In 2010, when ASWM held its first biennial international meeting, we established the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality as a lifetime achievement award. At this year’s conference, the recipient is beloved teacher, activist and artist Yeye Luisah Teish. Our letter to her reads as follows:
The award is given in recognition of your decades of visionary leadership as a Founding Mother of Feminist Spirituality, Cultural History and Political Awareness. We honor you for your work as an Iyanifa, Mother of Wisdom, and Oshun chief in the Yoruba Lucumi tradition, as a “spiritual activist”, a term coined by you, an author of a ground-breaking book and numerous articles, essays and poems, a priestess, a ritualist, a keynote speaker, a teacher, and a spiritual advisor on a global scale. We also recognize your current work founding the Jambalaya School of Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts Center a gathering, healing, learning sanctuary in the California Bay area which seeks to focus on access to rare indigenous knowledge, healing, spiritual preparation, and land stewardship.
Your groundbreaking book, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals, now a classic in Women’s Spirituality, has served as an essential spiritual blueprint for reclaiming faith, power, and knowing as the ancestors accessed it. In 1985, when you wrote Jambalaya, traditional African Spirituality was illegal, African religions had been outlawed for hundreds of years, and indigenous technologies like drumming and ancestral veneration were considered dangerous by the powers that be. Yet you knew these practices have always been the necessary lifeblood, not only as mechanisms of survival vis-a-vis colonialism, but as a means to overturn oppression. Traditionally passed down orally, you took a great risk in writing down and publishing these teachings in Jambalaya. While Jambalaya focuses on the African Diaspora, and centers on nourishing and sustaining Black women, it also invites people of all races to access their own ancestral lineages and spiritual magic. Jambalaya, in the forty years since it has been published, has become, as one author put it, “a kind of sacred text or portal for generations of cultural workers, spiritual practitioners, teachers, and organizers.”
We honor you also for your current engagement in founding and creating the Jambalaya School of Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts Center which seeks to spread the values of skilled spiritual activism, environmental restoration, community healing, a global ethos of social justice, and the decolonizing and reclaiming of indigenous wisdom. Your vision for this school is vast, and includes among other innovations: creating a haven for poets artists, musicians, and ritualists where they can collaborate and interact with their audiences; green spaces on campus for the growing of food as well as healing herbs and medicines based on ancestral recipes; a residence for visiting teachers and elders thus providing students with global connectivity; a digital archive of ancestral teachings; a curriculum dedicated to teaching the theory, practice, and application of ancestral techniques across various lineages; and an Ancient Mysteries Department dedicated to the deepening of creative practice, performance, and positioning into Spiritual Activism.’
The Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality is given to exceptioinal leaders, as a life-time achievement award. Previous honorees for the Demeter Award have included Margot Adler, 2010, Charlene Spretnak, 2012, Jean Shinoda Bolen, 2014, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum and Elinor Gadon, 2016, Kathy Jones, 2018, Vicki Noble and Judy Grahn, 2020, and Hallie Iglehart Austen, 2023.
Our board and members honor you as one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time and thank you for your activism and your literary, healing, and cultural leadership. We are looking forward to presenting your award to you in person at the 2025 ASWM Conference.