Wellness has a geography problem. The practices that promise to restore the nervous system — massage, acupuncture, reiki, meditation — are, with stubborn consistency, located in the neighborhoods least accessible to the people who need them most. That is a contradiction worth sitting with.
I chose North Minneapolis not despite this contradiction but because of it. The Northside has sustained generations of harm — from redlining to highway construction to the compounding weight of medical racism that still shapes who receives care and who does not. To practice healing here is to practice in full view of that history. I think that is important.
Why Location Is a Political Act
When I tell people I am based in North Minneapolis, I sometimes get a pause. A recalibration. There is a set of assumptions that attaches to the Northside that I will not enumerate here because they do not deserve repetition.
What I will say is this: the people I serve on the Northside are carrying things. Trauma from systems. Grief from losses that never get named in the official records. The particular exhaustion of navigating institutions that were not built with them in mind. They deserve care that meets them where they are — literally, geographically, without requiring a trip across town and a credit card with room on it.
"Proximity is care. Showing up in a place says something about who you believe belongs to the conversation."
Folkway exists, in part, to say plainly that the Northside belongs in the conversation about health and healing. Not as a charitable project. Not as an outreach program. As a home.
Duafe House
My work is rooted in Duafe House, a community classroom and learning garden that I tend alongside my healing practice. The name comes from the Adinkra symbol for the wooden comb — an emblem of feminine care, beauty, and the nurturing of what grows.
The garden is not decorative. It is a teaching space for ancestral herbalism, for reconnecting with the plants that our lineages used long before pharmaceutical culture. Some of what I grow feeds directly into the practice — tinctures, teas, poultices. All of it is grown in relationship with the land and with the community that surrounds it.
If you live on the Northside and you have been thinking about working with me, I want you to know: you are precisely who I had in mind when I opened my schedule.