Interview with Chief Iyanifa Fajembola Fatunmise of Ile Orunmila Oshun Compound speaking on the history and heritage of Ile Orunmila Oshun. Taped by Iya Shangogbemi at Chief’s house in Oakland, CA, August 7, 2008.

Ile Orunmila Oshun the house of destiny and love was started in 1983 in order for there to be a place where healing, learning and love could occur.  It came out of a need to see the Orisha tradition honored, normalized, and dignified.

Ile Orunmila Oshun attempts to recapture the holistic function that spirituality had in indigenous tradition, and to bring that holism into the present so that it is relevant for the future.  By that I mean that the healing part in western medicine has been divorced from spirituality.  Counseling and therapy have been pretty much divorced from spirituality.  That was never the way it was in indigenous culture.

We make it a practice to not only reclaim ancient healing practices but to look at modern healing practices and put them together, integrate them to address the whole person. Learning is important because we encounter so many people who practice this tradition who don’t know what they are practicing.  People either don’t have the philosophy,  the theology, or don’t have knowledge or skills.  We learn as much as we can, and  teach what we know.

We have to be evolutionary and holistic.  That is, we study what we can of Africa, of South America, of all the places where the Orisha tradition has migrated.  But we also recognize that all people of the world have something to contribute to the knowledge and the spirituality of the world, so we also study the Indian tradition, the Native American traditions and so on so that we have an understanding of our primal inheritance as human beings.  We blend this understanding with modern knowledge and information because we want to stay relevant to the times we are living in.

Further, we pray and meditate, and we ask for vision so that we’ll do the right thing in the present, to do that which preserves something for the future, given that we are the ancestors of the future.  We pay attention to what we’ve inherited, what we are doing now, and what we will be leaving.

Ile Orunmila Oshun has people of various races, ages, and from different cultures coming together with the understanding of universal principles. We look at the African application of these principles, the Native American application and so on.  We know that these principles are universal in that they impact all human life so we don’t segregate and say only black people, or only Native American people can belong to the Ile or practice this tradition. Through embracing that, and having a relevant vision of the world as we are experiencing it today, we can create new ways of practice and being based on universal principles--so we experience originality and we  bring together the knowledge and the beauty of all of the cultures.

Ile Orunmila Oshun is a place where the feminine is honored.  We strive for a balance between male and female energy.  We organize ourselves so that we have structures that will hold together, but that make room for everybody’s ashe, that make room for everybody’s talents.  Ile Orunmila Oshun is a place where everybody can contribute.  The experience is all the richer for that—it is very, very Oshun.

People often say that when they come to this Ile that the ebos and the rituals and other things they are required to do bring out their inner creativity.  For example, some have said they didn’t know that they could string beads like this, or create tapestries like that, or learn to sing in a certain way.  This is because as we grow together we learn who we are and what energy is passing through us.  It is important for an Ile to nurture that in every person.

Ile Orunmila Oshun is committed to re-grounding the Orisha tradition in nature.  Often Indigenous knowledge comes to urban areas and people forget that Oshun really is the River, she really is the sweet water on the Earth, or that Oya is the lightning. They begin to think that the sacred vessel or sopero [an orisha pot], or the coco is the only expression of that Orisha.  Our Indigenous traditions are based on our ancestors' observations of nature, and human nature, and then that understanding is mythologized, is ritualized, etc.

We understand again that at this point in our history re-sacralizing ecology is of the utmost importance.  Whereas a person may get a reading elsewhere and the direction would be, “Bring these offerings to the Oshun shrine,”  Here that directive gets interpreted as, “Bring these offerings to the Oshun shrine and go pick up the trash down by the river.”

You know, we have a perspective and we have a promise: we are mandated to healing our individual and communal ills; we are mandated to learn from the global community; and we are mandated to love ourselves, to love each other, and to love the planet.

While we have good social relations here, we have four festivals a year and many rituals, those coming to the Ile should understand that the Ile is not a social club.  The Ile is a place where people come to receive their life lessons and to grow and prosper.

Ile Orunmila Oshun has its roots in the Yoruba tradition of Southwest Nigeria.  The traditions that came out of Africa with the trans-Atlantic slave trade involved people in traditions that went as far north as Senegal, and as far south as Angola.  Those people were brought to this hemisphere and they connected with the Native people of this area, with the European pagans that were being brought to this area as well.  Certain traditions survived more strongly than others.  In this hemisphere the Yoruba tradition is one of those, the Fon tradition is another, the Akan tradition is another, the Kemetic Egyptian tradition  yet another.

Ile Orunmila Oshun has as its prime directive the tradition of southwest Nigeria and all of the traditions that grew out of that.  There are cords of the tradition in Brazil, in Cuba, in Haiti, in Puerto Rico and other in places in the western hemisphere.  That is the Diaspora.  We are grounded in our Ancestral inheritance.  And though Ile Orunmila Oshun has it’s primary roots in Yoruba tradition, the people in the Ile have ancestors that come from Yorubaland, from Dahomey, from South Africa, from Ethiopia, from different places in Africa, so we recognize those.  We have people whose ancestors came from South America, from Native America, from Southern Europe, from Northern Europe, and we recognize those because we are paying homage to the traditions of our collective Ancestors.

Our central and primary focus is from the inheritance from the Yoruba, but it isn’t the only one.  For example, people in Italy, have done all kinds of things with pasta, but pasta originated in China.  Africa, and specifically the Yoruba, is our China, but we’ve taken what came from there and shaped it so that we have a wide variety of pasta.  We have not forgotten where the traditions come from, what they are rooted in.  We know that Africa is the root of the tree, and we are the fruit of the tree.