Arrivals Origins

Like a portal to the past, The Arrivals Personal Legacy process helps participants discover and make sense of the histories stored within. The process can be an ancestral anchor for contemporary bodies. It grounds us in our history and gives us the confidence to dwell in our root cultural traditions thereby supporting our development as artists, facilitators, community leaders and citizens.”

–Diane Roberts

The Arrivals Legacy process began in a place of unknowing. A place that beckoned me to begin a lifelong exploration of authentic voice. It is a voice rooted in the legacies of my Garifuna (African and Indigenous Carib) origins, in each of the personal histories of my ancestors and in their totality as a whole. As my exploration grew, so did the APLP and its community of others seeking to find and reclaim their familial, systemic and cultural identities and voices.

APLP core collaborators Heather Hermant, Lopa Sircar, Danielle Smith and Rosemary Georgeson helped to shape the origins of the Arrivals Personal legacy process. As the first co-facilitators, they entered willingly into the experiments contributing their unique skills and perspectives. They have worked to develop their own legacy stories and to further research the application of the APLP in diverse cultural contexts.

The APLP illuminates the interconnection of each of our histories, both on a personal level and a collective one. In the group of core collaborators represented on this page, we can explore the rich cultural intersections of ceremony, language, experiences, and historical events between them. In the APLP, we also explore how these intersections may affect the here and now. When this group of Arrivals participants meet, we have the cellular histories of: The Garifuna Exile in Yuremei (St. Vincent) in 1794, the passage of the Indian Act in Canada which led to the first Residential School in 1876, the partition of India from Bengal in 1947, and the exile of the first Jewish woman to land on Canadian soil in 1738. All of our ancestral stories mingle and weave to create the baseline of our experiences now, in this life. We are an intricate web of personal and collective legacies.

This website is a continuation of the Arrivals Personal Legacy Project. The participants who share their Arrivals stories are opening the door to new creative possibilities in our communities and in the world at large.

Arrivals Origins Story Credits