Why I decided to create this
I dreamed up this site out of sheer pain and desperation.
Background
I dreamed up this site out of sheer pain and desperation. The vision I once had of my Brookland neighborhood came crashing in a wave of devastation once Donald Trump entered the White House just a few years after Muriel Bowser became our new Mayor. Since then, the events have been so traumatizing that I need time and space to process it all and share it in a way that is universally understood.
I tried making a short film in collaboration with three other Brookland/Ward 5 artists deeply affected by this historic wave of anti-Black, anti-Poor genocidal land grabs, displacement, and corrupt pop-up development schemes that completely altered the actual landscape and population of not only our neighborhood but most of Ward 5. We secured a small grant from Diverse City Funds with help from Bread for the City to make our film. We met the film crew that had just finished screening "What Happened 2 Chocolate City" at one of the most promising new Black-owned restaurants and event spaces on 12th St NE, the main business strip of Brookland that serves the Black community.
We proposed a short follow-up film that could be screened with "What Happened 2 Chocolate City." We met challenges that no small grant could address. Picking up a violent wind of predatory opportunism during all the illnesses, deaths, chaos, and shutdowns during the height of the Coronavirus-19 Pandemic, we were fighting for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Most of us would not have survived if it hadn't been for Ward 5 Mutual Aid. I'm eternally grateful for the enormous community of advocates, allies, and neighbors that rallied under the grassroots name of United Neighbors Brookland & United Neighbors Ward 5, who helped us all survive and helped us say goodbye to those who did not live through this crisis. This is my love letter to you all!
From those ashes of the flames of 2017 to the present, I have not stopped dreaming of and trying ways to salvage the footage and work we had, keep documenting our stories, and share them as a line of defense and a foundation for restorative justice that can birth a renewed effort of preserving the vital history of Black and Indigenous families and culture in Brookland. The need for this website became clear during my first Ward 5B virtual video conference recorded meeting. I missed my Brookland Neighborhood ANC meetings for over two years due to the devastating circumstances of the coronavirus-19 Pandemic, so I could not believe what I heard. It broke my heart to witness all the loss of representation of Black voices that were once strong and consistent in our meetings.
There were almost none of the wise Black and Indigenous Elders who lived for generations in Brookland that taught me so much. It seemed as if new residents were working for the outside development companies who were buying up properties from all the opportunistically enabled privileges and proposing all the same mixed-use up-zoned resource-draining anti-black, anti-woman cheap labor profit margins no matter what our neighbors actually needed and had often proposed for sustainable and beneficial development of our neighborhood. When the virtual meeting monitors finally allowed neighbors to unmute and speak, thank goodness, many of my neighbors spoke up about the vast difference and echoed my concerns. We were suffering in a food desert with too many new upzoned construction projects already causing much damage, problems, environmental devastation, conflicts, and contradictions that had been unaddressed even before the pandemic's closures. Many neighbors like me who had been going to these meetings for years felt repeatedly betrayed, angry, hurt, and abused by a system that brought a sense of rage and hopelessness. And, of course, it was all divisive by race, class, and age.
This website responds to those outside investment predatory developers and our Ward 5 Brookland ANC Commissioners. I am a Black and Indigenous artist raised in D.C, who offers my imagination and love for my People, our Land, and my community. This site is not here to document our issues in the colonized way. This gift to the viewer is to unite us and bring empathy, equity, justice, and doing the right thing for our Black & Indigenous future to decision-making tables. Mitakuye oyasin!
Who I am
The truest thing I can say about myself is best done in color.
The truest thing I can say about myself is best done in color. So, if you are like I am, you can understand so much about other humans through the photos and images they love, so please visit my Pinterest page. If you want more info, here are more words: Osiyo! My name is niki davis. I am Igbo/Cherokee-Eastern Band. Second daughter of Helen Delaney and Harold "Mato Haha" Davis, a Peacekeeper and Presiding Elder of the Metis Nation who recently passed in July 2021 during the second wave of our Elder deaths of the Coronavirus 19 Pandemic. I belong to the Deer Clan. In the 70s in DC, they called us REDBONES.
From my first crayon in Pre-K on an Army base in West Germany to now, where I assemble a Medicine Wheel Collage daily as a tool to heal intergenerational trauma, I see myself and others in terms of connecting and contrasting images. I see a tapestry with music like the Carole King album my mom would play when albums were still in wax and covers were works of art.
Color, music, nature & dance guide my nervous system and inform my wisest behavioral patterns, so when my family moved to DC and became a part of the making of Chocolate City in the 1970s, my roots of who I am informed by what I do flourished. From the DC Youth Chorale to the first graduating class of the then-new Duke Ellington School of the Arts, I learned how to soar above the colorism and violence that plagued our city.
Brookland, NE, was the home parish of my Catholic family. From our upper NW home across from The Walter Reed Hospital, we would travel to the National Basilica of the Immaculate Conception on the grounds of Catholic University for Sunday service. Our father would pack his four kids in the back of the infamous Davis family red BMW while our mom, in all her beauty, sat up front as the fresh air to balance our father's compressed explosiveness.
I loved DC—all of it. I especially loved the green open space and rolling hills of "Little Rome," what we called Brookland, NE. The violence and racist insanity driven by the indentured slavery of taxation without representation in our "not-a-state despite home rule" made me fight for DC. I loved it until September 23, 1979, when my brother Eddie died.
It took me over 31 years before I was able to return to DC. Now, I have made my peace with myself and my Chocolate City, which raised me and gave me the best experiences in my life. I did the hard work to restore what tragically was broken. I bought my first home in my Sunday paradise, Brookland, NE. I've been living here since 2011.
I have the honor and distinction of purchasing land and a 3-story, 19 bedroom, 16 bath Art Deco Yellow Brick Building with 15 other co-owners that sits in the middle of a hill on Perry St so close to my beloved dome of the Basilica and down the street from the Replica of the Holy Land at the Franciscan Monastery. As a Black Indigenous Elder in the Brookland Community, I am here on this website to protect our Land, preserve our history, and enhance our quality of life so we may leave our inheritance to our Black and Indigenous Future.
ps - look up the meaning of Ongweh'onweh, who the Great Peacemaker of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was, and the four market days of the Igbo Tribe of West Africa, and you will understand my root operating system when I engage with the world publicly as an Igbo African Indigenous American citizen. Mitakuye oyasin! A'ho! Ase!
I would love to hear from others who also love the Black and Indigenous community in Brookland or anywhere else in the world. Please share your love and ideas by Facebook or email at blkindiansprod@gmail.com
