When we speak of repatriation, we often think about cultural objects, sacred items, artifacts, and heritage returning to the communities that they once belonged to. In its fullest sense, repatriation is about more than the material. That’s why the term rematriation was introduced: to move it away from paternal connotations and pay homage to the cultural context and care that the material culture needs as it is the return of the sacred to the mother, the soil. It restores spiritual balance by reconnecting people, places, and traditions. It invites ritual and ceremony to create safe passage for what is being returned.

This is where spiritual reparations comes in, coined in this podcast by Femi Dawkins: the preparation of our inner and collective worlds for restoration. It is about healing what cannot be repaid in money: the memory, the soul, and the togetherness. It is reconnecting the ties that were severed by displacement, colonial extraction, and cultural erasure.

In this episode, we explore how these ideas take root in the work of chef, author, and food activist Lelani Lewis. Her cooking, her lectures, her writings, and her workshops return us to the produce of the soil, the sacred mother, in ways that transcend recipes. Her work draws us back to the ingredients, practices, and foodways that carry ancestral memory. It is a reminder that food is not just sustenance; it is ceremony, archive, and purpose.

For us in the diaspora, engaging with these ingredients and traditions is a form of rematriation. It’s a return to the earth, to seed and soil, to the knowledge embedded in our bodies. And when we treat this as a living practice — when we cook together, share the table, pass on the methods — it becomes a form of spiritual reparations. It rebuilds connection, strengthens community, and creates a safe passage for culture itself to return.

So what might this look like in The Museum of Black Futures? Can a museum be a place where you taste history? Where exhibitions are also meals, and where recipes are treated as heritage documents? Where the return of culture also happens on the tongue, in the body, and in the soil?

In this conversation, we speculate on what it would mean to design a museum experience where food is its beating heart. A site where rematriation and spiritual reparations feed the imagination as much as the body.

Production & Sound design: Marcellino van Callias with La Fam Productions

Intro music: Oshunmare

Visuals: Illest Preacha

Trumpet: Peter Somuah

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