Steve Miles:
On behalf of the Steering Committee of this conference, the Powderhorn/Phillips Cultural Wellness Center, the University of Minnesota and the Center for Bioethics, I am delighted to convene this conference.

The conference had its genesis at Lucille's Kitchen, about a year-and-a-half ago, when somebody asked me how I would memorialize slavery in light of Randall Robinson's The Debt. I had not read The Debt but I promised to get back to the community on that question, so I'm keeping my promise and getting back to you. Dr. Robinson tells the story of his son's graduation from college. An African American student got up to say the farewell address for the class, and she said, "If I was French, I would say merci; if I was German, I would say dankeshön; if I was Italian, I would say grazie; but what I say is thank you." Dr. Robinson was struck by how she, in that comment, spoke of the disruption of her ancestry, a disruption of genealogy, a disruption of her personal story in relationship to her culture and people of origin.

This conference is about that disruption. It is about using the tools of history, genetics, and genealogy to examine that disruption. We cannot restore what has been destroyed. We cannot measure the harm that was inflicted. But, perhaps these tools offer a way to name what was taken. It is the purpose of this conference to examine how these tools can help us name what was taken, and to examine how that naming can help us to change ourselves, the priority of such an effort, and how it may help address the deepest wound in the American culture.

I am deeply grateful to the donors to this conference, whose names are listed in the program, and also of the steering committee and the Powderhorn/Phillips Cultural Wellness Center lead by Atum Azzahir, to whom I now turn.

Atum Azzahir:
Good morning. I am Atum Azzahir with the Powderhorn/Phillips Cultural Wellness Center. More importantly, I am a member of the African American community and I struggle to make sure that what was destroyed can be put back in place. That is my life and that's why I'm here today.

Steve called me and four other people: Al McFarlane, Mr. Matt Little, Mr. Bill Davis and asked us if we would help him with this, and we decided that that we would work ourselves to death to make this conference an honorable activity for our community.

So, after a meeting with Steve in his office, we went over to the hotel and sat and had a cup of coffee. This was really a very difficult thing to think about: could we have a dialogue about this, which is the deepest, rawest pain that our people feel? Could we have that dialogue?

As we talked about it, we decided that with the work that we have all done in our community, that we had no choice, that we had to actually help this conference happen and keep it in the hands of the community. We set out to say that this conference is not about scholarship. It is not about academia. It is not about some abstract kind of experience. It's about the community of African people here in Minnesota, who is attempting to bring together scholarship and living. We want to say to you that that's been our theme throughout this last two years of trying to put this gathering together.

I am here to thank you deeply for joining us. This is an important gathering. We have been working on it for over a year. There are people in the room who, for the last year, have been coming to the Wellness Center every three weeks to talk about what is going to be talked about today. I met Troy Duster this morning and I said, "have your ears been burning, because we have been talking about you?" We've been trying to take the information that our speakers will present to you today and sift through it and see where it lives in our lives on a day-to-day basis and where we can use it. How can we use, not just the particular tools, but how can we use this information and these ideas in a way that will never again leave us with the rawness that we now feel.

There are many people that I would like to thank. I want to thank in particular my husband, Achmed Azzahir, and Chiyedza Nyahuye who is like my husband because she keeps me in place all the time. I want to thank the many people who have gone before us and those who will come after us and who will keep this conversation going.
This is not the last time this conversation will happen, so we don't have to talk about everything in these two days. I want people to feel comfortable, so we've provided for you journals in your book, we've provided for you people in this room who will go away with you if you need to debrief. There's a meditation room down the hall where you may go and sit with someone to process this information.

The speakers have been so kind to be with us, not just during their presentations, but they are here and all of them just blend in, as you can see, with the rest of us, and that's what we'd like it to be in these two days, to have a blending of minds, so that we can use the information that comes from this conference.

We have children coming because we want for this to be an experience that's very much about the community, so you'll have a Capoeira performance and presentations from the students of the Imhotep Science Academy.

I now introduce Dr. john powell. Dr. powell has a couple of things that we need. It often feels to us that he's not a real scholar because he is so close to us. He's intimate with the community and he takes care to make sure that we stay informed about his work. He is also the Executive Director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He is a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. He established the Institute on Race and Poverty in '93, and was the former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He has written extensively and is known throughout the country for his ideas on race and poverty. He has agreed to be with us for these two full days to do the moderating because we feel like he embodies this idea of scholarship, academia and community and we thank you very much, john, for agreeing to do that.