| Marquetta Goodwine | |||||
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| The Queen Mother, Chieftess of the Gullah Geeche Nation [1] [2] [3] | |||||
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| Queen of the Gullah | |||||
| Reign | July 2, 2002 – present [4] [1] [2] | ||||
| Coronation | July 2, 2002 | ||||
| Predecessor | Position established | ||||
| Born | 1968 (age 55–56) St. Helena Island, South Carolina, U.S. | ||||
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Marquetta L. Goodwine (born 1968) is a non-sovereign, elected monarch who serves as Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah Geechee Nation . [2] [1] She is an author, preservationist, and performance artist.
Goodwine was a native of St. Helena Island, South Carolina. She attended Fordham College at Lincoln Center and double majored in computer science and mathematics. [5] In 1996 she left Fordham and founded of the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. [5] [6] In 1999 she became the first Gullah to speak before the United Nations, giving testimony at an April 1 hearing of the Commission on Human Rights in Switzerland. [7] She participated in the United Nations Forum on Minority Rights which was first established in 2008. At the forum, Queen Quet recorded the human rights struggle of the Gullah/Geechee people for archival by the United Nations. [8]
On 2 July 2002, Goodwine was elected and enstooled as "Queen Quet, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation." [5] [9] Goodwine also serves as the Chair of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor General Management Plan and Expert Commissioner for South Carolina. She is a member of the 15-person commission established by the United States Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Act which was passed by the United States Congress.
Goodwine is a public advocate for the Gullah/Geechee Sea Islands in the face of increasing storm damage resulting from the climate crisis [10] as well as ongoing flooding due to overdevelopment and poor infrastructure maintenance. [11] Her work includes advocating and the preservation of Gullah/Geechee cultural traditions and resources that are threatened due to gentrification and climate change. [12]
Goodwine served as a consultant for the 2000 Mel Gibson film The Patriot , which featured scenes set on the South Carolina coast of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. She has been an advisor to several historic documentaries, including This Far by Faith: The African American Religious Experience, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, Slavery and the Making of America, Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, and The Will to Survive: The Story of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. She also lectures throughout the world.
She is the founder of a historic presentation troupe "De Gullah Cunneckshun," which has recorded several CDs and been featured on films and film soundtracks. [13] [14]
In 2022, she was awarded the Order of the Palmetto by South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, who has sought to preserve the Gullah culture in the state. [15]
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people, an African American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.
The Gullah are a subgroup of the African American ethnic group, who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Their language and culture have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms as a result of their historical geographic isolation and the community's relation to its shared history and identity.
The Sea Islands are a chain of over a hundred tidal and barrier islands on the Atlantic Ocean coast of the Southeastern United States, between the mouths of the Santee and St. Johns rivers along South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. The largest is Johns Island, South Carolina. Sapelo Island is home to the Gullah people. All of the islands are acutely threatened by sea level rise due to climate change.
St. Helena Island is a Sea Island in Beaufort County, South Carolina, United States. The island is connected to Beaufort by U.S. Highway 21. The island has a land area of about 64 sq mi (170 km2) and a population of 8,763 as of the 2010 census. It is included as part of the Hilton Head Island-Beaufort Micropolitan Area. The island is renowned for its rural Lowcountry character and being a major center of African-American Gullah culture and language. It is considered to be the geographic influence behind the children's television program Gullah Gullah Island.
The Lowcountry is a geographic and cultural region along South Carolina's coast, including the Sea Islands. The region includes significant salt marshes and other coastal waterways, making it an important source of biodiversity in South Carolina.
Daughters of the Dust is a 1991 independent film written, directed and produced by Julie Dash and is the first feature film directed by an African-American woman to be theatrically released in the United States. Set in 1902, it tells the story of three generations of Gullah women in the Peazant family on Saint Helena Island as they prepare to migrate off the island, out of the Southern United States, and into the North.
The Golden Isles of Georgia consist of barrier islands, and the mainland port cities of Brunswick and Darien on the 100-mile-long coast of the U.S. state of Georgia on the Atlantic Ocean. They include St. Simons Island, Sea Island, Jekyll Island, Little St. Simons Island, Sapelo Island, and Blackbeard Island. The islands are part of a long chain of barrier islands known as the "Sea Islands", located along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida.
Emory Campbell is a community leader among the Gullah people, African Americans who live in the coastal low country region of South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullahs have preserved more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other black community in the US.
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor was an American culinary anthropologist, griot, poet, food writer, and broadcaster on public media. Born into a Gullah family in the Low Country of South Carolina, she moved with them as a child to Philadelphia during the Great Migration. Later she lived in Paris before settling in New York City. She was active in the Black Arts Movement and performed on Broadway.
Atlantic Creole is a cultural identifier of those with origins in the transatlantic settlement of the Americas via Europe and Africa.
Joseph A. Opala, OR is an American historian noted for establishing the "Gullah Connection," the historical links between the indigenous people of the West African nation of Sierra Leone and the Gullah people of the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States.
The Penn Center, formerly the Penn School, is an African-American cultural and educational center in the Corners Community on Saint Helena Island. Founded in 1862 by Quaker and Unitarian missionaries from Pennsylvania, it was the first school founded in the Southern United States specifically for the education of African-Americans. It provided critical educational facilities to Gullah slaves freed after plantation owners fled the island, and continues to fulfill an educational mission. Leigh Richmond Miner photographed students and activities at the school.
Sierra Leonean Americans are an ethnic group of Americans of full or partial Sierra Leonean ancestry. This includes Sierra Leone Creoles whose ancestors were African American Black Loyalists freed after fighting on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War. Some African Americans trace their roots to indigenous enslaved Sierra Leoneans exported to the United States between the 18th and early 19th century. In particular, the Gullah people of partial Sierra Leonean ancestry, fled their owners and settled in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands, where they still retain their cultural heritage. The first wave of Sierra Leoneans to the United States, after the slavery period, was after the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the American Community Survey, there are 34,161 Sierra Leonean immigrants living in the United States.
The Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor is a federal National Heritage Area in the United States. The intent of the designation is to help preserve and interpret the traditional cultural practices, sites, and resources associated with Gullah-Geechee people. Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, and the federal Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission established to oversee it, were designated by an act of Congress on October 12, 2006 through the National Heritage Areas Act of 2006.
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is a 1982 novel written by Ntozake Shange and first published by St. Martin's Press. The novel, which took eight years to complete, is a story of three Black sisters, whose names give the book its title, and their mother. The family is based in Charleston, South Carolina, and their trade is to spin, weave, and dye cloth; unsurprisingly, this tactile creativity informs the lives of the main characters as well as the style of the writing. Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo integrates the whole of an earlier work by Shange called simply Sassafrass, published in 1977 by Shameless Hussy Press. As is common in Shange's work, the narrative is peppered with interludes that come in the form of letters, recipes, dream stories and journal entries, which provide a more intimate approach to each woman's journey toward self-realization and fulfillment. The book deals with several major themes, including Gullah/Geechee culture, women in the arts, the Black Arts Movement, and spirituality, among many others.
Gullah Gullah Island is an American musical children's television series aired on the Nick Jr. block from October 24, 1994, to March 7, 2000. The show was hosted by Ron Daise, the former vice president for Creative Education at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina until 2023, and his wife Natalie Daise, both of whom also served as cultural advisors, and were inspired by the Gullah culture of Ron Daise's home of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, part of the Sea Islands.
Edda L. Fields-Black is an African-American historian who is currently associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is known for her research on West African rice agriculture and societies and the African diaspora.
The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, in both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. They developed a creole language, also called Gullah, and a culture with some African influence.
Emily Meggett was an American Geechee-Gullah community leader, chef, and author who co-wrote Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island in 2022. She lived on Edisto Island, near Charleston, South Carolina.
Benjamin "BJ" Dennis IV is an American Gullah Geechee chef and caterer from Charleston, South Carolina who is known for preserving Gullah Geechee cooking and culture. Additionally, he is also notable for his discovery of hill rice in December 2016 in Trinidad, which was thought to have been extinct.
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