Re-Storying

As the land, river, and spirits of Roots to Sky Sanctuary began calling our community of color in to stay, we needed a container to hold our process of learning and unlearning, how to ask permission properly to enter into relationship with this Place. We conceived “Re-Storying the Potomac” as our foundational project, to serve as the initiator of this ongoing “Re-Storying” process, which we are taught must take place everywhere a relationship with territory is sought by people for whom those ties had been severed.

The foundational story of our “Re-Storying the Potomac” project is the history of the Fairfax Stone. For 250 years, this British colonial territorial boundary marker at the source of the Potomac River has presided as the dominant cultural destination in the region. RTS’s 125 acres of land is situated in the heart of ancestral Shawnee and Massawomeck Indigenous lands and is just a few thousand yards downriver from the start of the Potomac River—the site known as the Fairfax Stone. The project brought voice to the cultural paradigm shift and changing relationship with these monuments and convened a living, breathing exhibit to tell the stories and experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people who were living on this land pre-colonization and post-colonization.

From 2022 - 2023 with project support and funding provided by the Mellon Foundation, we launched this inaugural project which deepened the “gallery experience” from a passive exhibition to an active interdisciplinary site that played host to curated workshops, educational seminars, short documentary vignettes, art installations, and multimedia historical motifs. Through the process of storytelling within multi-media creative platforms and strengthening the bonds of community and connection to the natural environment, individuals of urban and diverse backgrounds received an opportunity to orient themselves and their lineages within Appalachia and its stories, and together weave a new cultural chapter with it. This corner of the Upper Potomac emerged as a vibrant multicultural educational experience that places into the center of public dialogue how the birth of the Potomac River did not begin with Lord Fairfax.

The inaugural project, which wrapped up at the end of 2023, was the seed that inspired Roots to Sky’s culture as a community and led to branching Re-Storying projects and events. Roots to Sky Sanctuary has convened stewards from other aligned Indigenous and non-indigenous land communities from all over the country to engage in cultural exchange, peacemaking and healing. The concept of Re-Storying remains at the core of what Roots to Sky seeks to host and develop for our own community and others seeking the renewal central to the desire to reconnect with land and our blood memory of harmony there.

Understanding the Potomac River

Roots to Sky Sanctuary lies at the headwaters of the Potomac River (the southern border of the property), which flows all the way to Washington, DC, before it empties into the Chesapeake Bay.