WILD12 Delegate Spotlight: Iya Tahirah Abubakr

Iya comes from Yoruba ancestry and grew up in a sharecropping community, whose ancestors were enslaved. She remembers her great-grandmother telling her about the classroom outside of school, asking her what she learned on her walk to and from school. She reminisces about the lessons that her younger self can still teach her about the way to see the world, what questions to ask, and what the trees and water are telling her. How to communicate with the other beings of the land. And how we owe it to our ancestors to communicate with them about the effects of their actions on our earth and people now and making peace between them. Iya is a medicine woman, diviner, shamanic practitioner, founder & co-founder for the St. Croix Council of Elders. Iya’s life purpose and dedication are to the service of humanity as a whole and to leave the earth in a greater place than she found it.

“When we lose the wild inside of ourselves, we lose our connection to what’s calling us to express in the world. And each one of us comes into the world with an expression, and if that expression is not allowed, something happens. You get wiped out, you get duped into something that’s unreal and so your body succumbs to that. A lot of the problems we see on the earth comes out of that because there’s no longer that connection…we have grown up in that generation that are no longer connected to the natural flow of life. So if there’s anything that we can breathe out and come through this conversation, it has to be how we guide ourselves back to connecting with all creation itself.”