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BBRP // Open Source Collective Year End Wrap
Published on December 12, 2021 by hannah mayree

2022 has been an amazing year for the Black Banjo Reclamation Project!

We are celebrating 3 incredible years of gathering in community and with nature to expand our practice with the banjo and the rich cultural traditions that come with it.

To back-track just a bit, at the the end of 2020 the BBRP was featured in the Smithsonian Folkways Publication in an article that documented and presented some of our work, specifically the workshop we hosted in February of 2020 in Huichin village of the Lisjan Ohlone people (the East Bay Area). This was an historic event because it was the first time in recent history that a group of Black African Diasporic people of all ages and genders gathered for the purpose of hand-crafting banjos out of gourds in similar ways that our ancestors have done for thousands of years. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/black-banjo-reclamation-project-african-roots

It was through this visibility that we connected with an administrator with the Old Town School of Folk in Chicago, IL. We were blown away to have such a passionate a dedicated organizer, Arif Smith, contact us to bring the Banjo Build project to Chicago’s West side neighborhood of Austin, to engage the youth in the work.

All this culminated in the Summer of 2021; the BBRP was able to collaborate with a multitude of organizations from across the city of Chicago to hold space for a group of student builders who were able to acquire knowledge and hands-on experience of these Black folk traditions. Woodworking, gourd crafting and even learning to work with raw goat hides to make their instruments. This accomplishment was enormous for all of us— we were still in the midst of rising cases of the Delta variant and we stayed creative, occasionally holding sessions over zoom, and continuing to create the space for this project to happen. 

The most exciting thing about the coming year is that we get to continue growing and cultivating relationships on the foundations we have built in the last three years. Our capacity is growing and many new branches of our work are developing and undergoing massive changes. In the coming year, we plan to hold three different Banjo Build projects across the country and we will be expanding our work to include building modern banjos as well.

One of the most exciting developments for us is our new relationship with Open Source Foundation! Open Source was introduced to us at the perfect moment; the more we feed these projects the more they grow and as a director and organizer of this project, I want to know that this work is supported and protected by a fiscal sponsor that sees the value in the intentions of our work in a material way. We are so glad to be part of the collective and able to expand our fundraising efforts for the years to come. 

This year is going to be our most involved yet. Our work continues to spread through our cadre of teachers who are bringing years of experience to share with our participants, some of whom are new to this work but with all community members we work with, we hold their personal knowledge and experience as paramount. We are all learning together and supporting each other on our journeys, individually and as a collective. 

It brings great solace for us to use musical technologies to transmute aspects of pain, anger and frustration in our world by creating something beautiful, recognizing that we all grieve. We can’t fix all the problems of this world through this project— but we do honor the work of liberation in every form it comes and realize that the reach of our work can be intertwined into so many avenues of abolition work. We recognize that folks experience oppression in so many ways— there are intentional systems designed to oppress Indigenous people on all lands and as Black Diasporic people living on Turtle Island, we are aware of the power and voice we have in telling our stories through song, the instruments we build from the earth and the ways we engage with community. The banjo has been used as a tool of oppression for the last few hundred years, but we are returning to the roots of the banjo and the liberation and joy that it is meant to bring to Black folks. 

We are so grateful to be in collaboration and be witnessed by all of our supporters! It is our intention that people all over the world can find truth in the stories told from the land and connect with the music of their ancestry in ways that guide us toward understanding and transformation.

With gratitude and abundance, we are so excited to share our work for another year of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project!

~Hannah Mayree, Red Branch, Sule Greg Wilson, Kele Nitoto and the rest of the team at BBRP