full color photos and paintings by celebrated artists Jonathan Green,
    Joseph Pinckney and Leroy Campbell, heritage resources lists, articles on Gullah history, culture, language and cuisine, The
    Legacy of Ibo Landing envelops us in the fertile nexus of African culture as it is practiced still in America. It offers nothing less than a
    voyage of the soul to African Americans’ American roots in the southern U.S.. Families burgeon, the generations encircle each other,
    and the ancestors walk.We savor Gullah folkways, tremble with the mysteries of their ghosts and spirits, and catch brief melodic
    strains of the Gullah language that has been preserved at such cost to its speakers, and is only now in the process of moving from
    an oral to a written language.

Praise House, 1988
Oil on Masonite, 14 inches x 11 inches
Jonathan Green — Naples, Florida
Courtesy of Sam Reed, Photograph by Timm Stam
Before Sunday School, 1994
Oil on Canvas, 10 inches x 8 inches
Jonathan Green — Naples, Florida
Courtesy of Paul Langston, Photograph by Tim
Stamm
The Passing of Eloise, 1988 Oil on Masonite, 36 inches x 48 inches
Johnathan Green — Naples, Florida Courtesy of Julia J. Norrell, Photograpoh by Tim Stamm
The Struggle to Save America’s Historic Gullah Culture
Gullah/Geechee Nation Headquarters
www.officialgullahgeechee.info
Marquetta L. Goodwine
QUEEN QUET
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