#189: Nana Kumi: The Land Remembers

#189: Nana Kumi: The Land Remembers

From Edible Activist by Melissa L. Jones

March 24, 2026 · 42 min · Episode 189

About this episode

Nana Kumi discusses her journey as a queer Black southern artist and land steward, exploring the memory held in the land and its impact on her creative work.

The land remembers. And Nana listening. In this episode, Melissa L. Jones sits down with Nana Kumi, a queer Black southern artist, filmmaker, herbalist, and land steward from Natchez, Mississippi — and project director of Spirit in Our Roots, an art-based land initiative uplifting Black growers and land stewards across Mississippi and Louisiana. Nana's work lives at the intersection of ancestral technology, plant medicine, and Black southern imagination, creating visual and spiritual landscapes that invite rest, memory, and radical dreaming. Nana takes us through a childhood in rural Natchez where imagination became survival, to a career in New York that Covid cracked wide open, to coming home to the land and the ancestors waiting there. She speaks to the memory held in soil, in water, in trees, and in the plants that guide her creative work in ways she is still learning to name. This one is medicine.

People in this episode

Host: Melissa L. Jones

Guest: Nana Kumi

Topics covered

  • land stewardship
  • Black southern art
  • herbalism
  • ancestral technology
  • plant medicine

Keywords

  • memory
  • imagination
  • radical dreaming
  • Black growers
  • Spirit in Our Roots

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Natchez, Mississippi, Louisiana, New York

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