This is where they can have equal opportunity, really!

He's talking about Black urban removal, nothing else.

Nothing else.

The way that I remember the CD is that this was, like, always the center of activity.

Certain landmarks have disappeared, but it's nice to have something that keeps the theme of the community.

Especially in a Black community, there's not many outlets like this for us to come and come together and be creative.

It helped people remember the artistry, the talent, and the background of this community.

This is light and an oasis, and you can feel it.

You can see it.

As a space where there is a deep history of Black life, artistic presence, resistance, creative resistance.

It's a sacred place.

Weclome to Wa Na Wari, where we cultivate the most beautiful, blackest, loving, caring, exciting, fulfilling, ancestral, divine, thriving!

Welcome to our home.

Wa Na Wari is a center for Black stories, social connection, and art, that is designed to signal to Black folks that we're still here, that there's a place in this neighborhood for you still.

And there are possibilities for the future.

My name is Inye Wokoma, I am one of the four co-founders of Wa Na Wari and I grew up here in the Central District.

My grandparents, Frank and Goldyne Green, moved to Seattle from Arkansas in the 1940s during what they call the Great Migration.

At that point, the only place where Black folks could get housing was in the Central District.

They bought a house right next door in 1947, and this house here where Wa Na Wari is in 1952.

My grandfather's brother had a house just a block up and his sister had a house just a block south, and just over here there's the house that I grew up in, which was also owned by my grandparents.

So this, this was like family Grand Central.

and....

Pop, okay so, so just we're gonna keep rolling.

Come on, come on.

This is Papisse!

This is Papisse.

This is my stepdad, Papisse.

He's from, he's from Senegal.

He used to beat me up.

Now I beat him up!

- No I do, I love you, Pop!

- I love you!

And so, you know, if we fast forward, my grandfather passed in 2010.

My grandmother had Alzheimer's, she did have a guardianship.

They proceeded to sell properties, including the house that I grew up in.

When thinking about the bigger picture of what was happening to the Black community, we held on much longer than most people.

But that was really a signal to all of us that these homes, these places that were so familiar, that were central to our identity, our sense of being could, could go away.

I realized that I was going to have to think really creatively, you know, about how to save this house.

As an artist, as someone who has a lifelong history of doing community work, it was natural for me to think of this space as a space that could house something for the community.

Hello, princess.

- How are you?

- Ok. - Miss would you like to come ov this way?

- Ok.

The original mission was always to be a cultural space, like you hope that the community will make it their own.

And they did that from the beginning.

I'm going to show you the garden after you take your picture.

You gonna love the garden.

I really believe in the power of art collectives and people who do practice in different mediums to work and collaborate together.

We've had film screenings, living room concerts.

We have dance performance.

We've had theater.

We have the garden space working with Black youth and Indigenous youth, and food sovereignty.

We have a partnership now with the Hmong farmers, and we're super excited to be doing more solidarity work with other communities like that.

These types of things happened in this community, you know, for decades and decades.

We're just making sure that we keep it here.

So we see ourselves working in an ecosystem because if we're siloed, we're actually not serving the Black community in the way we really need to we want to make sure that there's touch points all along the way for people to kind of grow and build their career.

But selfishly, as a Black woman, I just keep booking really dope Black artists and they keep saying, yes.

I came up with the name, Wa Na Wari with my father, whose ethnicity is Kalabari, a very specific group of people in southern Nigeria.

Wa Na Wari means "Our Home" in Kalabari, for us to name Wa Na Wari "Our Home," is a way of claiming the tradition of the way that this space had been embodied for the past three quarters of the century.

It's a way of evoking how my family and our people live on the other side of the planet, and what our purpose is here.

Wa Na Wari as an idea, as a concept, as an aspiration, right?

Towards, you know, some greater sense of Black Indigeneity.

You can't talk about displacement of Black people without talking about Indigeneity and the land, our liberation is connected.

So I hope that that's something that we can keep bringing forth in our work, is that we need to be working for "Land Back" and making sure that all the local tribes are uplifted so that we can also uplift our black communities.

To me community is like the womb, and all creativity has to incubate, gestate, and develop in a womb.

When you step into Wa Na Wari, you automatically feel welcome.

Whether it's a cup of sugar or, you know, butter between neighbors, that community, that's what I feel here.

Black life and dreaming is expansive and it is it is always, you know?

And being able to engage in that with each other is something of sustenance.

It's taught me to think about Indigenous lands and being thoughtful about how we all can be together.

It makes you positively question yourself of what you can do.

So the potential to create whatever is endless.

I want to see it duplicate, you know, you have a Wa Na Wari that's here, have a Wa Na Wari, that's over there, over there, over there.

Wa Na Wari, Seattle.

Wa Na Wari, Tacoma.

Wa Na Wari, New York.

You know, I hope to see it proliferate.

People are moving back to the neighborhood, which is really exciting.

And I think what we learned is the importance of art at the neighborhood level, which is what this community has always had.

We got to keep fighting.

We got to keep pushing.

And collectively, you know, we're signaling to people that there are possibilities.

We'll never have what we had before, but it doesn't mean that we cannot create the space for ourselves.

And it still feels like home.