john powell:
Atum and I were talking about a process to close, and this is what we have come up with. What we would like to do is go around the room and have you say a couple sentences about your impressions of the last two days, how you feel now, and maybe then another sentence about what's next for you.

Audience Member:
Good afternoon. I'd like to thank everyone that participated on the panels and in the discussion. I would like, as scholars, as community members and activists, to say that without linking ourselves to each other and to a community, to a neighborhood, to the people that support us and nurture us, we are just individuals doing "science" in a vacuum and we need to be cautious of that.

Audience Member:
I would like to say that I have gained a greater awareness of self throughout the conference, and it has made me want to become more actively involved in the process. No man or woman is an island unto themselves, so we do need to attach ourselves to one another, progress and move forward.

Audience Member:
For me, the process requires, and the challenge is, that we move this discussion into the ordinary common neighborhood culture. We need to bring these ideas and these discussions to be part of people's table conversation at lunch and dinner, and these sharp ideas. It is healthy and it is wonderful to have sharp differences because they allow us to have clearer thinking, so this has been a great exercise. We should replicate it in our daily neighborhood, church, community and barbershop conversation.

Audience Member:
I am a physician in St. Paul and care for quite a few African Americans and some new Africans, for that matter. I have been impressed at how complex this is. To quote, "It is too complex to leave to the physicians." It really is because this connection between health and cultural identity and genetic material is very complex. The only way we are going to understand that is if we get it out and talk about it.

Audience Member:
I want to take the opportunity to join others in thanking you all for putting on this very edifying and inspirational conference, Sister Atum and all the wonderful young scholars, Waneda and Chiyedza, all you guys. Thank you very much. This is going to go a long way. Drip, drip, drip makes a hole in the rock. This is the first drip.

Audience Member:
One of our elders once said, "what brought us here is external, but what keeps us here is internal." That is for all Africans, actually, not only the ones who were brought here unwillingly, but for those of us who immigrated here as well. We need to do a lot of internal work.

Audience Member:
I feel very moved. I feel moved by the beauty and the depth of the work that is being done. I feel over saturated, and I feel like there is a pain somewhere that has been skirted around that I have yet to investigate. I have already gotten the questions to do the next series of science focus groups at the wellness center.

Audience Member:
I think that the naming of the conference was kind of a misnomer. It was far more than African genealogy and genetics, looking backwards to move forward. It was more of a community get together, and I felt a closeness and that is revolutionary in that respect. I hope that the momentum that has been generated here will be only the beginning of a wide new range of things in which we can cover a lot of these, including the new and the old.

Audience Member:
What I do is science, but that is not who I am, and I think that is true for everyone. What our profession is is not who we are, and what brought us here isn't our profession, but who we are. I feel like that is what we need to focus on as we proceed with this endeavor.

Audience Member:
I have been a faculty member at the University of Minnesota for 24 years, and I have always believed, or said, or thought, that those of us who were faculty and students here would think better if we thought in inclusive dialogue with people in diverse communities, but I have never seen it happen the way that it happened here. These two days, in addition to being inspiring and warming and heartwarming, have been some of the most intelligent, incisive, critical thinking that I have experienced in my 24 years here, so thank you.

Audience Member:
I would like to say thank you also to everyone in the community and the organizers who put this together. It, indeed, has been a very powerful experience for me. It has been thought provoking and eye opening in a lot of ways. I hope that I will be able to contribute something to the community as a result of it, and I hope this will be replicated in some way in the future.

Audience Member:
I think it was an excellent assemblage and gathering. It was wonderful being a participant here and taking in all the information and enjoying this process. I would encourage us all to go forward with the work and to come together again. And to all the various doctors, your presence is very powerful, those of you that are scholars in the academic world, and those of you that are scholars in the community. The children are watching.

Audience Member:
One of the things the conference has affirmed is that we cannot gain an understanding of our identity, just through a physical understanding, and that there is something that lies behind our identity that is not physical. If we continue to do that study and try to make those connections, that is where the identity lies.

Audience Member:
I would like to say, I thank God that I was able to come because I have been sick, but these have been the best-spent days, the last two days here of my life. I really felt spiritual here, and I hope everybody that is involved in this process will continue to keep it alive, and I hope the technologies and the new things that are coming up, I hope we'll use it to bring love on Earth, and everybody unite together and try to use your energy to do something positive.

Audience Member::
I was on the steering committee and we really struggled with having the community come in and having a voice. It has been real gratifying hearing the community say that they felt they were comfortable and that they had a voice here. I feel quite full and privileged to have been here. I have heard and learned so much these last two days. I thank everyone for coming and participating and being open to the information, to the knowledge, and to what we shared today.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall:
I want to thank everybody who organized this wonderful conference, and I'm going to have to make a confession. I very rarely sit through conferences for two days any more. The fact that I did do so, and wanted to do so, and at every stage learned a great deal and had stimulating ideas and stimulating thoughts, that is a great tribute to the organizers of the conference as well as to the people who attended. Thank you.

Audience Member:
Good afternoon. This was a very beautiful conference. It was put together very nicely. I'm young; I'm only 21. What we have to do is bring this to our children because we are still in the process of learning and trying to get to where we want to be. I feel like our children are very close to where we are trying to go, just spiritually. We need to go home, we need to teach, we need to get on the street, we need to teach, we need to go to school, we need to teach, and we need to try to bring the children here, so they can teach us too.

Audience Member:
I want to thank you personally for having invited me. I would not have come otherwise. It has been a tremendous experience in terms of feeling included and excluded at the same time. As a Latino woman, as understanding where my inheritance comes and where those pieces are, I have learned more about myself and others in these two days than I have in a very, very long time. Thank you all.

Audience Member:
She took the words out of my mouth. Thank you so much for such a beautiful experience. This was just wonderful. It is dawned on me that I have taken steps in that process of figuring out who I am. It is a really good feeling, and then, all of a sudden, I feel like I can look at other people and say, maybe I can figure out a little bit about them, but I hope they can start to figure out who they are. That has taken on a whole new meaning.

Audience Member:
I feel really privileged to be here, and this is something that I have been needing without knowing that I was needing it. This is making me feel like I have come to the right place. Thank you.

Audience Member:
I just want to thank you, Mother Atum, for inviting me to come. This has been a healing process for me. That is one of the many reasons why I'm glad I came.

john powell:
I'm going to make a few closing remarks, and mainly I'm going to say thank you to all of you. Thank you to the organizers: Steve, Atum, Al, one of the titans in our community, Matt Little. Thank you for dealing with a subject that is incredibly complicated, in a very thoughtful way, but not in a way that did not grapple with some of the hard issues. There are some hard issues. There is a saying that the future belongs to those who participate in its making. I think the future is ours, as long as we continue to participate. So I hope we will go forward and that we will participate in this very complex and important discussion.

I won't try to summarize what's been said, but I will just lift up again, that we are in the process of making culture; we are in the process of making ourselves. The challenge to us is to look back and figure out where we have come and to look forward, and do it in a way that not only allows us to be whole, but allows all of us, black, white, Latino, Asian -- all of us to be whole. The challenge is to do it in a respectful way, and sometimes out of that love, I think we may have to do some hard things. I do not think it is loving to leave people in the role of abuser. I do not think it is loving to allow a husband to continue to beat his wife, or to allow a people to continue to destroy the Earth. So being loving does not simply mean that we'll be passive about it. So out of the love and the history that comes from being marginalized, that comes from the pain of that, we can not only do something that is good for ourselves, but do something that is good for all humanity and the entire planet. So thank you.

Atum Azzahir:
We talked to Dr. powell about coming, and we did not hear from him and we did not hear from him. We knew the answer was yes, but we were starting to wonder how would he do it, since he did not know what we wanted him to do. And then all of a sudden, he showed up about two weeks ago and talked to us. In the midst of his travel he said yes, and I really want to say that we did not make a mistake in who could do the moderating and pulling of this together. We thank you immensely.

We want Steve to know that we understand the difficulty that he had in giving over the power. Someone talked about that earlier today when we were sitting at the table. We do recognize that it did take some doing for you to hand over the power. Now Steve said it did not. He says that it was no big deal. He just knew what he had to do and he did it, but we do understand that it is, as you heard from a lot of people, it is historical for a white physician at the University of Minnesota, who has as many accolades as Steve Miles does, to turn over this kind of gathering to us in the community, especially someone who is as bossy as I am, and he did it. We want to thank you tremendously.

The committee, please stand again, those of you who are still here. Dr. Little, Sister Chiyedza, Sister Waneda, Sister Callie, Rose Brewer, Mr. McFarlane, and Dr. Semerit. You all, thank you so much. We really did work well together, and I appreciate you tremendously. Bill Davis, who is not here, would be included in that. Thank you.

We also want to say thank you to Marian Secundy - I think she left - but one of the things in the beginning, we had a national committee and a local committee, and I feel that we received guidance from Marian Secundy. She, as you can see, is an elder and she gave us, in know uncertain terms, her advice about what would work and what wouldn't, in a couple of phone calls, and we really, really appreciate her. She's not here, but we thank her.

We also want to thank the Allina Foundation; the Community Action Agency; Insight News; the Greenwall Foundation; the Minneapolis Foundation; National Institutes of Health. At the University of Minnesota: Office of Continuing Medical Education; Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice, Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs; and the Medical School Office of Minority Affairs. We thank our funders and financial supporters in making this happen.

I want to thank the cultural Wellness Center because they allowed Chiyedza and me to spend a lot of time on this. We want to thank our board of directors who left us do whatever we wanted to do because this seemed like a very important thing to do.

Finally, my thoughts just from listening to, particularly my sisters this morning. I have only been able to respectfully work with my white counterparts and build, as I have taken a stand for my African intellectual, philosophical and cultural heritage. Prior to that, I could not work with my European white counterparts because it hurt so bad. I have only been able to stop hanging out and looking for acceptance into this kind of citizenship that this country offered and become a citizen of my people in heritage and culture, and I have only been able to do that after I took a stand for my African intellectual, spiritual and cultural heritage. I have only been able to come out from down under, and I have taken a stand for my Africanness with no permission from anyone else. I have only been able to courageously stand up with people like Steve who, in the past, would have silenced me. I have only been able to stand up to my sisters like you, in the past, who I felt were disconnected from me, since I have taken a stand for my African heritage, intellect and culture.

My father and mother and my brother, we all were in Mississippi, in the deepest corners of the delta. We know disrespect, but we found honor when I took a stand for my African heritage and culture. My mother died with honor because I said, we are African people, and when she stood up and said she was not going to take anything, you know with the pistol that she carried, it did not give her honor; it gave her fear and more fear. It was only as I took a stand for my African heritage that I got the courage to stand up and be who I am.

My children, who stand on the corners of Powderhorn, on the corners of Bloomington and Lake, on the corners in Jamaica when I visited, or Brazil where I visited, or Benin where I visited, or Senegal where I visited, or Egypt where I visited, I could only take them as my children as I took a stand for my African heritage. I did not go to them asking for return, but I went to them saying, I have come back, and then they felt like my children and accepted me as their mother.

This all means so much to me that I wanted to share that with you. And finally I said, my sisters who talked this morning about the work that you're doing, and as I have come to know them, I had a deep fear of losing them to the academy because of this thing that I hear us talking about that means complexity. There is so much complexity, and I have only been able to simplify the return that we have to each other as I have taken a stand for my Africanness. I have only been able to simplify all the complexities that get presented back to me, as I have taken a stand. It means only that I am, and there is no question to be raised about that.

So I really appreciate having this opportunity to be with Steve and work with him, to meet all of you and come together with you, and look at how we can take a stand, as the academy has, on behalf of something that sometimes separated us. I want to take a stand that says I'm going to come back to the academy, not necessarily to study, but to keep this bridge that has been created in place, so that we do not find ourselves separated ever again. I really appreciate all you've done. Sisters, thank you. Travel safe. Thank you so much. The information you shared with us will take us a long way.

We close by saying, may the ancestors be pleased with our work, and may they guide us as we go forward. Thank you again.