The Hoodoo Heritage Council
Meet Ina
The
Homeschool Farmer
Ina Maka is a cultural worker, farmer, wellness educator, birthworker, and food advocate whose work is rooted in the belief that reconnecting to land, ancestral knowledge, and community can be a pathway toward collective healing and liberation.
Her work sits at the intersection of culture, agriculture, wellness, and community care. Through her cultural preservation work with Hoodoo Heritage, Ina helps explore, protect, and carry forward the folk traditions, plant knowledge, spiritual practices, stories, and ancestral wisdom passed through generations of Black communities.
Rather than treating these traditions as something that belongs only to the past, she creates opportunities for people to experience them as living practices that continue to shape how we care for ourselves, our families, our land, and one another.
Meet Nay
The Hoodoo
Doll Maker
Janay is a Hoodoo practitioner, author, educator, cultural worker, and founder of Hoodoo Heritage whose work is centered on the preservation, practice, and teaching of Black Southern spiritual traditions.
Known in the community as The Hoodoo Doll Maker, her work explores the ways Hoodoo continues to live through prayer, spirit work, divination, dolls, altars, roots, ritual, ancestral practice, and the everyday traditions carried through Black families and communities.
Through her books, workshops, retreats, spiritual gatherings, and hands-on teaching, Iyami Ajé creates spaces where people can move beyond simply reading about Hoodoo and begin experiencing it as a living tradition. Her work places particular emphasis on learning through practice, community, land, memory, and relationship with Spirit.
As a cultural preservationist, she is deeply interested in documenting and carrying forward the practices that have often survived through oral tradition, family custom, spiritual instinct, and the quiet teachings of elders. Through Hoodoo Heritage, she works alongside other cultural workers to create experiences that honor the history, spirituality, creativity, and cultural inheritance of Hoodoo while making space for those traditions to continue evolving within Black communities today.
Meet Bri
COmmunity
Midwife/
DOula
BriAnkh-Ka I-Shanti is a traditional birthkeeper, herbalist, author, educator, and cultural preservationist whose work lives at the intersection of ancestral practice, plant medicine, birth, and African Diasporic tradition.
Her relationship with Hoodoo Heritage is rooted in the understanding that much of what we now call Hoodoo has always lived quietly within Black communities, in our kitchens, gardens, birth rooms, funeral traditions, prayers, remedies, superstitions, protection work, and the teachings passed down by our elders without always being given a formal name.
Her work as a traditional birthkeeper and herbalist has given her an especially intimate relationship with the ways ancestral knowledge survives through the body. Since entering birthwork in 2017, she has supported hundreds of births while studying, practicing, and preserving traditional approaches to pregnancy, birth, postpartum care, herbal medicine, and family wellness.
Through her broader work, BriAnkh-Ka continues to document, preserve, and create experiences centered around African Diasporic healing traditions, cultural preservation, herbalism, education, travel, and community care.
Meet Ken
The Picture Maker
Kennedi Carter is a North Carolina-based celebrity photographer and visual storyteller known for creating imagery that feels timeless, intimate, and deeply rooted in memory. Working with vintage and old-format cameras, her photography carries the texture, grain, and character of another era while still feeling alive and present.
For Hoodoo Heritage, Kennedi was brought in to capture the essence of Hoodoo through a visual language that honored both history and lived experience. Her lens helped translate the people, objects, textures, rituals, and atmosphere of the project into photographs that feel less like staged images and more like pieces of cultural memory.
Her use of older cameras gives the work an archival quality that naturally complements the spirit of Hoodoo Heritage, allowing each photograph to feel like something uncovered, remembered, or passed down rather than simply created in the present.
Through her work with the project, Kennedi helped build a visual record that reflects the beauty, depth, mystery, and cultural inheritance of Hoodoo while honoring the people and traditions at its center.
Meet Mama Justice
The Wise Elder
Mama Justice is an elder, farmer, rootworker, herbalist, maker, and talisman crafter whose knowledge is deeply connected to land, spirit, and lived tradition. She keeps chickens, tends the land, works with roots, herbs, crystals, and protective objects, and has built a little conjure shop and apothecary on her property that feels like its own world of history, medicine, and making.
She is the kind of elder who can walk you across the land and name the plants most people pass by without a second thought, sharing what they are, how they have been used, and what they can teach us. Her home is filled with old relics, handmade pieces, tools of practice, and the kind of objects that make you want to ask questions and stay awhile.
Mama Justice brings an older and wiser perspective to the Hoodoo Heritage Council, along with humor, care, practical knowledge, and the kind of guidance that comes from actually living what you know. Somewhere along the way, she also seems to have adopted all of us.
She is, quite simply, the Hoodoo lady we all hope to be when we grow up.