Indigo is a plant that has been used for centuries, its vastness connecting an abundance of cultures around the world. While it has long served as a crop of craft, design, art, and spirituality, indigo also carries a difficult history. It is a spirited plant shaped by beauty, brutality, and resilience. The radiant blue dye that indigo yields fueled colonial expansion and European wealth through the ravaging of Indigenous populations, the enslavement of Africans, and the pillaging of land across multiple continents. In this manual, we focus on cultivation in the Coastal Southeastern region of the United States, where the history of Lowcountry indigo begins with enslaved Africans. African captives carried with them agricultural knowledge, cultural memory, and spiritual relationships that made indigo, along with rice and cotton, viable cash crops in the Lowcountry. It was their land-based wisdom as seed stewards and plant breeders that made indigo foundational to American wealth. That knowledge was not only practical, but ancestral. During and after enslavement in the United States and the Caribbean, African descendants maintained deep cultural and spiritual ties to this plant. What has persisted is not simply technique, but a lineage of resilience that continues to move through hands and soil. As a Black fiber farmer who cultivated indigo in the South, I understood this work not as a replacement for history, nor an attempt to redeem it, but as an offering, one that honors the lives and labor of those who had no choice in laying this foundation. The Gullah Geechee people of the Coastal Southeast represent one of the few African diasporic communities in the United States whose culture and customs have not been erased. Their sustained connection to African traditions, language, and land is a living testament to the strength of their roots. It is their ancestral resonance that has awakened and guided many of us working with indigo today, allowing us to build upon a foundation they had no choice in laying. Acknowledgement
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