SakiSavavi
The Territory
Saki Savavi is a liberation cartographer and cosmic geographer whose practice refuses the false boundary between scholarly rigor and embodied knowing. Working across the Sonoran Desert and the American South, Saki builds frameworks that map how colonial cartographies have shaped the spatial imagination of entire generations, and what it takes to draw ourselves free from those inherited coordinates.
Saki is the creator of the Leyline Almanac, a spiritual geography planner that tracks global liberation dates through zodiac seasons, and the founder of Compass Collective LLC, where astrocartography consulting meets decolonial ethics. Their Substack publication, Wayfinder's Field Notes, holds a growing community of more than 2,800 readers. Their work on forgotten Black cartographers like Louise E. Jefferson has reached hundreds of thousands across social media and continues to shape curricula in classrooms across the country.
Their scholarly essay "Black Cartographic Discernment: Survival Technology and the Politics of Land Justice" is forthcoming in the Land Food Freedom Journal. Recent engagements include facilitating the Archive of the Living: Mapping Lineage and Practice lab at Beaucoup Hoodoo Fest in New Orleans and presenting at the Reconstructions convening at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
An Active Practice
I do not come to speaking engagements as someone narrating finished work. The ideas I bring into rooms are alive because I am still inside them. These are the projects I am actively building.
The Leyline Almanac, 3rd Edition
Sacred Sites and Sovereign Geography. The third edition of an annual spiritual geography planner mapping global liberation dates through zodiac seasons. Each edition deepens the methodology and the reach.
Etiquette of Engagement
Part living reference tool, part spiritual memoir. A guide for navigating landscapes, internal and external, that were never designed with our survival in mind. It is both a document of practice and a record of transformation. Completing 2026.
Never Eat From a Fire You Haven't Fed
Rooted in six years of monthly solo desert fire ceremonies, this documentary explores sovereignty, reciprocity, and what it means for a Black woman to claim elemental territory. Premiere Leo Season 2026.
What I Speak About
Each talk, workshop, or lab I facilitate draws from interconnected bodies of work: liberation geography, embodied desert practice, cosmic cartography, and Black spiritual traditions as survival technology. These are not separate subjects. They are different languages for the same knowledge. The entry point shifts depending on the audience. The destination is always spatial sovereignty.
My signature keynote. Colonial maps are not historical artifacts. They are active technologies still shaping how we understand who belongs, who has access, and whose relationship to the land gets to count. I trace how cartographic violence operates and how communities have built counter-cartographic survival infrastructure in response, from the Negro Motorist Green Book to the Leyline Almanac.
Adapted from the forthcoming Land Food Freedom Journal essay, this talk examines how developing a fluency in reading colonial spatial narratives functions as a form of survival literacy. I move through the work of Victor and Alma Green, Louise E. Jefferson, and Fannie Lou Hamer alongside my own desert fire practice to argue that counter-cartography is a generative infrastructure, not just a reactive correction.
My monthly Sonoran Desert fire ceremonies are a sovereignty practice. This talk explores how a direct elemental relationship, fire tending, thermal navigation, and somatic time, reclaims an orientation toward the land that colonial logic has spent centuries trying to sever. Particularly resonant for audiences who want frameworks for embodied practice that hold political consciousness without losing presence.
When 25 nations gain independence during a single zodiac season, that's not a coincidence. It's a pattern. I developed the framework of cosmic cartography to examine how liberation movements harmonize with temporal rhythms that colonial calendars actively obscure. This talk makes that methodology accessible to audiences across spiritual, academic, and creative contexts without sacrificing its rigor.
Colonial spatial logic did not disappear with the age of paper maps. It migrated into algorithm design, platform architecture, and the hidden cartographies of digital infrastructure. This talk examines how communities can develop a critical spatial literacy for the digital landscape, recognizing extraction, centering care, and building platforms that reflect their own worldviews rather than inheriting someone else's.
A participatory lab experience. Participants move through two interconnected mapping processes: the Ancestral Map, what our people carried across distance, and the Medicine Map, what we tend in the present. Using somatic tools, cowrie shells, rice, okra, and stones, participants trace routes their bodies already know before their minds catch up. This is cartography as altar work. Available as a standalone lab or as a conference workshop.
Formats and Contexts
I move fluidly between contexts. Whether I am holding a 90-minute somatic lab or addressing a lecture hall, the same principles govern how I show up: I do not over-explain. I trust the container. I stay in my authority without making it a performance.
1Keynotes and Plenary Sessions
45 to 90 minutes. Ideal for conferences in geography, Black studies, decolonial theory, spiritual ecology, wellness, and interdisciplinary arts. I build talks that make abstract frameworks visceral, leaving audiences with a practice they can carry into the following week, not just ideas to sit with.
2University Guest Lectures
Departments of Geography, Black Studies, African American Studies, Environmental Humanities, Cultural Studies, Art History, and Urban Planning are natural homes for this work. I design lectures that complement existing syllabi rather than interrupting them, bringing practitioner knowledge alongside archival research and peer-reviewed citation.
3Workshops and Intensive Labs
Two to four hours. Hands-on, somatic, and designed around participant experience rather than information delivery. The Archive of the Living lab format can be adapted for community organizations, academic cohorts, arts institutions, healing collectives, and festival contexts.
4Panels and Moderated Conversations
I am available to participate in or moderate panels addressing decolonial practice, spatial justice, Black spirituality, counter-cartography, and the intersections of creative practice with political consciousness. I prefer panels that allow for a genuine dialogue over a presentational format.
5Artist and Scholar Residencies
For institutions seeking sustained engagement rather than a one-time visit. I can spend time in residence working with students, developing material in response to an institution's specific context, and contributing to the living archive of counter-cartographic practice in a place.
6Community and Cultural Organizations
I am deeply committed to bringing this work outside of exclusively academic or institutional settings. Community organizations, freedom schools, healing collectives, and spiritual communities are not secondary venues. They are where this work is most alive, and I bring the same intellectual rigor to every room.
I also welcome co-designed engagements. If you have a community or context in mind and are not certain which format fits, let's talk through it together. The best collaborations begin there.
Who I'm Invited By
My most generative engagements happen when hosts understand that this work lives at several intersections simultaneously and are willing to let it breathe in multiple directions. I am particularly drawn to communities, institutions, and organizations that are reckoning seriously with post-colonial legacies in their fields, that are developing innovative approaches to traditional disciplines and asking what those disciplines have historically left out, and that hold lived experience and embodied practice as legitimate forms of knowledge alongside academic and institutional credentials.
If your community, institution, or organization is actively asking how its frameworks were shaped by colonial logics and what a different approach could look like, that is a conversation I want to be part of.
Community gatherings are a first home for this work, not an afterthought. Festivals, folk tradition spaces, healing collectives, and grassroots cultural events are the rooms where counter-cartography breathes most freely. If you are organizing something for your people, I want to hear from you.
Communities + Cultural Spaces
Hoodoo and folk tradition gatherings · Healing arts collectives · Spiritual and metaphysical conferences · Wellness and embodiment festivals · Land justice and food sovereignty organizations · Community organizing spaces · Freedom schools · Afrofuturism gatherings · African and Diaspora arts festivals
Academic
Geography · Black and African American Studies · Environmental Humanities · Cultural Studies · Urban Planning · Decolonial and Post-colonial Studies · Art History · Interdisciplinary Humanities · Innovative design programs
Institutional + Arts
Museums and cultural institutions · Libraries with public programming · Documentary film festivals · Visual art and design spaces · Organizations developing innovative approaches to traditional disciplines · Institutions centering lived experience as rigorous research
Investing in This Work
I believe in naming what labor is worth, and I believe in having honest conversations about what organizations and communities can actually offer. My fees account for the depth of preparation, research, and energetic investment each engagement requires. They also reflect a body of work that now includes published scholarship, an active international speaking record, and a practitioner's archive built over years of independent research.
The foundation of my current fee structure reflects recent engagements including the Archive of the Living lab at Beaucoup Hoodoo Fest, the forthcoming publication in the Land Food Freedom Journal, and the Reconstructions convening at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. I welcome equity-minded conversations with communities and organizations committed to doing this work but navigating budget limitations. Let's find something that honors both sides of the exchange.
University, college, or graduate seminar context. Includes preparation, materials, and one hour of post-session engagement. Travel and lodging additional.
Participatory, hands-on format up to 90 minutes. Ritual materials, printed maps, and handouts included. Travel and lodging additional.
45 to 90 minutes including Q&A. Full preparation, discovery call with host, and post-mortem available. Travel and lodging additional.
right territory
together.
Booking inquiries, university requests, community gathering invitations, and collaboration conversations are all welcome. I respond best to messages that share context about your audience, the kind of experience you are hoping to create, and your timeline. The more I know about your room, the better I can show up for it.