A common autumnal vignette includes a snuggled up with a good book and a warm beverage. When I was in middle and high school, our very fine education was extraordinarily British, upper-middle class, and full of titles with one female name (Emma, Pamela—ok, Jane Eyre was two names). These were proper novels, and important in the novelistic tradition, a chance to uplift female voices (or male voices pretending to understand women) and, inasmuch as they were a thematic contrast from the more “man-oriented” works such as Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, and Kipling, they were pretty standard fare… for two or three generations before ours!
You know, this was all in the aftermath of the second wave of feminism, and writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Alice Walker hadn’t reached such heights that they’d be on my erudite girls’-school reading list.
The 90s changed all that, and I was thrilled to see not only more women writers, but also women of color (thank you, Toni Morrison, for enlarging the literary landscape as both writer and editor) and more essential volumes by men of color too. It was glorious to see WEB DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk show upon the list, or Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, and also works by Latino and Chicano and Indigenous leaders like Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Vine Deloria Jr., among many others.
Running an entity that seeks to build celebration, learning, and action through de-centering default whiteness narratives, I think this is progress. And as with all sorts of progress, it is being met head-on with book bans, censorship, and organized backlash by the kinds of restrictive, patriarchal, and regressive white supremacizin’ factions who want us not only to back to the monochromatic reading lists and cultural lives of the 1930s, but even to stop reading altogether. Too many ideas, so much subversion, it’s maybe even low-key communistic to open your mind to other cultures and experiences, ladies (and gentlemen).
No to all that.
In this edition of #SistoryLessons, we don’t have time to go into a deep analysis of “the canon,” and what that even means, but we will celebrate and uplift three Black, Brown, and Gold women (thanks to Tasneem Ansariyah Grace at Mosaic Changemakers for introducing me to this wonderful term) who not only claimed the right to narrate their own communities, histories, and futures, but to expose more of these stories to people who were unaware of, or worse, estranged from them.
But first, a bit of news from the broader arms of Brave Sis Project.
The Team Solidarity and Unity Barometer™ Is Open
As you know, we’ve been building all sorts of tools and resources to help us along in our solidarity and unity work in this post-DEI era. One phenomenon I am painfully familiar with is the gap between what team members in an organization say on the “employee survey” or “pulse check,” and what they really experience or feel behind closed doors. Meanwhile, management continues to whistle a happy tune, while talent bleeds away or worse, people stay and feel frustrated, frightened, or fed up. It dilutes the mission, it makes the office a much less happy place. I know many of my readers are familiar with this terrible dichotomy. (I sure am!)
One of new our offerings is the Team Solidary and Unity Barometer™, a useful assessment that measures the distance between what an organization says about itself and what the people inside it actually feel and experience. Three or four people from the same organization each answer 75 anchored scenario questions, independently, 45 to 55 minutes apiece. From this data, we generate a report that helps identify the divergence, and serve as a starting point for how to design a better path.
I have participated in and even purchased tools like this, and they usually start in the low four to five-figure range. Well, we believe that the times we are in call for more expedient and accessible levers. Our Barometer tool is priced at $350 (relaunch price, it will rise in the new year), and customers receive a $200 credit towards any other Brave Sis Project Solidarity Lab engagement within a sixty day-window. So, if you know anyone who is struggling with a disjointed team spirit, check this out. Like everything we do, it’s built with love and determination.
Now back to our #SistoryLesson
Phillis Wheatley (1753–December 5, 1784)─Poet, Yes. Free, No.
What’s in a Name?
During the mid 18th century, millions of West Africans were snatched from their homelands and ferried over the Atlantic through the abominable inhumanity of the Middle Passage. Many people died over the course of the approximately 245-day trip, in horrendous conditions known to many of us now. Hundreds of humans were crammed below deck in spaces too low to allow them to stand upright; they were often chained together and subjected to a months of heat, foul air, hunger, thirst, disease, beatings, filth, and the terror of a crossing from which they had no escape and whose endpoint was unknown.
An untold number jumped to their deaths rather than face whatever it was that awaited on the other side. Some of these captives were children. One was a little girl aboard a ship called the Phillis, which landed at Boston Harbor in 1761. We know close to nothing about what she endured, but “fortune” would have it that a Boston merchant, John Wheatley, opted to purchase her to be his wife, Susanna’s attendant. She was a frail girl; accounts reckon she was about seven or eight years old because she had lost her baby teeth. The child would be given a new name: Phillis Wheatley.
After Chores: Virgil, Ovid, Homer
While the men who would write the Constitution were arguing their tenets, and philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant were publishing opinions stating that Africans were less than human, Phillis was learning the Greek and Latin classics in their original languages. At age twelve, she wrote her first known poem; it would be followed three years later by one that became well known: “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” It dealt with enslavement, Christianity, racial prejudice, redemption, and human equality—and ended with a request to the white populace, written in the same lofty prose that her enslavers had come to value as erudite:
“Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”
Though she was not free, she had opinions of her own. She wrote about the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre, stating that liberty makes “strong the weak” and gives voice to “Ethiopians” as well as colonists; in her lost Boston Massacre poem, the surviving lines mourned the dead and placed them in “Freedom’s Cause.”
Eighteen Men Attest to Her Authorship
Anyone familiar with the plight of African-abducted people in the 18th century can imagine that such words, penned by a slave—at this time, the institution was of course still legal in the state of Massachusetts, and would remain so until 1783—was unimaginable to the general white population. Accepting such erudition would undermine the conceit that Africans were subhuman, right?
But sometimes in history, the men with power step up and do the right thing: eighteen of the most prominent men in Boston—the governor and lieutenant governor among them, and John Hancock—signed an attestation in her 1773 volume of poetry, certifying that the poems were indeed written by her.
London, 1773
In 1773, as the winds of revolution began to blow in the colonies, the Wheatleys took Phillis to London, with their son Nathaniel Wheatley as her chaperone. The young woman was in poor health, and the family hoped that she could attain both adequate care as well as support for the publication of her manuscript. Indeed, in London, Phillis met patrons, including Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, who helped fund the publication of the girl's tome, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Wheatley's book was published in London on September 1, 1773, as Phillis was returning to Boston to tend to her mistress, Susanna, who was by now gravely ill.
A case called Somerset v. Stewart had ensued in 1772, and its outcome largely reshaped British opinion about the institution of enslavement. Phillis’s London supporters pressed the family to free their young woman, but they resisted until late 1773, when Susanna Wheatley was near her deathbed.
The Letter
On February 11, 1774, the newly emancipated Phillis wrote to the Reverend Samson Occom—a Mohegan Presbyterian minister—after receiving his letter condemning the hypocrisy of Christian enslavers and defending the natural rights of enslaved Africans. Their earlier correspondence had begun years before, when she was still a child.
“In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”
This letter made the front page of the Connecticut Journal on April 1—no joke.
What It Cost
Phillis married John Peters, a free Black man, in 1778, but her writing career would not see further successes. The American Revolution had wrought havoc on society, including the printing presses; a second volume of Wheatley poems was advertised but never saw the light of day.
The remaining years of Phillis’s life were not ease-ful. John Peters struggled to establish himself in a series of ventures, and the couple lived with severe financial instability. Phillis is known to have lost children in infancy; records vary as to how many. She died on December 5, 1784, in just her early thirties. The cause of death has escaped the records.
Despite the short and obscure ensuing years of her life, Phillis Wheatley is celebrated as one of the first published women poets of the American colonies and the first published African American woman poet. She was also the first person of African descent in the British North American colonies to publish a book. Of the estimated 145 poems she wrote, 55 survive.
Reflection: When have your gifts been viewed as exceptional instead of natural? What’s the risk of a minoritized person bein singled out as a “miracle” or an “rarity” because of their talents?
Pura Belpré (February 2, 1899–July 1, 1982)─Afro-Caribeña Librarian and Champion of Bilingual Culture
Nueva Yol
First of all, happy Hispanic Heritage Month, which started on September 15 and runs through October 15. (Longtime readers and others may recall that Hispanic Heritage Month straddles two mid-months because September 15 marks the independence anniversaries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The period also includes Mexico’s independence day on September 16, Chile’s on September 18, and Belize’s on September 21. By it crossing two calendar months, the observance can center these historically important dates.)
I grew up in New York City, and my earliest memories are of our next-door neighbors in the Bronx, Ralph and Gladys, and their three kids, Tito, Tita, and David. Gladys made an arroz con pollo dish I remember with fondness to this day, even though I'm a pescatarian now. In the South Bronx building of my early childhood, there was always someone blasting salsa.
I've long considered my heritage akin to Puerto Rican culture because of where and how I grew up in my earliest years. And none of this has to do with Bad Bunny, who, of course, I adore. Here's a bit of Foremother history to bring it full circle.
It starts with the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917, which made Puerto Ricans US citizens. After this law passed, the first waves were coming north, with many settling in New York City’s Harlem neighborhoods. During this period, which coincided with the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, Puerto Ricans would come to what the poet Julia de Burgos and Bad Bunny called “Nueva Yol” in search of a better life. Some came to visit or join other family members. This was the case of a young student named Pura Teresa Belpré y Nogueras, who arrived in New York for her sister Elisa’s wedding in 1920. She decided to halt her studies and stay.
Despite facing a cold and unforgiving climate—both meteorological and social—Pura was determined to make her way in the city she had adopted. Because she was a college student and considered well-read, she was hired by the New York City Public Library to serve as its Hispanic Assistant at their East Harlem branch on East 135th Street. In signing on for the job, she became the city’s first Puerto Rican librarian.
135th Street, Then 115th
Soon into her tenure, Pura was transferred to the East 115th Street branch, a neighborhood with a growing Puerto Rican population. She found many ways to serve and animate the community and especially its children, from hosting bilingual story hours, to building puppets and staging shows with them, to creating new celebrations for the branch such as Día de los Reyes (Three Kings’ Day). This is part of the long legacy public libraries bring in service to their communities, and the East 115th Street branch became a cultural magnet for much of Latino New York.
Also a writer, Pura published a children’s book in 1932. Pérez y Martina was a love story between a cockroach and a mouse, and the first Puerto Rican folktale published by a major American publisher; sources also describe it as the first Latin American folktale published by the U.S. mainstream press and the first of its kind published in Spanish.
Why the cockroach and mouse? Belpré adapted a Puerto Rican folktale she had known from childhood. Martina la Cucarachita and Pérez el Ratoncito were not random protagonists; they were familiar figures from Caribbean oral storytelling, through which she could bring the humor, rhythm, language, and cultural memory of Puerto Rican childhood into a US library and onto the American publishing page.
The Years Away
She married the violinist and composer Clarence Cameron White in 1943, and took a leave from the library, traveling with him and focusing on her own writing. But upon his death in 1960, she returned to the job. By this time, the 1960s, libraries had become neighborhood pillars providing wraparound community services such as social work and vocational support. Pura helped lead the new South Bronx Library Project after her official NYPL retirement in 1968, which ran life-helping services alongside the books.
For her decades of valor, Pura was awarded the New York City Mayor’s Award for Arts and Culture in May 1982, just two months before her passing on July 1. She was also honored by NYPL on June 30—one day before she died.
The Medal
Even in the afterlife, Pura Belpré is heralded. The American Library Association founded the Pura Belpré Award in 1996, with REFORMA, a national association that promotes library and information services to Latino and Spanish-speaking communities. It is presented to Latinx writers and illustrators whose work “best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience” for children and youth.
In January 2026, it went to three separate winners:
- Abraham Matias, illustrator of Popo the Xolo, written by Paloma Angelina Lopez—a picture book about a beloved Xoloitzcuintli dog and a child’s family life.
- Lupe Ruiz-Flores, author of The Pecan Sheller, a children’s novel about a girl whose family’s livelihood is tied to pecan-shelling work.
- Vanessa L. Torres, author of On the Wings of la Noche, a young-adult novel.
Reflection: What was missing from your childhood bookshelf, and what do you think about that?
Haunani-Kay Trask (October 3, 1949–July 3, 2021)─“We Are Not American”
The Kahakumakaliua and Piʻilani Family Trees
Haunani-Kay Trask was born in San Francisco on October 3, 1949, to a Native Hawaiian family, and raised on the Koʻolau, or windward, side of Oʻahu. Her line runs to Kahakumakaliua on Kauaʻi through her father, Bernard Kaukaohu Trask, a lawyer, and to Piʻilani on Maui through her mother, Haunani Cooper Trask, an elementary-school teacher. Over her life she would carry on, and extend, the legacy of this lineage.
Trask didn’t adopt the topic of Hawaiian sovereignty as an abstract academic interest or career path; she came from Kānaka Maoli family lines rooted in the lands. It was these islands’ genealogies, lands, and political inheritances that constructed the argument of her life’s work: Hawaiians were not some picturesque “ethnic group," but an actual people whose nation had been overthrown by the U.S. government. Furthermore, they were a people whose relationship to land, language, and self-government remain contested (to this day).
She completed her studies at Kamehameha Schools in 1967 and returned to the mainland to enroll at the University of Chicago. She would finish her undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: a BA in 1972, receive an MA in political science in 1975 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a PhD in political science in 1981, from the same institution.
Building a Center and its Ethos
Haunani-Kay was determined to return home to Hawaiʻi. After completing her doctorate in 1981, she joined the faculty at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she helped create what became the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies. She became its first director and remained at the helm for nearly a decade, retiring from the university in 2010.
The Center mattered because Hawaiian knowledge had long been treated as a local “flava”: suitable for tourism, anthropology, or a historical aside, but not a place with its own intellectual, political, and living tradition. Trask helped make a home inside the university for Hawaiian language, history, culture, politics, and ways of knowing—on Hawaiian terms.
She also was frank regarding the limits of “American Studies.” During her tenure, she challenged the program’s failures around race, gender, and intellectual diversity, insisting that Hawaiʻi could not be honestly taught as merely a far-flung region of the United States. As long as the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, land theft, language suppression, militarization, and the continuing demand for sovereignty were left out of the story, the area of scholarship would be inauthentic and lacking.
Native political movements in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific became the subjects of her teaching. Her students learned about the literature and politics of Pacific Islander women; Native political movements in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific; and Indigenous history and politics.
Beginning in 1986, she hosted and produced First Friday, a monthly public-access program on Hawaiian cultural and political issues. Not content with professorship and public education, she also had a hand in political advocacy, bringing pro-Native Hawaiian claims to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva and to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in South Africa in 2001. There, she lobbied for international recognition of Native Hawaiian rights and the Hawaiian claim to sovereignty.
January 17, 1993
One hundred years to the day after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, a crowd gathered at Queen Liliʻuokalani’s ʻIolani Palace, the site of the 1893 American-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. More than 10,000 people assembled on the Palace grounds for the centennial commemoration. Trask spoke to the assembly:
“We are not American. Say it in your heart. Say it when you sleep. We are not American. We will die as Hawaiians. We will never be Americans.”
She said this because she believed the United States had not simply annexed Hawaiʻi—in actuality, it had overthrown a sovereign nation, taken Hawaiian land, imprisoned its queen (Lili’oukalani, of whom we’ve written often), suppressed Hawaiian language, and then tried to make occupation disappear under the story of statehood and assimilation. Her point was not that Hawaiians had failed to become American enough. Her point was that they had never consented to stop being Hawaiian.
That same year, she co-wrote and co-produced Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation and published From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi. The book received a Gustavus Myers Center award the following year. She contested that, no matter how much time and energy the US spent trying to morph Hawai’I into a more generic “America, Hawaiʻi was not “absorbed” into America, it was overthrown. Her premise is as alive today as it was when she published this book.
The Apology and the Honors
A few weeks after Haunani-Kay Trask’s death on July 3, 2021, at seventy-one, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa issued a public apology for the attacks its philosophers had made on her decades earlier. The department admitted that Trask was right to raise the colonial power dynamics that shaped both the university and the “American studies” program. As often happens with posthumous recognition, the University said its apology was “long overdue. So we uphold and thank her, in her absence.
Reflection: Which words in your family are the ones that cannot be translated, and who taught them to you?
Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone
As you think about Phillis Wheatley: when was a time you had "a thing," but not "the thing"? How did you reconcile this dissonance?
Celebrating Pura Belpré: which story from your own childhood would you tell differently now?
Remembering Haunani-Kay Trask: which words feel sacred to you, and what would it cost you to say them in public?
HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color
In tribute to Phillis Wheatley: how have you been made to prove your humanity, and your brilliance? Write about the last time somebody asked for your credentials before they would read or hear your testimony.
Honoring Pura Belpré: how have you translated your culture so it could be heard, while holding it intact?
Thinking of Haunani-Kay Trask: what language, spoken or spiritual, connects you to your roots—and who is left to speak it with you?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
In honor of Phillis Wheatley: read her book of poetry, here online.
To celebrate Pura Belpré: go read one of this year’s Belpré winners —Abraham Matias, Lupe Ruiz-Flores, Vanessa L. Torres. REFORMA, which co-sponsors the award, is a place to learn more.
For Haunani-Kay Trask: check out this book from Duke University Press: Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i.
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What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
The thread between Phillis Wheatley and Pura Belpré may be an obvious one, but Haunani-Kay Trask belongs in this discussion too because each woman understand the power and the purpose of identity expressed in poetry, prose, and political discourse alike.
All these forms of expression are essential elements of our continued progress as a people. We flourish when these rights of expression and respect are upheld. Claiming authorship, autonomy, agency, identity, and heritage are what’s at stake; to honor their legacy, we must continue to find the strength and the resilience to keep this intact. So I invite you to keep reading and learning about new (or new to you) voices that claim “I am here. I have a story. I’m going to tell it because it matters. And I matter too.”
Friends, you matter too! Keep reading, keep learning, keep teaching and uplifting voices that may be new to you, but who were always there with wisdom for you and us to use. Even if they were ignored, unpublished, uncounted, or told to wait their turn. Their turn is right now. Who else will you discover?
Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research. Visit our newly relaunched website for resources to help you Celebrate - Learn - Act.