Cowboy Sunday Folk Fest

Info: The convening opens in sacred assembly with a community-centered worship circle designed to ground the day in collective intention. This intergenerational gathering invites participants into song, reflection, prayer, and embodied spiritual practice rooted in African diasporic traditions.

The worship service functions as both invocation and alignment — honoring ancestors, acknowledging land, and preparing our bodies and spirits to engage in a full day of learning, cultural exchange, and creative activation.

Through call-and-response, shared breath, and communal affirmation, we establish the spiritual foundation upon which the rest of the festival unfolds.

Info: Following morning worship, participants are invited into a guided Ring Shout experience — an embodied movement practice rooted in West and Central African diasporic spiritual traditions of the American South.

More than dance, the Ring Shout is a circulatory ritual of rhythm, resistance, and remembrance. Through synchronized steps, polyrhythmic clapping, call-and-response, and counterclockwise procession, participants engage movement as both archive and activation.

This class explores the Ring Shout as a technology of preservation — a practice that historically sustained community cohesion, spiritual endurance, and coded communication under conditions of displacement.

Grounded in accessibility and collective participation, “The Art of Release” invites all bodies into the circle, emphasizing movement as a pathway toward emotional release, ancestral connection, and communal alignment.

Info: The Folk Fest Market opens as a living ecosystem of cultural exchange. This curated marketplace uplifts local artisans, growers, and cultural practitioners whose work reflects lineage, land-based knowledge, and creative continuity.

More than commerce, the market is a site of circulation — where stories, techniques, recipes, textiles, seeds, and symbols move hand to hand. It invites participants to materially support heritage preservation while engaging directly with makers who embody intergenerational knowledge systems.

The market functions as both archive and activation, reinforcing economic resilience as a vital component of cultural sustainability.

Info: 2:00 PM Teach-In

Cowpeas Across the Diaspora: Land, Memory & Nourishment

This interactive foodways session explores the cowpea — including black-eyed peas — as a living technology carried across continents through migration, trade, and survival.

Participants will examine how cowpeas traveled from West Africa to the Americas, becoming foundational within African diasporic culinary traditions while preserving agricultural intelligence and ecological adaptation strategies.

Through storytelling, food preparation demonstration, and collective dialogue, this teach-in situates the cowpea not simply as an ingredient, but as a vessel of memory — holding nutritional knowledge, land stewardship practices, migration histories, and cultural resilience.

Food becomes pedagogy. Nourishment becomes archive. Preparation becomes preservation.

Info: 3:00 PM Vision Zine: Graphic Notation as Cultural Memory

The Vision Zine session introduces graphic notation as an accessible method of journaling, reflection, and creative writing. Blending image, symbol, text, mapping, and intuitive mark-making, participants create personal visual narratives that document memory, identity, and aspiration.

Rooted in traditions of grassroots publishing and community archiving, zine-making functions as both artistic expression and preservation practice. Graphic notation allows participants to record stories that may not yet have language — using line, rhythm, color, and fragment to translate lived experience onto the page.

This session positions the page as a site of sovereignty. Through guided prompts and creative exercises, participants will explore ancestral mapping, land relationship, and future visioning, leaving with a self-authored artifact that bridges reflection and imagination.

The Vision Zine becomes both record and rehearsal for dreaming

Info: Closing Session: Genealogy — Cosmologies of Being & Becoming

The convening closes with an expansive approach to genealogy — one that moves beyond charts and name maps into a deeper inquiry of origin, orientation, and responsibility. Here, lineage is understood as cosmology: an interconnected system of land, migration, memory, belief, kinship, and cultural transmission that shapes both identity and imagination.

Participants are invited to explore ancestry as a living field rather than a static record. This includes bloodline and chosen kin, inherited traditions and reclaimed practices, geographic displacement and ecological belonging. Genealogy becomes not only an act of looking back, but a practice of situating oneself within broader constellations of story and possibility.

In this closing reflection, we honor those who carried us here while clarifying what we are here to carry forward.

Info:

After a full day of cultural reflection, embodied learning, and heritage activation, the Folk Fest After Party offers space to exhale. This gathering invites participants to shift from study to celebration — to move, sweat, laugh, and reconnect in joy.

The after party is an intentional release valve: a moment to integrate the day’s teachings through rhythm and collective energy. Here, the dance floor becomes a site of freedom and fellowship, honoring the understanding that pleasure, sound, and movement are also technologies of healing and cultural continuity.

Come ready to let loose, celebrate community, and close the day in vibrant communion

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Viktor le. Givens and Southern Android productions