We hope that some of you found your way to our site via the recent (9.19.24) New York Times article about indigo 'revival' in the Lowcountry. We are grateful for the coverage and link to our site and have seen some lovely support, and more is always welcome!
There have been many conversations that have flowed out in response to the article. They say that any press is good press, and we feel that is mostly true in this case! Several of our talented and hard working board members are featured, including Arianne King Comer and Keisha Cameron. While others may not have been mentioned, there was certainly a lot of time shared to lead an effort to help the journalist understand what is going on in "our indigo community."
You may wonder what that even means? Who is this community and what is the involvement? Well, the community of people working with indigo has a history that reaches back to what some might not even consider community. Can enslaved workers who educated, toiled and did not profit from the growing and processing of indigo be considered community? Some may think so. Especially when we consider the way that knowledge of indigo has traveled from continents and nations via people who shared in those diaspora.
It's taken some considerable time to circle back to this plant as a viable crop for both healing the land and healing people who work with it (weather for art, textiles, medicine or something else).
This organization was founded in 2016 by Donna Hardy, who moved from NW Georgia to Charleston on a mission to learn about, grow, harvest and dye with Indigofera suffruticosa. She found plants growing off the coast of Georgia (on Ossabaw Island) and worked closely with Clemson Extension agents (self-funding research) to grow out enough indigo to conduct testing on things like soil salination tolerance, nitrogen fixation (this plant is in the legume family) and more. She managed to "revive" the seed viability in order to share seeds with other textile artists and farmers who wanted to grow indigo. Fast-forward to 2024, a decade later and we have a much more viable and stable source for seeds and many more individuals growing and processing indigo pigment with updated equipment and knowledge of processing.
Though the NYT article did a lovely job of highlighting individuals working with indigo, it fell short of reflecting on where we have been and, maybe more importantly, where we are headed. In order to reflect on this, another board member, Heather Powers, has begun to write a series of posts about the Lowcountry indigo community and media coverage on her Substack account. She links to articles written over the past decade (below) and asks us all to consider what has and is changing.
Via Lowcountry Indigo Op-Ed, Part I:
A decade of indigo articles:
2014-Charleston Magazine
2016-Garden and Gun Magazine
2019-Charleston Post and Courier (paywall) and the Charleston Library podcast, The Time Machine
2020-Deep South Magazine and Atlas Obscura
2021-Charleston Mercury
2022-Smithsonian
2023-Atlanta magazine, National Geographic and CBS Evening News
2024-The New York Times (Gift Article) and Only In Our State (SC)
With our latest USDA SARE Grant, we certainly hope to see our community grow larger through community collaboration and shared knowledge, materials and resources. Indigo processing is labor intense. We believe in a future where indigo is not just viable but creates profitable solutions solutions for farmers interested in working fiber and fashion solutions into their agricultural vision. To do this, we must consider economics of scale, and we envision this as a collaborative effort.
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