Roots Renewed

Tami almost threw away her great-grandmother's rocking chair more than once. She didn't know the story behind it, only that it had always been there. Then one ordinary afternoon, something clicked, and the idea of heritage fragments was born.

This episode traces the origin story of the Heritage Fragment Framework back to the moment it actually started, and gives you a simple way to find your own. Watch the full video episode on YouTube @tamideegarcia.

For the first time, I'm the one being interviewed. My friend of almost thirty years, Dr. Jason Johnson, political analyst, journalist, and professor, sat me down to ask the questions instead of the other way around.

We talk about how we actually met decades before this show existed, why some people need permission to reconnect with their own heritage, my own honesty about shame and language, and why this work matters more than ever right now. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

Tami has heard the question her whole life. Black woman, Spanish last name, no Spanish. People decided that meant she wasn't really Dominican. In this solo episode, she tells her full heritage story for the first time.

This episode traces her disconnection back to her grandmother's choice to leave New York, to what Howard University gave her, and to how she built a cultural connection for her daughter around a heritage that isn't originally her own. Watch the full video episode on YouTube @tamideegarcia.

At 13 years old, Aselefech Evans told someone in DC that she was Oromo. They told her not to say that. She did not understand why then. It took 30 years -- and a lot of pain -- to understand the political suppression behind that instruction and to finally claim the identity that had been buried.

Aselefech Evans is an Oromo psychotherapist, Ethiopian adoptee, and co-editor of Lions Roaring Far From Home—the first anthology by Ethiopian adoptees. In this conversation, she talks about the eating disorder that brought her to death's door, the godmother she found at the Seattle airport after 18 years, and what it meant to cook from berbere her mother made in Ethiopia. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

Natalie Preddie always knew she was Jamaican. She cooked the food, learned the anthem as a little girl, said Jamaica Jamaica Jamaica when nobody else in her family was paying attention. And she still carried guilt that she had not done enough. That she had let the side down.

This conversation goes places most conversations do not. Natalie is a Canadian travel journalist and creator of Beyond the Resort — a series about Caribbean culture through Black-owned businesses and authentic local experience. This year, she said, if not now, when — and started going all the way back through colonial archives, through blood memory, through raising three sons to know that being Jamaican is the coolest thing on the planet.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

Greg Maurice moved from Haiti to Brooklyn at 13. Black Americans told him he was not black. Haitians back home called him a Yankee. He was not enough for either side. So he kept choosing Haiti anyway — in the language, the food, the history — while building one of the most successful careers in independent film distribution in the country.

In this episode, Greg talks about what it costs to hold onto your identity when both sides question whether it belongs to you, how soup joumou connects to Haitian independence, what led him to build ZAKA for the next generation of immigrants, and one step for anyone caught between two cultures. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

Hilary Giovale was 40 years old when she opened a book at her parents' house and found the names of people her family had enslaved, each one with a dollar amount next to their name. That night changed everything.

She spent eight years writing about what she found, gives every dollar her book makes to reparations work, and has been reclaiming her own European heritage through Gaelic songs, Celtic ceremonies, and an ancestor altar she works with almost every day.

This is a conversation about what it looks like to face the hardest parts of your family story and turn it into something good. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at Tami Dee Garcia or search Roots Renewed.

Find more information at tamigarcia.com.

Melat Terefe grew up watching her grandmother wear tattoos that told stories of beauty, protection, and strength. When her grandmother passed away, Melat turned those exact patterns into the foundation of her Ethiopian fashion brand, DolMel.

In this conversation, Melat shares how she is fighting to preserve Ethiopia's handwoven textile traditions against the rise of cheap fast fashion, and what her work means to Ethiopians in the diaspora who are finding their way back to their roots.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube, search Tami Dee Garcia or Roots Renewed. Learn more about Tami at tamigarcia.com.

Hugo Maynard grew up in the worst part of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, built a pharmaceutical company, won an Olympic medal, and acquired everything the world told him to want. Then he sat in his Bentley and felt nothing. His reconnection to his West Indian roots did not start on a plane back to the islands. It started with brutal honesty with himself. From that truth, his family's story — a father on a piece of plywood with $17, a mother homeless and pregnant, a bloodline stretching back to a prime minister — started to make sense.

This episode is about what happens when the life the world sold you stops working, and you finally go back to where you actually came from. Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.

Kim Lawson took a DNA test after her mother passed — hoping to find family. What she found was a Nigerian family, a Ghanaian queen mother who looked exactly like her, royal roots on both sides of her family, and a Ghanaian citizenship she earned by going to Ghana three times in five months. Her family thought she had lost her mind. The passport proved otherwise.

This episode covers the DNA test that started everything, the moment she walked into a room and saw an older version of herself, what it means to reconnect with Africa rather than reclaim it, and exactly what to do after your DNA test this week.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube at tamigarcia.com.