Submission Tracks & Thematic Areas

Proposals should align with the Conference's/Gathering’s theme and are invited but are not limited to the following tracks (a presenter’s proposal may combine more than one track). These tracks are designed to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue and center Indigenous and Diasporic perspectives:

TRACK A. Reclaiming What Was Hidden

• Focus:  Recovery, memory, and the restoration of silenced knowledge.

  This track is for work that brings hidden, denied, or misunderstood ancestral knowledge back into view. It welcomes presenters working to recover lineage and memory, to confront the silences in family and community histories, and to correct the labels, such as “demonic,” “evil,” “superstition”,  that have been used to dismiss ancestral spiritual systems.

  Welcomes proposals on:

  • Genealogy research, family archives, and oral-history recovery

  • Ancestral grave sites, burial traditions, and sacred spaces

  • Silences, denial, and missing records in family and community histories

  • Misunderstood or demonized ancestral spiritual systems: myth versus reality

  • Recognizing disquiet, intuition, and inherited memory as ancestral signals

  • Cultural identity formation among diasporic populations.

  • Restorative justice through memory and historical acknowledgment.

TRACK B. Ancestral Healing & Whole-Person Wellness

• Focus:  Traditional healing in dialogue with contemporary health and mental wellness.

  This track examines how ancestral and traditional healing practices can be honored on their own terms and brought into conversation with contemporary mental-health and wellness paradigms, working toward “whole-person” care for Indigenous, Black, and peoples of color.

  Welcomes proposals on:

  • Ancestral herbs, plant knowledge, medicines, and healing treatments

  • Spiritual technologies and ritual as pathways to healing and balance

  • Intersections and tensions between ancestral practice and organized religion

  • The body, sexuality, and autonomy within ancestral traditions

  • Integrating traditional practice with contemporary mental-health frameworks

TRACK C. Foodways & the Land

Focus:  Nourishment, cultivation, and the knowledge held in what we eat.

This track honors food and the land as living ancestral technology, including the ingredients our communities have carried across generations and geographies to the communal acts of gathering, preparing, and eating together. It welcomes cooks, growers, foragers, and scholars of foodways alike.

Welcomes proposals on:

• Traditional foods carried across diasporas and still used today

• Foraging, gathering, and ingredient knowledge

• Preparation, cooking practice, and the communal act of eating

• Food as medicine and the overlap of culinary and herbal knowledge

• Stories of origin, migration, and adaptation told through food

• Food insecurity and the social determinants of health

• Food justice as community practice — land access, community gardens, and urban agriculture as sites of cultural renewal and collective care

TRACK D. Voice, Story & Living Language

Focus:  Oral traditions, language, and the transmission of cultural memories.

This track is for the carriers and students of the spoken word, such as the  storytellers, language-keepers, and elders through whom knowledge passes from one generation to the next. It welcomes both the practice of oral tradition and scholarship about how cultural memory is transmitted and preserved.

Welcomes proposals on:

• Oral histories and storytelling traditions

• Language and linguistics: idioms, colloquialisms, and sayings

• Elders’ roundtables and intergenerational wisdom sessions

• Cross-cultural stories, myths, and the meanings beneath them

• Methods for preserving and transmitting oral knowledge

• Women’s roles as keepers of ancestral memory and cultural heritage. 

TRACK E. Expressive Arts as Ancestral Technology

Focus:  Art as knowledge, communication, and spiritual practice.

This track treats artistic practice as a form of ancestral technology in its own right — a way of knowing, communicating, and connecting with the spirit and the community. It welcomes practicing artists and performers, as well as, those who study and teach the cultural and spiritual dimensions of the arts.

Welcomes proposals on:

• Music: drumming, rhythm, instrumentation, and song

• Dance and body movement, including body autonomy

• Visual and craft traditions: weaving, basketry, sculpture, painting

• Spoken word, performance, and storytelling as art

• The arts as ritual, celebration, and spiritual continuity.