Partner Showcase: Wa Na Wari
Above: Visitors gather on the porch of Wa Na Wari in Seattle’s Central District. Photo courtesy of Wa Na Wari.
We sat down with three of the co-founders of Wa Na Wari—Inye Wokoma, Elisheba Johnson, and Jill Freidberg—to talk about their work and their relationship to preservation.
Tell us about your organization’s mission and work. Where are you located, and what communities do you serve in Washington State?
Inye Wokoma: Wa Na Wari is located in Seattle’s Central District. We occupy a house in a residential neighborhood which has been repurposed for community and cultural work. Our mission is to create space for Black ownership, possibility, and belonging through art, historic preservation, and connection. And our work is about using art and culture as a way of pushing back against displacement—it’s helping Black folks keep their homes in Seattle, but also a kind of cultural place keeping, making sure that the community where folks have lived for generations represents who they are and feels like a place where they belong.
Tell us about a recent project or initiative that your organization has undertaken that represents your overall goals and values.
IW: It’s a big question because we do a lot, so there’s a lot to be excited about. The first and most important program at Wa Na Wari is the house itself, which functions as a binder, a place for people to come and be connected, a beacon, a possibility, and a rallying cry. We also have the Love Offering Community meals program, which is a food justice program that where we work with Black and Indigenous chefs to provide hot meals free of charge to the community twice a week. It’s an extremely popular program, for all of the economic reasons, the rising cost of living generally, but also because it’s an opportunity for people to gather, congregate, and eat a meal that was prepared by hand that day. We also have Bloom, which is a community garden and land justice program that activates a portion of our backyard as a community garden. We operate Bloom in partnership with the Indigenous and Latino communities, and it focuses on Indigenous modes of land stewardship alongside more contemporary urban garden techniques. We also have CACE 21 (Central Area Cultural Ecosystem, 21st Century), which is an anti-displacement and housing policy organizing project that focuses on housing policy to create more ways for Black families to keep their homes in their families cross-generationally. And then there’s the art. We use art as a tool of provocation and something that is reflective. In the house, we have exhibits every 10 weeks that feature four to five Black and Indigenous artists, as well as performances, including live music, poetry readings, and book readings. We also organize an annual art festival, Walk the Block, which really pulls together elements of all those things and creates a community-wide, open-air, visual and performing arts festival.
Elisheba Johnson: All of our programs are like children. We don’t try to pick favorites. But I think our big annual festival is a representation of everything that we do. Every single program is represented in some way, and we’re really excited about how this year is coming together. But what’s also really exciting is the air of possibility that happens when there’s the space for artists and the community to come in and dream about what’s possible. We’ve had some African hoodoo workshops recently. We had an Indigenous language group work in our space recently, and now they want to be there twice a month. So for me, what’s exciting is that the space is such an open canvas for what people want and need.
Jill Freidberg: I’m most involved in the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute, which is our two-year oral history and community story training institute in partnership with the Black Heritage Society of Washington State and the Seattle Public Library. The institute started in the summer of 2021 and came out of Wa Na Wari’s mission statement that is rooted in history and building Black futures based on knowing your history and being rooted in your history. The first one was mostly virtual during COVID. We had a cohort of six community members who learned from Black oral historians all over the country and then spent most of 2022 creating a way to share their own oral histories with the public, which culminated in an exhibit at Wa Na Wari, with installations ranging from zines to movies to textile art. Community members apply to participate, receive a stipend, and then research and record histories with community members. Our themes are identified through partnerships with organizations like the Black Heritage Society of Washington State, themes like Black experiences on the waterfront, barbers and beauticians, Black educators, and Black veterans. Our second cohort is bigger, eight people. They spent a week with Alissa Rae Funderburk, an oral historian from Jackson, Mississippi, who came out here and worked with them last summer. Right now, they’re all out recording oral histories right now, and then summer of this year, they’ll start proposing how they want to share those oral histories with the public.
What does “preservation” mean to you, and how does it impact your organization’s work?
JF: It depends on how you define historic preservation. The Wa Na Wari house itself wasn’t intended as an act of historic preservation, but it’s become one. People come to Wa Na Wari to see art and realize that they played there as a kid. They’ll walk in and say, “Wait a minute, I’ve been in this house.” It means so much to them. I would also add that one of the goals of the Black Spatial Histories Institute is to build community capacity. Graduates from the first cohort are now out doing their own oral history work. Two of them are doing an oral history of Black educators doing restorative justice practices in South Seattle schools. Several of them helped out with the folks who are trying to preserve the Seattle Vocational Institute and did oral history interviews with people who taught and studied there. And they’ve done some of the Blacks on the waterfront research with the Maritime Washington National Heritage Area. So they’re out getting paid gigs to do history keeping and memory work. That’s cultural preservation. I also just came from a meeting at Washington Hall with some folks from Historic Seattle and with Stephanie Johnson Toliver—they’re renovating the phone booth inside Washington Hall to make it a story booth where stories from the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute will be exhibited. That’s using partnerships to activate historic spaces for new community uses.
EJ: I believe preservation is vitally important. Seattle has been on the precipice of losing its soul for a really long time, and it might have lost its soul, to be honest, but keeping the essence of what this city is is really important—which is a lot of bootscrappy, funky artists and creatives who moved out west to be able to explore and find themselves. There’s a long history of that here. There wouldn’t be a Jimi Hendrix or a Quincy Jones or an Ernestine Anderson and many more if this region didn’t actually grow and support the weird and the creative. I think Wa Na Wari tries to do that in all the ways we’ve mentioned.
IW: I think for the work that we do, one of the most important things is the fact that our histories and our stories are alive, that they live in us and live through us. Anti-displacement work is preservation work, because it keeps the people who hold the memories of that place there, and they continue to make new stories and new memories that are a part of the continuum of history. Those are living stories that continue to be relevant as long as the people are there. I dislike the idea of history fading off into the past, becoming irrelevant. For example, I don’t think my grandchildren are going to know my grandfather, but I would like for them to feel firsthand some of the living essence of who he was, and if they hear a story about him, they can connect it to something that they are experiencing tangibly. To me, that’s historic preservation. It’s about holding communities together, holding people together.
What is your vision for your organization’s future? In that future, how could preservation be a better ally and support your work more?
IW: Our vision for the organization’s future is to be bigger, to do more. We’re young, and we have lots of ideas. Some of them are very practical things we want to see happen in the next two, three, four years; some are bigger. For me personally, as one of the co-founders of Wa Na Wari, my vision is for me to eventually step down as leader, so someone new and young can step up and have a really exciting vision for what the essence of the organization can be moving into the future. Maybe it won’t be what it looks like now. There’s no reason why it has to be exactly what it started as. As long as the core values are the same and it continues to serve the community in a meaningful and relevant way that people really connect to, that’s the most important thing. I would like for the organization at some point to have its own life, not dependent on its founders.
EJ: We have lots of capital campaign goals, but really, one of our biggest goals is just staying around. The whole nonprofit industrial complex is hard. If we can lead the organization now so that when we all do move on, it’s finally secure, that would be the biggest goal. Preservation sometimes can feel limiting, because it’s about preserving a thing—like when you landmark a place—in one moment in time, and that doesn’t always allow for ingenuity and growth. As we explore what the preservation realm can actually do with us, I’d love to see how it can help us maintain spaces and buildings in a way that feels fluid for the community.
JF: The only thing I would add is that I would like to see graduates from the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute take over leadership of the institute in the next few years. That would be great.
EJ: I haven’t worked with the institute as much, but it’s been cool to see these folks who started gathering stories and how now that’s entering their personal practice—now they’re thinking about how they want to move through community in a different way.
JF: It’s true. We went to the Oral History Association conference last year with the first cohort and learned that there’s not really another program in the country like the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute that pays community members over a long period of time to learn how to do this work. It’s a big priority for us that the people who are participating are compensated. In the current cohort, each cohort member receives $10,000 over the course of two years. And it’s ambitious to keep doing that. But hopefully we can continue to run a program where people are compensated for stepping up and learning how to do this work.
IW: That reminds me of when I found out that members of the first cohort were spinning off and getting contract work. To me, that was super exciting, as a former gig worker and freelancer. It was exciting that there was opportunity for people to take these skills and go out and make money from them. It also means that there are people out there that actually realize that it’s valuable to invest in this work. My hope is that the more we invest in having people learn and practice oral history work, the more that investment will help create the demand by showing people how powerful collecting and sharing community stories can be. It would be beautiful for there to be a whole sector of the cultural economy that is a community of oral historians. We’re focused on the Black community, but it would be lovely to see that in the Latino community, in the Indigenous community, and the Pan Asian community.
How can people get involved with your work?
IW: You can email us [at ], but I always invite people to just show up—to get a feel for who we are and what we do by coming to see us.
JF: All ofour upcoming events and artist exhibitions and all that is on our website, wanawari.org. A lot of people just want to come to an art opening we have coming up, and then they have an opportunity to see what’s happening.
EJ: If they follow us on Instagram [@wanawariseattle] or join our newsletter, they’ll hear about all the stuff we’re doing. As my friend Ebony says, Wa Na Wari is always open—we’re always busy, and we have lots of stuff going on all the time.
