Chaka Khahn
Harvesting Memories along the Urban Brook: A Saponi Legacy of Spring Spicebush Tea
When people think of the inner city, they usually picture concrete, brick, and asphalt. But my great-aunt—a proud Saponi woman who held our family’s ancestral knowledge tight to her chest—looked at our neighborhood through a completely different lens. We lived in the heart of the inner city, right on the border of East Orange and Bloomfield, New Jersey. It was an area carved out by historic brooks and hidden urban waterways feeding into the Second River. To most folks, these urban streams were just a backdrop to the traffic, but to my aunt, they were lifelines where nature stubbornly refused to be paved over.
Even in the middle of our city neighborhood, the damp, shaded soil right along those urban brooks provided the perfect sanctuary for wild plants to thrive. Our foraging walks didn’t require a trek out to a distant forest; we simply walked down the block to where the concrete gave way to mud and running water.
It was there, walking beneath the filtered canopy of the urban understory, that she taught me how to truly see the land. She showed me that our medicine adapts just like our people do. Standing near the rushing brook with the city hum in the background, she would point out the very first gift of the season: spicebush (Lindera benzoin), or “spinebush” as we often called it at home. “The earth always provides what we need, right where we are,” she would tell me. That contrast—the sharp, clean smell of wild citrus and allspice cutting through the heavy city air—became a core memory for me.
Waking Up the Forest: Finding the Yellow Blooms
My aunt always knew the exact moment to gather the twigs. In early spring, long before the green leaves unfurled, the spicebush branches would blanket themselves in clusters of tiny, fuzzy, pale-yellow flowers. They looked like delicate drops of sunlight clinging to the gray-brown wood right above the water of the brook.
She taught me to look for the slender, flexible outermost twigs. As we clipped them cleanly, thanking the bush for its medicine, she would have me scratch the bark with my thumbnail. Instantly, a bright, warming scent would burst into the crisp air—a beautiful, complex aroma that carried a deep allspice warmth mixed with a clean, zesty hint of citrus.
The Woodland Medicine of the Saponi
For Eastern Siouan peoples like the Saponi, spicebush twig tea was much more than a comforting drink. It was a vital, mandatory “spring tonic” utilized to wake up the body after a long, stagnant winter of heavy, preserved foods.
My aunt would explain the healing power locked inside that aromatic bark as we walked back from the brook:
- Settling the Stomach: The volatile oils act as a natural carminative, instantly relaxing the stomach muscles to eliminate nausea, bloating, and painful cramps.
- Breaking Fevers: Known historically to early botanists as “fever bush,” a hot cup promotes therapeutic sweating, helping the body naturalize its temperature during colds or flu.
- Clearing the Lungs: Breathing in the steam from the pot opens up clogged sinuses, thins deep mucus, and calms persistent, hacking coughs.
- Easing Body Aches: As a gentle circulatory stimulant, the warming brew moves blood through sluggish systems, easing winter joint stiffness and muscle fatigue.
Keeping the Tradition: How to Prepare Spicebush Tea
The magic of my aunt’s recipe lay in how she coaxed the delicate, heat-sensitive citrus oils out of the wood without letting them escape into the air. Here is exactly how she taught me to prepare it, whether using fresh spring twigs from the brook or pre-dried segments:
- The Prep: Take a small handful of twigs and snap or cut them into short, 1-inch pieces. Gently crush or bruise the segments with the back of a spoon to crack the outer bark wide open.
- The Cold Start: Place 1 tablespoon of dried twigs (or a small handful of fresh ones) into a pot, and pour cold water directly over them. Heating the twigs slowly with the water ensures the deepest extraction.
- The Low Simmer: Bring the pot to a gentle boil, then immediately turn the heat down to low.
- Trap the Steam (Crucial Step): Cover the pot with a tight lid. The citrus notes live entirely in the essential oils of the steam. Leaving it uncovered means your medicine will float away into the room instead of staying in your cup.
- The Timing: Let it simmer softly under the lid for 12 to 15 minutes until the water turns a stunning, clear amber-gold.
When you strain it into your mug, you are left with a tea that is naturally smooth, mellow, and perfectly balanced by that unmistakable citrus finish. Taking a sip always transports me right back to those muddy inner-city brooks, walking side-by-side with a woman who ensured our connection to the earth would never be forgotten.
The DNA Data Monopoly: How European Bias Controls Modern Genetics
When we spit into a plastic tube and mail it off to a commercial DNA company, we expect an objective, scientific mirror of our history. We want a clear, unbiased look at our blood, our ancestors, and our roots.
But behind the colorful pie charts and the corporate marketing lies a deeper, systemic truth: Modern genetics is not a neutral science. It is an industry built on a foundation of structural bias, shaped entirely by who funds the research, who controls the databases, and who writes the algorithms.
If you have ever felt that commercial DNA tests erase, smooth over, or fundamentally misunderstand non-European lineages, you aren’t imagining things. The entire genetic landscape is built on a data monopoly that treats one specific population as the universal human standard.
1. The Reference Database Monopoly
DNA companies do not look at your genes and magically “see” a country, a tribe, or a specific coastline. Instead, they take your genetic markers and run them against a reference panel composed of previous customers and public data samples.
The math behind these panels is profoundly skewed. Globally, roughly 78% to 87% of all individuals in genetic databases are of European descent, despite Europeans making up only about 16% of the global population.
Conversely, individuals living across the entire African continent account for a staggering 0.16% of the data.
Because the database is overwhelmingly white, the camera lens of genetics is sharply focused on Europe. A customer with European roots can have their ancestry traced down to specific counties, distinct valleys, or tiny historical sub-populations. But because the databases lack diverse samples for Africa and the Americas, the algorithm frequently lumps non-European users into massive, sweeping continental blankets (like “West Africa” or “Indigenous Americas”) with very little internal detail.
2. The Universal Blueprint Is Mostly One Person
The bias isn’t just in commercial databases; it is hardwired into the foundational blueprint of global genetic science. To interpret any human DNA, scientists must compare it against a baseline standard called the Human Reference Genome—the universal map created by the historic Human Genome Project.
When this universal baseline was first built, more than 70% of the DNA used came from a single African-European donor from Buffalo, New York.
For decades, global medicine and anthropology defined a “normal” human genome based largely on this one individual’s genetic code. Any sequence that didn’t match this Eurocentric baseline was labeled an “anomaly,” a “mutation,” or a “variation,” rather than being recognized as a natural branch of human diversity.
3. Mathematical “Smoothing” and the Power to Erase
Because private, multi-million-dollar corporations write the software that handles your data, they control the statistical “noise threshold” of your test.
The software’s mathematical models are engineered to recognize dominant patterns. When an algorithm encounters a rare, distinct, or deeply specific genetic marker from a community that hasn’t bought millions of testing kits, the computer simply doesn’t recognize it.
To make the final consumer report look “cleaner,” the algorithm will often force an unfamiliar genetic segment to match the nearest large, high-confidence European bucket it knows well, or completely erase it as statistical noise. This results in software mathematically smoothing over or wiping out genuine, documented indigenous or regional lineages because it lacks the reference samples to confidently validate them.
4. Reifying Colonial Concepts of Race
There is a direct structural parallel between modern biotech marketing and the racial classification systems established by European colonizers in the Americas.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, colonial authorities invented rigid, hierarchical legal classifications (such as “Negro,” “Indian,” or mixed-race legal tiers) to dictate who could be enslaved, who could own land, and who held human rights. They claimed these categories were permanent laws of nature and blood.
By selling “ethnicity estimates” tied to modern geopolitical borders, commercial DNA tests inadvertently validate this old colonial science. They reinforce the false idea that human beings are divided into neat, distinct biological subspecies. In reality, human genetic variation is a fluid, continuous spectrum. Political borders and socially constructed racial categories do not exist in human DNA.
5. A Matter of Life and Death: Medical Inequality
While a blurry ancestry pie chart is deeply frustrating, this data monopoly has dangerous consequences when applied to consumer healthcare and clinical diagnostics.
- Failing Health Risk Scores: Genetic risk calculators evaluate a person’s likelihood of developing conditions like heart disease, diabetes, or breast cancer. Because these tools were trained almost web-exclusively on European genomes, medical experts warn that they frequently fail to accurately assess health risks for non-white individuals.
- “Variants of Uncertain Significance”: When an African American or indigenous person takes a genetic health screening, doctors frequently find minor genetic variations they cannot interpret. Because the database lacks a baseline map of healthy, normal variations within these communities, these harmless differences are often flagged as dangerous mutations, leading to unnecessary medical panic or incorrect diagnoses.
Reclaiming the Narrative Outside the Lab
The scientific community is currently racing to fix this, building tools like the Human Pangenome to replace the old single-donor baseline with a genetically diverse map of global humanity.
But until these databases achieve true population parity, the entire DNA saga remains a reflection of power: who owns the servers, who writes the code, and who controls the gatekeeping of human identity.
For communities whose histories were systematically disrupted by colonialism and the slave trade, relying solely on corporate algorithms will always be limiting. True ancestral reclamation happens when we take control back from the corporations—prioritizing oral histories, family traditions, and localized historical archives over a commercialized $99 genetic product.
The Hidden Burden: How Colonial Church Taxes Erased Indigenous Women
When we look back at early American history, we often imagine the separation of church and state as a foundational pillar. But in the 1700s along the Virginia and North Carolina borderlands, the local Christian church operated as an aggressive arm of the British Crown. It didn’t rely on voluntary donations; it demanded mandatory taxes by law.
For independent Indigenous families navigating the colonial frontier, this religious tax system was not just an economic burden. It was a weapon designed to enforce racial hierarchies, police bloodlines, and legally erase women from historical records.
The Anglican “Tithable” Church Tax
In colonial North Carolina and Virginia, counties were divided into administrative religious districts called parishes, managed by an elite board of twelve wealthy men known as the vestry. The vestry possessed the same enforcement powers as modern tax agents.
Every year, the vestry calculated a mandatory tax called the Parish Levy, or tithable tax. The word “tithe” historically meant giving a tenth of one’s earnings to the church. In the colonies, this forced tax was extracted from every household to buy farming land for the local parsonage, construct brick chapels, and pay the official salaries of Anglican ministers.
Whether a family was a religious dissenter (like a Baptist or Quaker) or practiced traditional Indigenous spiritual ceremonies, they were legally forced to fund a church they did not follow. If a family refused or could not pay, the local sheriff had the authority to seize their livestock, crops, or household belongings to sell at auction.
The Double Tax on Native Families
The system was uniquely punitive toward Free People of Color and independent Native American households. Under colonial acts passed in 1705 and 1723, assemblies adjusted the definition of who counted as a taxable asset:
- White Households: Only white males aged 16 and older were counted as tithables. White women were completely exempt.
- Indigenous and Black Households: The law declared that all free Indian, Negro, and multiracial women aged 16 and older were fully taxable.
This created a severe economic trap. If an independent Native man settled a farm, his household was immediately hit with a double tax burden compared to a white neighbor with the exact same household structure. It transformed an Indigenous woman’s legal status into a permanent financial liability for her family.
Hiding in Plain Sight: Resistance to the Tax
This exact legal oppression explains a major roadblock faced by modern genealogists: why women are missing from early census and tax lists.
Because women were legally viewed as dependents under the doctrine of coverture, they were rarely named. Instead, they were reduced to anonymous tick marks or numbers in a household column. If a husband wanted to protect his family from discriminatory religious taxes, his only option was to hide his wife’s identity from the parish tax collector.
Throughout the colonial court dockets of the borderland counties, local farmers were routinely dragged into court for “concealing tithables.”
By withholding a wife’s name and identity, these families weren’t just committing tax evasion; they were actively resisting a racially biased Christian church tax levied against an individual’s Indigenous ancestry.
The Aftermath of the Revolution
The financial grip of the parish vestries finally collapsed with the onset of the American Revolution. When North Carolina adopted its 1776 State Constitution, it disestablished the Anglican Church, permanently outlawing mandatory church taxes.
When the first federal census was launched in 1790, the tracking shifted from localized religious assessments to a standardized national population count. Families who had spent decades hiding from parish wardens in isolated frontier enclaves finally stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the records.
While the 1790 census still kept women anonymous by using simple tally columns, families of color were no longer hunted as religious subversives or tax evaders. Instead, they were documented by the new United States government under the “All Other Free Persons” column—acknowledging them as tax-paying, land-owning, free citizens
The History Behind the Slurs: How Colonial Powers Weaponized Speech
Language has always been a powerful tool in human history, but during the colonial era, it was systematically weaponized. European colonizers frequently used derogatory terms to strip Indigenous, African, and mixed-heritage peoples of their identity, sovereignty, and humanity. By examining these historical slurs, we can better understand how colonial powers sought to justify land theft, enslavement, and cultural erasure.
Dehumanizing Indigenous Americans
To justify the violent seizure of ancestral lands, European settlers used language to frame Indigenous peoples as subhuman or inherently inferior to Europeans. This rhetoric laid the groundwork for centuries of systemic displacement:
Savage: Colonizers used this term to falsely label Indigenous peoples as wild, lawless, or uncivilized. This deliberate framing made the violent theft of land look like a “civilizing mission.”
Redskin: A derogatory descriptor targeting the skin tone or traditional red body paint of Indigenous peoples. Over time, it became closely tied to state-sanctioned violence, appearing on official bounty proclamations offering cash rewards for Native scalps.
Squaw: A deeply offensive term historically used by traders and colonists to demean, exoticize, and sexualize Indigenous women. It severely degraded the respected social and political status women held within their tribal societies.
Heathen: A religious slur applied by European settlers to anyone practicing traditional Indigenous spiritualities. By framing non-Christian beliefs as wicked or sinful, colonizers justified forced religious conversions and the destruction of sacred spaces.
Enforcing Racial Hierarchies on African Peoples
In the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies, language was weaponized to enforce strict racial hierarchies. These terms aimed to permanently lock African and Afro-descendant peoples into a status of forced labor and property:
The N-Word: A deeply destructive racial slur originating during colonial chattel slavery. It was explicitly designed to dehumanize African people, strip them of personhood, and legally cement white supremacy.
Blackamoor / Moor: Archaic colonial terms used by Europeans to flatten diverse African ethnicities, kingdoms, and identities into a single, exoticized, and derogatory category.
Pickaninny: A harmful racial caricature and derogatory term used to describe Black children. This rhetoric portrayed them as disposable, unfeeling, and subhuman to minimize the horror of separating enslaved families.
The Language of the Colonial Caste System
Colonial societies—particularly across the Spanish Americas and the American South—were obsessed with tracking blood quantum and racial heritage. They created precise, derogatory legal categories to control social mobility and dictate a person’s legal rights:
Half-Breed: A derogatory classification used to marginalize individuals of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. It viewed them as racially “impure” and cut them off from full tribal or colonial status.
Mulatto: Derived from official colonial caste systems (castas), this term categorized people of mixed African and European descent. The word roots trace back to comparing human lineage to livestock, specifically mules.
Quadroon / Octoroon: Legal and social labels used in plantation societies to calculate exact fractions of African blood (one-fourth and one-eighth, respectively). These calculations legally dictated whether a person could be enslaved or set free.
Why Examining Colonial Language Matters Today
The derogatory words born out of colonialism were not just insults; they were structural legal tools. They created the psychological and social conditions necessary to sustain centuries of exploitation. Unpacking this vocabulary helps us spot how the echoes of colonial bias still linger in modern speech, systemic institutions, and social attitudes today.
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