When I first met Tia Clark, she told me she had recently been spearfishing an alligator in the swamps of South Carolina. I saw the Gullah Geechee woman as a role model, a black woman using her passion and physical prowess to attain the goal I used to be pursuing— food sovereignty.For Clark, the owner Accidental crabbing with Tiait’s like a call from the sea. “I don’t feel like I’m choosing it. I feel like it’s what I have to do,” she told Andscape.

Seven years ago, Clark wasn’t fishing, crabbing or hunting. She worked in the food industry and had health problems brought on by inactivity, stress and late nights. “If you had asked me back then if I would kill an alligator, I would have said, ‘You better not come near me if there’s no alligator,’” she said. But after returning to the water, where her family found food and purpose, Clark saw her health improve dramatically. She was happier and stronger, she lost weight, now not had prediabetes and felt spiritually at peace. “Before, I was cut off from my culture and my family, from everything. I was wasting my days and never taking care of myself,” she said.

Clark now teaches people learn how to fish and crab since it’s fun and essential to understanding Gullah Geechee culture and sustainability. The sea is in the blood of the Gullah Geechee people; it’s sacred and has been a major part of their eating regimen since their ancestors were taken from Africa and enslaved here. Due to gentrification and restrictions, the lack of access to fishing and crabbing grounds has affected the eating regimen of the Gullah Geechee people in South Carolina, so it’s vital to remind them to take their place in the seas. It also helps — through the saltwater fishing licenses Clark requires of participants — to take care of the Charleston shoreline ecosystem through her partnership with the city of Charleston.

Clark reminds people who being here may help them connect with their ancestors and community. Hunting, crabbing and fishing may help people come home to themselves, as it did for Clark. “My first memory is hand-feeding crabs and shrimp in the dirt in my grandmother’s garden,” Clark said. “If I close my eyes, I can tell where the table was and I can tell what the sea tasted like on those crabs. All of that was already in me. And now being able to go crabbing brought it all back.”

This is what sets sports like hunting and fishing aside from others, and what makes the exclusion of black people, especially black women, from these sports all the more insidious. Feeding ourselves is a form of self-preservation. If we leave hunting and fishing to others, we leave ourselves and our communities vulnerable. “The Atlantic Ocean is a mass graveyard,” Clark said. “That’s why we as black people need to reconnect with the water because if we don’t feel those emotions ourselves, it’s easier to ignore them.”

There is a misconception that blacks are usually not desirous about outdoor sports or activities such as swimming, hunting and fishing. In South Carolina, where fishing was a path to freedom, a forced occupation and an ancestral right limited by slave restrictions, people have complicated feelings. Slaves built the maritime and fishing industries, wearing special badges that showed they’d “permission” to be at sea or they might be killed, imprisoned or sold. But additionally they called — and still call — the water home.

“There are all these stereotypes that say black people don’t swim, don’t fish, don’t hunt. That keeps us away from those places. And when we are in those places, people look at us suspiciously because they’ve been told we don’t belong here,” Clark said, adding that she is commonly missed, with passersby assuming that white dock employees are more knowledgeable about their business than she is.

Is this the kind of environment that Black people even wish to be in? Or will we, like Clark, wish to construct our own places away from the values ​​that emphasize resource extraction—expensive hunting resorts, the killing of wildlife, and illegal and even illegal hunting safaris? These are usually not just places where Black people are usually not welcome, but places that folks like Clark actively reject.

“We need to get a mass influx of black people back into the water,” Clark said. “We feel confident here, but we need to lower our guard a little bit because the sea is powerful, if you can get in there and connect and block everything. I know it’s not easy for everyone, so I’m trying to take their phones, all the things that connect them to the outside world, and pull them into that world.”

For blacks, hunting and fishing are greater than just sports; they are frequently not sports in any respect, not in the way others perceive them. They are a way of communing with ancestors, a form of community and individual self-defense, and a sacred responsibility. Clark is one of many mentors (including Chief Kimberly Tilsen-Brave Heart, Renville’s Chanceand Amethyst Ganaway) that taught me to respect the life I actually have taken and to make use of it in a way that honors all of us and brings us closer to a sustainable future.

Hunting can grow to be a technique to bring a community together. After catching an alligator, Clark called her friends over to fry it in buttermilk and spices, then drizzled it with hot sauce. She gave sausage and alligator meat to those in the community who could use it, and she made a big pot of alligator, shrimp, and okra gumbo for her family and friends. In this manner, hunting and fishing became greater than solitary sports, but cultural legacies passed down through generations of families, elders, and friends.

Clark was one of the mentors who helped me prepare for my first duck hunt, during which I cried like a baby. Instead of specializing in teaching me to see it as a competition, Clark told me to acknowledge the sacred. “I’m telling you right now, your whole body is going to shake.” She told me the story of her alligator hunt. “The boat was a long way from the alligator, and the closer we got, the more the alligator doubled and doubled. I stabbed it with the harpoon and fired a .45, and when I touched my chest, my whole body went into convulsions and I was in a primal state. I couldn’t stop.”

I felt breathless listening to Clark, pondering the seriousness of the journey I used to be about to embark on. It wasn’t just a sport. It was a duty and a responsibility. We had learned to view food as something frivolous, something that got here in plastic and paper. But something you possibly can catch. Fear and sadness were natural. Trophy hunting wasn’t.

Clark sees part of her mission in educating black youth and black women. “That’s where I put all my extra energy because they’re going to take it into the future. That’s their legacy. And if we don’t teach them, they’re going to be in robot mode, going to the grocery store, buying fake food, eating fake food, feeding their family that.”

For us, it’s greater than just a sport. It’s healing. It’s stewardship. It’s community. Black people have at all times belonged to the sea, and black women fishermen like Clark are helping us reclaim our space here, a place that’s home. As an African American and Caribbean woman, a descendant of slaves and migrants, I consider that the swirling center of the Atlantic Ocean is my home, my origins, my birthplace. And Clark echoed those feelings. “I felt so strange… The hairs on my arm would start to stand up as I approached the sea, especially near where my family would crab and fish,” she said.

“I asked my advisor, ‘What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?’ And then this black man told me it was an ancestral connection. Something we don’t know about that causes us to react when we get near that water,” Clark said. It’s a response she’s seen in others when she shows people learn how to crab. “People are afraid to get in the water. They don’t want to feel the feelings it can bring up. They don’t want to revisit that trauma.” But it’s not only trauma, it’s our history. The sea holds great pain, but in addition great love. Here, in these waters, with Clark as a mentor, black people are usually not just playing sports. They can connect with our ancestors, honor our past, and move toward the horizon of our food future.