Purveyors of the Obvious

Denver Green Festival and Pan African Arts Society

// May 5th, 2009 // Uncategorized

The first Denver Green Festival happened this past weekend at the Colorado Convention Center.  Denver is the latest city to host this festival which also takes place in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D. C. at various times through the year.  These festivals are a joint project of Global Exchange and Green America.  I have been looking forward to this festival for a while as I have been volunteering my time with it for seven months on the host committee.  Volunteer work is one of the foundations of the event.  Over the weekend more than 2,000 people put in their time from greeting attendees, valeting bikes, keeping an eye on waste recovery, and every other nook and cranny of manpower that is needed to run a large-scale event.

I had been aware of the exhibitors and speakers for a while, so was not surprised with the breadth of topics covered.  For me the huge surprise took place the night before the festival began.  The Pan African Arts Society in conjunction with the Denver Green Festival kicked off a May Day Grub Party and Panel in a small room at the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library.  A vegan soul food meal was provided by chef Deronn Turner in exchange for attendees bringing their own dishes and flatware.  The event was opened with a performance by the Heritage African Drum and Dance Ensemble.  The room was filled with satisfied people sitting in their seats.  Full tummies and joyful senses were abound.

What we experienced next was simply icing on the evening.  The panel took to the floor of the room.  Artist stic.man of Dead Prez, author Afya Imobu, eco-chef Bryant Terry, collective farm opearator Faatma Mehrmanesh, community activist Zakiya Harris, activist Ambessa Cantave, chef Deronn Turner, and a representative from the Denver Ausar Auset Pan-African holistic spiritual group.

The evening was a chance to open up a dialogue for the Denver Five Points community about topics that are not usually targeted towards them, urban greening and food justice.  Between green events and scientific academic meetings I know first-hand how communities of color are not part of the discussion of what is going on in the environment around us.  For me just going to this panel was a treat.

It was also a chance to hear about the environmental movement away from the statistics of global climate change, advocacy of how we use natural resources, and options of all the “green” products on the market we can purchase these days.  In reflecting on the speakers there were cycling themes they kept hitting on.  The community does not know it could be living healthier, it does not know how it can be living healthier, there needs to be a return to the ethos that indigenous communities realized before they were corraled in cities with few opportunities, food is a key component to making healthier communities.

Stic.man, Zaikiya, and Ambessa talked about getting the message of a better way to live out to people through music.  Dead Prez are able to use their lyrics to reach a worldwide audience about things to consider.  I loved stic.man for talking about how little he knows about the green movement, but that he is actively absorbing as much as he can.  That humility can be rare in the pop African-American community and he showed true leadership in that Socratic thought.  Zaikiya and Ambessa are co-founders of Grind for the Green, a non-profit for youth in the Bay Area, and showed how they have used music leadership in getting youth to attend workshops and throw large, green hip-hop events in Northern California.  They are guiding a new generation of leaders to advocate for better lives in their communities.  Zaikiya said her moment of epiphany about why this project was necessary came when she realized she was a hypocrite for talking to her students about police brutality and community safety, giving them processed snacks from Costco, then going home to eat her vegetarian dinner.  It was in this realization that she  learned that “if the hoods don’t go green, there will be no saving America.”

Bryant Terry, the author of Vegan Soul Kitchen, comes from an academic history background.  He drew on his knowledge of the Black Panthers and how they would provide food programs for children in their communities to come up with the idea of Grub parties.  These nationwide parties now draw neighborhoods together to provide good food and discussions about what is going on around them.  The quality of food is important though because there is rampant diabetes and other preventable diseases in communities of color.  The common item that Bryant was able to use to draw the room together was collard greens.  Anyone who has had this traditional dish knows it is usually cooked until it is a sloppy brown-green blob.  All the nutrients are cooked out.  He showed how he re-worked this recipe so that the greens are blanched, then quickly sauteed with raisins.  He went through slides that drew gasps from the audience.  People were asking him to repeat recipe titles because they sounded so good. There was also a lot of clapping for each new dish that appeared on the screen.

The Ausaru Auset Denver Society, Afya Ibomu, Deronn Turner, and Faatma Mahrenesh all talked about food and health as it relates to spirituality and how you live your life.  Afya Ibomu talked about her journey to veganism from being a sick child, learning a better way to eat as a teen to get healthier, helping her ailing family with what she learned about diet, to becoming a holisitc nutrition expert.  Deronn is a member of Ausaru Auset and talked about the way she cooks as being a vehicle for making healthier children who will be more productive in society.  Faatma talked about seeing the need for better food options in her community that were economical and then taking action.  Last year she contacted Grant Hill Family Farm and was able to gleen their crops before they tilled.  She took volunteers who collected bags and bags of food.  As the group’s leader she learned how to can and set up a canning collective to have good food through the winter for her and participating families.  This year she began the East Side Grower’s Collective with over 20 plots that are planted for food.

This panel touched on many topics about poverty and ill health that are commonly associated with communities of colors in the city and how to break from that cycle.  They suggested that people learn how to do well in the green economy with the incentive that indigenous cultures were the original green movement.  It is essentially a birth right we need to reclaim.  Food is one way to do this by getting away from what Malcom X referred to as the “slave diet” of inappropriate food for an efficient body.  Stic.man said it best with, “the green movement IS an extension of the revolutionary movement.”  The panel discussion lasted for close to three hours.  It was engaging and uplifting.  For me it was the best way to start the festival weekend.  While I assigned a singular role to each panel member when I first mentioned them they are each activists, artists, and authors in their own rights.  It is through their multi-faceted talents that they are making a difference in underrepresented communities.

The next day I covered the festival’s opening program with a media badge.  After I took some pictures of the mayor I was asked where the Lakota Indians were who gave the opening blessing.  I was mistaken for being in their group.  I was asked a question about where the dancers would be performing again since I was mistaken for being with Fiesta Colorado who also were in the opening program.  Upstairs I was bummed that nobody in the audience could recognize a common KRS-One lyric about vegetarianism that Bryant Terry was going to give a prize away for.  There was also silence as he went through the slides of food that had the crowd from the night before going nuts.  I think the saddest moment of how special the night before was happened when I was reading a Denver Green Festival article in a journal I like.  The author wrote about Bryant Terry making spinach with raisins in his demonstration and how it tasted yummy.  This really offended me for some reason.  Collards are not spinach.  For me it is part of a cultural identity and the author scored a big FAIL with her mistake and I could not read the rest of the article.

I have no delusions about how minorities in the Front Range play into the dialogue about the environment where I live.  When I joined the host committee in September I got involved in a discussion with the festival regional director about diversity being a key component of all the Green Festivals but that we would have to brainstorm about how to make it a part of this festival due to the demographics of the area.  The festival itself was great.  You can read any of the reviews that have been posted in print and online outlets about the speakers and exhibitors.  For me the real proud moments of the festival happened the night before the convention center doors opened.  It happened in a room in a library on Welton Street and I am grateful to everyone who participated in that dialogue.