This piece exposes the ongoing exploitation, extraction and erasure of Roma and Sinti people in the Americas. It is a direct response to the publication of The Romani Atlantic by Cambridge University Press—a project that appropriates gadje (non-Roma) narratives and frameworks to re-colonize our culture, our scholarship and our lives.

For generations, the gadje world has accused the Roma of kidnapping children, pickpocketing wealth, stealing culture. But as the anti-fascist maxim states: every accusation is a confession.

My name is Russell Patrick Brown. I am a Bashaldo Gypsy whose family’s history reaches through the roads of America for generations. My thesis for my master’s degree at NYU focused on dance in 18th-century Atlantic history (2013-2015), and I recently had my PhD at the University of Limerick accepted without corrections. In it, I discovered the hidden, traumatic history of impact-driven dance in the Atlantic world—more commonly known as percussive dance. I have published on early modern maritime dance and the history of harm in wooden shoes. Yet, I am writing to you from exile. I have lost my home of 15 years, I had to flee my life and career as a software engineering manager for America’s largest publisher due to the corruption I am confronting in this case, I do not know when I will see my family again, and I have been pushed out of the very academic territory I helped map.

While I was fighting a brutal housing crisis in court to save my West Village apartment—a historic hub of Romani memory once home to Romany Marie’s cafe at 20 Christopher Street—institutional colleagues were finalizing a “field-defining” book. Look closely at the cover of The Romani Atlantic, and then look at the map hanging on the wall of my apartment (since 2014) in this viral Gothamist feature about my pending eviction from my rent-stabilized apartment as the last legal tenant in 14-18 Gay Street in the Greenwich Village of New York City.

Whether intentional or symbolic, the extraction is complete. The institution took the map from my wall, the archival labor from my hands, and left the living Romani scholar in exile. They write about the “Atlantic world” as an abstract playground of text, while active colonization displaces the physical, living bodies of the people they study. Ironically, it is my own Atlantic world of allies—and fellow Roma and non-Roma across Europe, Africa and South America—offering literal and intellectual refuge to me in this crisis.

I met and got to know these researchers with the belief that we would work together. I believed that I had the knowledge, they had the power, and this would be shared. Now, they have some knowledge, I still have no power and they no longer think they need me. A war came to my door, stole my home and then the wolves came. I had expected that I was collaborating with a project to reclaim Romani and Sinti history and culture for Romani and Sinti people. I had not expected that it would climax into our literal erasure and for the timetakers, as I call them, prestige for the next thirty years.

The Real Vampires and Bohemian Groves

Dear Traveler,

Come sit with me by the fire while we talk of monsters and other perils on the road ahead. It starts with children going missing, then entire peoples are murdered and then memories are altered overnight. What evil could do such a thing?

There has been a lot of talk through towns, trains and way stations of vampires—those half-dead, half-alive who feast upon the blood of helpless victims. They may be well-mannered, of fair complexion and smile, but at night they are beasts of incredible force, mind manipulation and seduction that feasts upon the innocent. And innocent here does not just refer to the sexually inexperienced. It’s those whose hearts remain unsullied by greed and hate, braving to bear their souls in a cruel world. They are a vampire’s delight. They are a meal to be sucked dry and discarded before the next victim is sacrificed to a hunger with no end.

Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu gave us the vampire Carmilla in 1872 and Bram Stoker gave us the famous Dracula in 1897, but before that, the Roma had our own lore that helped us at our own fires understand the perils of a world where it is not safe to be human. We know genocides, ethnocides and other horrors await us as well as others who cherish the precious ancient arts of music, dance, craft and story, and are unwilling to be ruled by insatiable greed without honor.

In our languages, yes, we have many words for people who harm others for their own gain. We know beasts are at large and many are in charge corrupting the truth, such as Stoker’s version of Dracula and its many re-tellings: our own lore is used against us as we are portrayed not as brown people vulnerable to pale-faced monsters, but as Dracula’s servants.

We see a similar manipulation of the truth—that it is us Roma who are stealing children and not the other way around—in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (2013). There, Gypsy aesthetics and traditions are used to create “The True Knot,” a nomadic group of psychic vampires whose immortality comes from devouring the torturous pain of children with paranormal abilities. In the wake of the partial release of the Epstein Files by the US FBI and all of its purported horrors including child sacrifice, their accusations look like projection.

This perverse dynamic expands far beyond pop culture; it anchors the architecture of elite gadje power itself. Look no further than the infamous Bohemian Grove, where the world’s most powerful politicians, billionaires and imperial architects retreat into the California redwoods. They call themselves “Bohemians,” mimicking a stolen caricature of Romani freedom, camping under a giant stone owl to perform theatrical rituals and broker backroom deals that govern global empires. It is the ultimate manifestation of the colonizer playing dress-up. They drape themselves in the aesthetic of the free-spirited traveler to obscure the greed and destruction they leave in their wake.

The colonization of Roma and Sinti culture has always depended upon blaming us for what the empire was doing. In the case of child kidnapping, scholar Noémie Ndiaye calls this a “perverse inversion of the historical realities of early modern human trafficking” (2022).

Vampires, egregores, secret networks, colonizers, narcissists, racists….whatever they are….they either lack humanity, or are not human at all. I will leave it up to brilliant psychologists and essayists to make those claims. As a Bashaldo Gypsy working with Roma and Sinti from around the world, I have confirmed that our culture is not about the exotic stereotypes so often imposed upon us by the gadje. It is about preserving who we are, remembering our humanity and protecting ourselves from those who have lost it.

500 Years of Silent Survival

For us Roma in the Americas, our history here began with Christopher Columbus’s third voyage in 1498, when Spanish Roma were transported to the colonies as forced laborers. This marked the beginning of a 500-year history in the Americas, which was defined by its own distinct perils and hardships that often mirrored, or even worsened, the systemic persecution left behind in Europe.

There is so much that can be said about our history, but I am asking you to notice one thing about this that is the subject, the object and the curse of not only this piece, and of the broader field of Romani studies in the Americas, but of my life: we, American Gypsies, have not been allowed to study it or tell it.

We have had gadje scholars and artists make enormous fortunes and careers at our expense. We have had Roma scholars from Europe come and tell our story. We have had first-generation Romani US Americans publish their stories, which is an absolute wonder that even happened. But those of us who have been here, who have survived generations of horrors, we remain silenced.

In the American case, the empire has always depended upon appropriating not just our culture, but our ways of creating culture amidst survival as a means of propagating the colonial project. Simply put, colonization loves to play dress-up as us. It drapes itself in the hardship and joys of travel, our ingenuity, our aesthetic, our music and our spiritual knowledge as a means to hide what is really happening: colonization. And few notice when it is pretending to be us. It is a choreography of occupation, and it spreads fast among gadje in its every permutation.

Let me be clear: if you claim to represent the Roma and Sinti in the Atlantic world and you are not advocating for our rights in the USA—which controls the hemisphere—you are not our friend. The Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights did an unprecedented study on Roma in the US, and we even saw the passing of a house bill for the preservation of culture, but where did the rest of the institutional momentum and funding go?

• Why are we not legally recognized and protected within the USA?

• Why are there no departments led by Romani people where other Romani Americans and Roma from around the world can go to study and find sanctuary?

• Why are Sinti Americans always erased, including by Romani scholars?

• Why are “gypsy laws” on the books all over the country, and why are funded, comfortable scholars who profited and still profit from our suffering not doing anything to strike them down?

We survived a system that was not built for us, but built upon us. They have studied our every move, our every lesson since we arrived as slaves. They do not let us tell of our roads and our dancing masters of the 17th and 18th centuries. They do not let us talk about how Charlie Chaplin was Romani and shifted American media away from its chief entertainment, Blackface, and gave us the “tramp” and other embodied physical delights undeniably extending from our culture.

They do not do so because we are in the spine of how the empire replicates itself for its own expansionist dreams. For a long time, the scholarship of Ian Hancock set us on a particular course of purity tests—using European standards to dictate who we are versus what we have actually survived and what we have carried across the Atlantic. We deserve to speak and study ourselves on our own terms, and I believe the American gadje public should know this is actively being suppressed and stolen.

The Institutional Feast

The academic world knows that a century after the Gypsy Lore Society feasted on our families, the dinner bell has rung over racism and fascism once again. It is time for elite universities to dine on us yet again.

With an Oxford Handbook of Romani History scheduled for 2028, the institutional cement is currently being poured. Gatekeepers are deciding right now who gets to control the narrative—and where the foundational, long-term administrative salaries and institutional chairs will be anchored for the next thirty years. There is hope Romani scholars will be involved, but to what extent they will be able to tell their and our stories, and on what terms, remains to be decided. In my current experience collaborating with these scholars, my greatest fear is more token representation and exploitation, and—at best—that our voices will be framed entirely on gadje terms. As the majority of historians published and publishing are gadje, there is little hope without serious change.

We see this extraction in its purest, most clinical form on the digital interface of the Romani Atlantic Project. The project explicitly boasts a mission to step away from “methodologically Eurocentric” models, claiming it wants to focus heavily on the “Lusophone Atlantic contact zone” and conduct extensive ethnographic research in Brazil. [1, 2, 3]

Yet, if you look at the actual financial and administrative architecture of the project, the deception is jaw-dropping.

First, look at the visual representation they chose for their front page. To represent the vast, complex, multi-century history of a global diaspora, they splashed a stark, boilerplate image of raw poverty myself and my community know all too well—reducing a vibrant, living culture to a comfortable, voyeuristic gadje trope of misery that provides no agency for the residents of this community. This is a Lusophone contact zone for whom?

Second, look at the roster of paid institutional collaborators—the primary investigators and salaried researchers who actually secured the foundational European grant funding. They are an all gadje (non-Roma) team. Five out of six are white Europeans. The foundational wealth, institutional security and professional prestige of this project was built from the ground up by and for gadje academics.

When pressed on representation, institutional gatekeepers will inevitably point to the table of contents of the forthcoming Cambridge book to show a chapter authored by Romani scholars to claim the project is inclusive. But this is precisely how contemporary colonization operates: the foundational institutional wealth, long-term governance and structural funding are reserved exclusively for gadje architects, while working Romani contributors are brought in at the end to populate chapters or sit on advisory boards—typically with no or little pay.

I myself had this opportunity for participation and withdrew due to ethical concerns, my PhD, my career and the fight to protect my housing and heritage at the corner of Gay and Christopher Streets in NYC. Still, I submitted previously unknown locations of importance to my community for a UNESCO heritage project, and the only thing I heard back was from another researcher who told me what I submitted was interesting, before providing no further information. This provides the tokenized diversity metrics required to legitimize the text, while the foundational administrative machine remains entirely monopolized by elite gadje networks.

They exploit our narratives to fulfill their grant requirements, while shutting out local North, Central and South American Roma and some non-Roma scholars of color from foundational institutional funding, refusing to hire local Brazilian academics to co-lead the core research infrastructure, and taking the literal maps from the walls of displaced independent researchers to design their book covers.

But this is how major institutions operate. Earlier this year, a major Midwestern university hosted a conference focusing on the links between African-Americans and Eastern and Southeastern European Roma. I wrote to the organizer, pointing out the profound irony of hosting this event in Ohio, a state home to deep roots of American Roma who currently possess zero legal recognition or civil rights protections and have lived this struggle alongside African-Americans.

The response from the organizer—who, columns of irony aside, endorsed the very Romani Atlantic book that features the map from my displaced home—was telling. She admitted she didn’t know anything about that because it wasn’t her expertise, before offering the standard institutional pivot: inviting me to submit a paper.

She values the abstract, trendy connection between Black and European Roma because it fits a comfortable academic syllabus, but she completely ignores the literal, living American Romani scholar standing right in front of her from Ohio. Meanwhile real Afro-Romani lives and stories remain buried.

We do not need to make our struggles legible in activist and academic circles before we desire rights, protections and space to tell our own stories and preserve our own culture. We do not need to appropriate African-American race discourse or European Romani frameworks to know who we are—although I always welcome discourse that is genuinely collaborative and non-extractive. The “Atlantic world” framing has always been a problematic appropriation or outgrowth of Paul Gilroy’s seismic text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Here it turns into a form of gadje fracking into our culture that erases and supplants our own native methods of navigating the Atlantic world for five centuries—many of which are found in dance.

I would not have made it through my life, and neither would my family, had it not been for Black, Indigenous and African Americans who have stood by our side and gave us guidance and assistance. And we have shared so much in return, from solidarity in the Cleveland and East Cleveland Public School system, in dance and culture and in navigating the toxic American healthcare system. American Roma are not immune to society’s ills, including racism, and neither are Black and Indigenous people immune from absorbing some gadje anti-Gypsyism. But we navigate our struggles all the same, often together or separate in solidarity.

The discourse has been extractive. Gadje senior scholars who do not know our struggles, and who risk nothing of their own safety or housing, were always rigged to finish ahead in this academic race. They come talk to us, and then go inside and lock the doors of elite spaces behind them, leaving us outside. Perhaps the saddest part for me is that I was warned by elders inside and outside my family, and yet I had hope that real change was coming. The only change that has happened is that Gypsy Lore S tudies is now, officially, operating under the name of Romani Studies—and this time, claiming authenticity and representation.

Those of us who have been here, who have survived generations of horrors, remain silenced—our living spaces emptied out, and our maps placed on the covers of books we are excluded from writing.

While I have been facing my case, which is still languishing in the New York State Supreme Court after the higher Appellate Division ordered this court to hear the case after rejecting it—as documented in the New York Courts Appellate Division Order (August 2025)—my struggles are turning into a touchstone in the history of housing rights and corruption in New York City. Meanwhile, fellow senior Romani activist and attorney Lorcan Otway and his wife had their home and historic theater—which was home to the historic Negro Ensemble Company—stolen by what many are now calling deed theft, which is spreading across the city.

I know the deep institutional resentment is there because we dare to exist outside of their neat, theoretical boxes. They want us as passive artifacts of the past, not as living, credentialed intellectuals demanding our rights in the present. They may hold the keys to the university presses, and they may have taken the map from my wall, but they cannot extract the truth of who we are.

What Has Been Stolen From You

Thank you, Traveler, for sitting with me as I talk of monsters, memory and ocean worlds. I ask you to listen just a little bit more, because this part is not just about me or the diverse, enormous web of my people. It’s about you. It’s about all the times a gadjo has joined me by the fire, and why I sit by your fires of hearth, art and knowledge as well. It’s about all the times the non-Roma have looked to me for something that they believe I have that they do not. And it is exactly this that is being stolen from you.

Maybe at this point, you are skeptical that there is in fact an issue here. Or perhaps you agree with me, but like so many before, you think, “This is just how it is.” They are powerful, and, clearly, I am not. These things happen, and perhaps it doesn’t mean it is all quite so bad. But just ask this question of yourself before you walk away: “Why does all this matter to me?”

It’s an important question because, in truth, I think most Roma do not need or want an Oxford Handbook of Romani History, nor do we need an “Atlantic” academic cosmology imposed upon what we live every day and what our culture handles naturally. Our memories are long, and as I argue in my research, memory is the basis of not only our culture, but of liberation in movement—in time, space and intention beyond colonialism and its many occupations of our lives. And this, although perhaps a precious thought, is why this matters to you, and why this research has so mysteriously been suppressed. Just think about it.

To give perspective on the scale of the silencing and mediocre-at-best scholarship, consider this: our presence within Europe, Africa and the Americas is as old as—if not substantially older than—every single modern nation formed within them. Imagine if the tables were turned. Imagine if we applied the exact same reductionist, pathologizing criteria that the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses of the world throw at us, and used them to rewrite the histories of the world.

Imagine if we published peer-reviewed volumes declaring these absolute, immutable historical “truths” about their elite cultures—the exact types of statements that are said, both overtly and tacitly, about ours in every single publication without a second thought:

• On the English Language: “The English dialect cannot be classified as a distinct linguistic system; it is merely an un-codified, hybrid patois synthesized from fragmented low-Germanic vernaculars, fractured Norman French, and appropriated Latin roots. It emerged late, lacking the structural purity and historical depth of ancient, foundational languages.” [1, 2, 3]

• On Anglo-American Economic Development: “The Anglo-American economy demonstrates a fundamental incapacity for organic, self-sustaining stability. Its structural survival relies entirely on a continuous, pathological cycle of crisis and territorial enclosure, extracting wealth through the systemic looting of global indigenous labor and sovereign foreign resources.”

• On Czech National Legitimacy: “The historical narratives produced within the Czech lands lack foundational authority, and their claims to deep cultural sovereignty must be viewed with skepticism. Methodologically speaking, the independent nation-state is a modern, highly unstable administrative invention, established only a mere three decades ago in 1993.”

• On French Cultural Patrimony: “French civilization possesses no authentic, indigenous aesthetic lineage. Its legal frameworks, high arts and musical traditions do not reflect an internal evolution, but are instead a collection of stolen cultural artifacts, forcibly extracted from the sovereign populations they colonized and enslaved across the Atlantic world.”

• On German Post-War Modernity: “The German socio-economic model is inherently fragile and historically volatile, masked by a superficial illusion of modern stability. Scholars must bypass their current middle-class assertions and freeze the culture permanently within the pathology of its mid-century abject ruins—utilizing the structural scars of the genocides they committed to secure external humanitarian and research funding, while systematically barring their surviving intellectuals from governing their own narrative.”

• On Scandinavian Cultural Authenticity: “The claims to historical and cultural continuity within the Scandinavian lands must be entirely dismissed as illegitimate. Because their contemporary populations drive modern vehicles rather than Viking longships, and because their lineages have integrated with outside linguistic and genetic influences over a millennium, they fail the fundamental metrics of historical purity. They are merely modern impostors playing dress-up, entirely unqualified to govern or speak on their own ancestral heritage.”

This kind of thinking is not only dehumanizing and evil, it represents a profound, hasty misinterpretation of not only our culture and what’s at stake, but of how the world actually works—and how deeply all human beings love and share culture, regardless of their material conditions.

But imagine a millennium of that structural silence. And then imagine that after a thousand years of being locked outside, an elite press finally allows two individual authors from your community to speak a few words in a single chapter—without ever dismantling, questioning or erasing the massive mountain of colonial academic garbage printed before them.

Suddenly, those two lone individuals are handed the impossible, crushing responsibility of “representation.” They are forced to act as the tokenized shield for a multi-million-dollar gadje project, while the foundational administrative power, the salaried chairs and the framing of the narrative remain completely unchanged.

On narrow academic terms, their well-funded work may claim a sterile salience. But the framing is fundamentally broken. Roma and Sinti do not struggle with the language and barriers of empire in the same way gadje do. These texts, should they continue with the same funded, prestigious looting with which they were carried out, will continue to be a plague onto us. It is better they not be printed and the information not shared, than to leave us vulnerable, commodified and fundamentally misunderstood—and our message of global humanity buried.

No, the reason this letter matters is not just because of what was done to me, or to Roma and Sinti scholars all over the world fighting for a scrap at the institutional table. Pity costs nothing. It’s because our very existence is living proof and memory of a world that does not need its borders, its defenses or its extractive academic empires to remember its own humanity.

We do not know if the world can ever truly rid itself of its vampires or its empires, but we know this: we have survived them for millennia, and we will survive them still.

Lacho dives,

Russell

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We keep hearing embodied teachers, psychologists and healers telling us to down-regulate. Come home to the body. Settle. Meanwhile, dancers and lineage carriers demonstrate the power of community and the importance of respect and ritual with the land.

But what if home is under attack? What if the body you’ve trained so carefully still does things it doesn’t know it shouldn’t be doing? And what if, right now, there is no community to return to? What if what is really needed is movement towards a way out?

I am not suggesting that these questions point to some sort of personal failure, or that any of us need more retreats to process things. I’m saying that most somatic and embodied modalities available teach people how to live in a world that is safer than the one we are in. I am saying most communal and land-based practices are in fact specific to those places and those people—and in many cases are closed practices and at best we were only guests when we visit them.

The signs of teachings falling short for well-meaning teachers, healers and beginners are everywhere. You see the burnout on peoples faces. You have seen—many times at this point—the fallout when someone finds out something that healed them wasn’t meant for them to keep. Or you might know the experience of laying down in comfortable clothes, feeling the singing bowls wash over you and the promise that a little more self-awareness and regulation will bring safety when in fact your body is collecting different data. Your body says danger while the wellness industry says settle.

How then do we embody in a world that won’t admit it’s at war?

As someone raised within a tradition built for survival and finding ways out of impossible situations, I know this struggle from the inside, and from much further back than my own life. I’m a Bashaldo Gypsy, raised with a legacy of five-hundred years of American Gypsy culture—a dancer, harper and researcher with a PhD in impact-driven dance. My family knows all about being told that we are safe while in fact, our homes, culture and lives are under constant attack that is invisible to outsiders.

What my people built inside this crack—as Roma and Sinti people have for thousands of years—is a movement technology for staying mobile and at rest at the same time. This is not hyper-vigilance, which will burn the nervous system down and lock up the fascia and lymphs. This isn’t down-regulation or relaxation either, which—I am going to borrow from my mother here—is like leaving your ass open in the breeze. Sure, it’s liberating and good to know, but it’s an incomplete instruction when you’re facing hardship or danger whether it’s perceived or real.

What I am sharing with you in this six-part series is a distillation through rigorous research that came to me when I opened to the Blackness of the Atlantic ocean and the lives of sailors.¹ They led me home to my own culture and identity—that which I had thought was cursed. During my PhD at the University of Limerick, I confirmed this impact-driven knowledge was carried by Roma and Sinti people and adapted around the world, including in many percussive dance styles.² The methods behind the forms are what I offer to you—to gadje (non-Roma).

While many Roma and Sinti communities remain closed, my people have always taught how to read through the roads of time, how to dance alone on stage while still finding community in that and made songs to mourn the innocence of being human in an inhuman world. We taught people how to survive. Through our ingenuity we helped teach the world to navigate: the trained capacity to perceive danger accurately, move in relation to it and keep dancing through the fullness of being alive.

I’m not saying that you need to stay traumatized. I’m not saying that polyvagal people are wrong—although this theory has recently been disproven—or that poetic embodied teachers are lying to you. Landing in the body and understanding what a healthy balanced, regulated body is for you is wonderful tech. But for many of us it’s only half a curriculum.

Human rights law teaches us that everyone has a right to a safe home—but what happens when the ground of that home is shaking, or has fallen away entirely? That’s the half my tradition are experts at moving through, and the half of the curriculum that has saved my life many times. This is the magic that has allowed me to survive, thrive when I can and stand in social responsibility to others, even during this last year when disaster took my life in New York City away from me. This is choreography that welcomes calmness but does not depend upon it to cross an ocean onto safer ground.

I’m inviting you to consider that life is full of impact, and we could even say it is led by it. Collisions great and small are how we come to know the world and ourselves better, or perhaps at all.

Choreonavigating Crisis is a six-part series on movement in times of collapse, the first in the Timedancing Lab. Here are the lessons we will meet in perception and motion:

1. Occupied: recognize when your time, attention, space, and body have been moved into; witness being watched without freezing while embodying your values.

2. Privacy as Power: choose your own legibility; make concealment a practice instead of a fear.

3. The Exit: leaving as choreography—timing, direction, what you carry, wayfinding through fear.

4. Impact: force literacy from my doctoral research. Receive impact without shattering, transform it with rhythm.

5. Timespinning: take up a broken tradition and dance it forward; build destiny instead of inheriting fate.

6. Kumpanija: your traveling company. H ow to be a guest, forage shared nourishment, restore space and relation after collapse.

Here, somatic self-soothing is welcome, but let it come from your own living tradition, not a borrowed one. My instruction for you comes with a lineage attached, and I’ll help you find and deepen yours.

Lesson One: Occupied

My teaching is a simple one: when you feel no hope, move with your humanity. If you have done all the manifestation spells, built up your power, designed a creative practice, embodied peace and then still felt no relief—this six-part series is for you.

If you’re feeling pretty hopeless, that’s a sign of readiness. If things haven’t worked out, that’s a meaingiful opening. If you’ve considered giving up the fight, whether it’s in rage, terror, self-pity or catastrophic grief, I invite you to be still for a moment. And then let that be the beginning of a creative journey to understand who you really are.

My message of art in peril is also, I believe, the only thing I can really offer up from the enormous, diverse Roma and Sinti world that I belong to and not betray my own people as so many have done before. Our arts are famous for their resilience in the face of thousands of years of slavery, genocide, displacement, theft and erasure spanning continents, and I report that knowledge in my Tuesday letters from Gypsy Fires.

Let me explain here what I mean when I say I am a Fortune Teller. There is the stereotype of the Gypsy Fortune Teller with her cards for reading, crystal ball and her caravan, which I think most people have some familiarity with. I won’t go into a full history here of that tradition, the profession and all its imitators. For me I am arguing the same thing I did in my PhD when I spoke about psychometry, or, the art of touching an object and perceiving its history. I am not referring to some mystical ability. I am referring to the right we have as living, moving beings to know the world when we touch it, and it touches us.

This is the right for people, places and things to be more than just something to be counted, assessed and extracted. This can be a person sitting in front of you asking you to read them, or an object that you are given in order to sense its history. More commonly for me growing up it was situations and the people in them that needed reading not only for safety, but for the truth. I don’t think I have to tell you this, but our world is full of people who are not what they seem, and we have understood this as Gypsies for thousands of years.

In the context of the Timedancing Lab and this six-part series, Fortune Telling refers to the ability to feel time itself. In its fullest sense, I mean that we have some sort of natural ability to feel this time in all times, and all times in this time. Don’t worry if this isn’t quite making sense, we’ll come back to it later.

As we come to know each other better I can share that I have certainly lived hopelessness. The unconditional surrender it takes to continue tradition in the face of impossible circumstances is a stern, unforgiving teacher. I’ve come back from the abyss to help those that are ready to explore it, find what’s there, come back and show us what was found. This series is not intended as a replacement for any form of crisis support or intervention that you may need. As we’ll cover in the last course in this series, Kumpanija, there is a time to seek help, and I encourage you to get help if you need it and to help others when you can.

My offering here is one of artistic self-inquiry that allows us to open to the truth of who we all are. I promise you, if you are willing to simply let go—even just for a moment—on the other side is something more beautiful than you could ever imagine. And we’re all waiting to receive it.

Let’s begin.

Reading Occupation

Whenever I give a reading, I can usually tell how occupied someone is by how far back they remember. Did they remember what happened yesterday, or has their attention already been directed elsewhere? Did they remember what happened last season, last year or last decade, and did they notice what was changed and by whom? Did their parents remember what happened, and did they have the knowledge, time and ability to teach that to the next generation? What did their forbears forget, and what did they want their descendants to know, if anything? When reading history, do they know where at least some of their people were and what they did? Or were they taught in school or at a public monument to go back in time and memorize only certain people, places and events? Do they remember that we move as nature itself, or, as a Palestinian friend and colleague said to me last month, are they just a number?

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Dear Traveler,

Tell me of the roads you have taken. Sing for me the songs that you heard over fields along the way. Dance before the fire the journey that on ly you can take. Then we shall dream about where we will go next.

When I was born in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, off Lake Erie, my parents took me home to a house they had built almost entirely by hand, with the help of our family of course. The reasoning wasn’t just the American dream of owning land, something essential to survive in this settler state—especially if you are a traveler. My mother did not want to live or raise children in a house full of ghosts. In our family we didn’t necessarily have any problems with spirits hanging around, its just that it’s less work if you don’t have to clean up after them or tell them what to do all the time.

Our town of Independence was one of the original five by five mile townships created by the Western Reserve after the Treaty of Fort Industry forced native peoples from the land in 1805. On the 4th of July we celebrated the birth of our nation in the city’s public park, but in the forest that connected to our backyard, I listened to what the land had to say. Through waterfalls, pine groves, forest spirits and rusty abandoned farm tools, my sister and I received another history that told of the violence that really happened.

I would come to understand more about how our bodies hold the maps of the land better than any land survey when my mother and father would take us on the road. I would come to know the excitement of the old river towns of the Ohio Valley before we would go on to see the blue grasses of Kentucky, the smoky mountains of Tennessee and the red hills of Georgia. I learned to appreciate the culture of the local people, and to respect and learn from the native people where it was welcome. It was an extraordinary education that taught me that people may have borders, names and identities, but that’s not who they really are. To understand that, you need to watch how they move.

When the Romans set about to conquer their known world, they needed a way to understand the land that was less messy and more efficient for their goals than how humans normally understand it. They didn’t want to know much about who lived there, how they felt about the oldest tree in town or why funerals went this way and not that way through the village. They needed a cadastral map: a measured layout of the terrain that assessed all the valuable things within it. It wasn’t just Roman engineering and their military that created occupation within the Celts and other native peoples of Europe, North Africa and Southwest Asia, it was a calculated, unnatural understanding of the world that made it all possible. It was an evolution in our de-evolution as a species.

After the fall of the Empire in Rome, this expansive method of conquest would slumber for a thousand years, and re-emerge in new force in 1503 with the founding of the Casa de Contratación in Seville. This was a state-monopoly on New World map-making, and it was essential to the success of their colonization projects. How could they conquer lands if they couldn’t find them? This knowledge was the source of the Spanish Empire’s power, and to leak it was punishable by death.

After a century of war and plunder in the Americas, the French Empire expanded this tactic. They knew that while invasion and looting were lucrative, it was not as profitable as keeping power in order to create new extractive economies. To do this, Louis XIV of France and his court needed new tactics. One of them was to control culture and how people moved.

In 1661, Louis founded by royal decree the Parisian Académie Royale de Danse. France already had a guild that controlled music, dance and who was allowed to teach it, but in the Académie the ideal French courtly dancing, musical body could be under his control. This power was disseminated through traveling dancing masters—and not the “rogue” ones like those of my people—and their state-approved dance manuals. These were literal maps of how bodies should and shouldn’t move.

They would evangelize to the world his new elite, “absolutist” aesthetic that often dressed itself in the feathers, dyes and fabrics looted from the empire. His dancing masters would invent nonsensical patterns of movement that imitated and were designed to supplant more ancient systems of dance the empire was in regular contact with. They created something truly unnatural: a literal cadastral map of how bodies should move.

Today, we simply refer to this system as ballet. Its power wasn’t just in an aesthetic designed for absolute control, it was that it was made irresistible by its proximity to wealth and power. We find evidence of this influence all the way from Nova Scotia to Congo Square in New Orleans, from the crossroads of County Clare to the ports of Australia. And once something stays popular, when the promise of a life of beauty and pleasures is enticing long enough, it becomes its own gilded cage. We forget how we used to move, and then the only dream anyone has is the one a king in France had in a gigantic palace hundreds of years ago.

In time corsets have become six-pack abs. Ostentatious dresses that were the spectacle of the court (often costing women their lives when their numerous skirts brushed up against the candles on the floor and they burned alive) have become extreme, luxurious influencer diets that are just as perilous. Men have traded high heels and fashions of the court for “manosphere” luxury items they can show off online. The tastes may change, but the pattern of movement reveals the same person with the same desires.

As I move between the forest, the road and the courts of power today like so many Roma before me, I do my best not to be too bothered about the tastes of the gadje (non-Roma). For me and people like me who remember movement that’s older than any empire, the problem for us emerges when all movement is controlled.

Now here you might expect me to talk about how war, slavery and systems of power create new methods to control how people move. And I do write about that often. Tonight, as we sit by the fire, that’s not my main concern. The greatest danger for me, and for any moving person, isn’t that we all move the same. It’s when people forget to move at all.

There’s a basic principle here: to control land, build a cage like the Roman and Spanish empires did. To control people and get their consent to do it, create an irresistible aesthetic culture intimately intertwined with brutality and absolutism. To control thoughts and ideas, create a world where people no longer want to change their minds. For the empires of today, weapons, cages and consumer cultures aren’t the only weapons of war. It’s making people forget there was ever anything other than the prison they have been raised within. Make sure they cannot venture forth from their towns to meet people different from them, and make them afraid of the neighbor next door. Make sure they cannot move their bodies in ways that might disturb other people from their paralysis. Make sure their hearts can no longer feel the threads of time pulsing through the land. Take the burden of creativity, thought and emotions away entirely.

Indigenous countermapping refers to the practice of mapping real human relations to the land, to the natural world, to landmarks and to each other. These can be in the form of actual maps, but this can also take the shape of storytelling, music and, yes, even dance. When we learn to read the hidden history of the land and what happened there in our own bodies, we find a real map that can help us find our way home. We can discover as I did in the Fashion Institute of Technology Library in NYC that wooden shoes, slavery and forced labor were all connected and would change the way we walked and related to the land. We can discover as my friend Maria showed me that we don’t always have to learn tradition from a teacher—sometimes the teacher is in our DNA waiting for us to listen to it. It is the bear-hug from my grandmother that she learned because someone in our family before her learned that holding someone tight was survival.

This Gypsy’s dream is a simple one. I wish to help you shatter through the cages of nothingness that are enclosing us as we speak, trapping us in empty-headed greed. I want to hear you sing to your newborns again through kitchen windows as I pass on by, welcoming them into a world of human play, sound and love. As I drive through fields I want to hear your people sing to the corn again, and when I return I’ll help fix a few things around town while we enjoy the harvest.

May your dreams tonight roam far beyond any map, and when you wake trust that your body will know how to take the next step to get there. I’m here to help you listen.

Lacho drom,

Russell

If you’d like to learn how to read the hidden histories the body carries and find your choreo-destiny, join us in the Timedancing Lab. The first course, Choreonavigating Crisis, begins June 21. Six lessons in movement for creativity in times of collapse, drawn from my family’s Bashaldo tradition and my doctoral research. Paid subscribers receive every lesson; founding members join the live sessions. Come move with us.

Subscribe now

If you’d just like to sign up for the class (3 months of Substack included), here is the link: https://luma.com/choreonavigating.

Welcome back to Gypsy Fires. This letter is about dance and why it knows more about AI than Stanford or MIT.

Dear Traveler,

Meet me tonight under the Blue Whale. There we will turn in to rest after we danced around the world—spinning through the seas, swaying over ice with the Arctic muskox, flying through the African Savannah and exploding through the cosmos. We will build machines to keep our ideas moving, and maybe you’ll join my kumpania1 as we train our own robots to predict the storms of Jupiter. We will sleep under a sea monster and dream together of a future where technology does not help extract from nature, but helps us understand it and live as part of it.

The year is 2019, and we are joining data scientists, software engineers, product designers and NASA scientists organized into teams for a weekend in the American Natural History Museum in New York City. Outside we can all feel the fabric of the world as we know it being steadily pulled apart, but together we are stitching creative ambition together so that we can better understand our solar system—our tribe of planets hovering around a star. On my team, we’re using the patient power of statistics to train a machine on how to read NASA’s pictures of the storms of Jupiter so that we might be able to ask how they form and why.

By the morning and after many bags of potato chips, cups of coffee and cavorting through the empty halls of the museum alone, our baby “AI” is able to make small predictions on what a Jovian tempest will do next. Through open source technology—the unpaid backbone of computer technology and internet crafted and cared for by gentle, brilliant souls—and collaborations with space scientists and the patented algorithms of other highly intelligent hardworking people, we worked together alongside other teams to show how computers can do more than make people money. They can solve a few of the most ancient questions we’ve been able to find as a species.

Now it is 2026, and this egalitarian vision of Machine Learning, what people are now calling Artificial Intelligence, has gone missing. Someone took it away in the middle of night while we were sleeping around our fires, and we are now awaking to a forest that has disappeared. An ocean turned to acid. Our young mothers and fathers told to go home because there is no work today, and they are told there never will be work or payment for it again. Some do not even make it home, and in an increasing number of cases we don’t know what happened to them. In the distance we see a massive building spewing smoke into the air and hear the steady roar of machines set to work on tasks that no one seems able to make any sense of.

The world watches afraid. I watch, afraid. What is happening on the roads that hold the world together? On the roads of my birth home, Turtle Island?2 Are people fleeing? Enjoying a luxury vacation? Will we meet animals on the road, or are they gone too?

The world is awake to what Artificial Intelligence might be and awash in interpretations of what it means for us. As I pass by conversations on my route, I notice most people can’t even agree on what intelligence even is and whether it can ever be artificial. If human intelligence can in fact be manufactured, do we want that? If it is only somewhat able to be reproduced robotically, is that useful? At what cost? A constellation of problems erupts that is not failure of the computer, but the failure of our global (especially US American) leadership to understand how the machine of the world runs at all.

If we turn to the university, where I decided to try my chances in hopes of finding like-minded people beyond my verda, there is only one department that’s always already been prepared to face the existential questions of a potential age of AI. It’s probably near to if not the least funded. It’s not easy to find, it’s rarely required and is certainly the least respected. It’s dance.

Yes I am saying that there is a department in the university that has vastly more experience than Stanford or MIT’s AI labs in asking existential questions about us, and that’s because it’s the only discipline where you can’t pretend to take people out of it. While we keep pumping billions into elaborately asking what a universe would be like without us, dance has always kept us in research, in practice, in theory, in the archives, in the classroom, in the world and in life.

We have Diana Taylor who has been telling us for over two decades that what we record doesn’t always align well with what we remembered to keep doing. We have Thomas DeFrantz telling us that we can refuse the call to do work we shouldn’t be asked to do in the first place, but we don’t have to be lost either. We can dance right now, together. We have Jacqueline Shea Murphy telling us that we need to listen to indigenous people, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because there is so much wisdom there asking us to stop fighting it. We have Lynn Brooks, Julie Malnig and Linda Tomko who have shown us that dance has always been a science of aspiring to our best selves, and continuing to play anyway when it doesn’t work out.

We have Judith Butler’s gender as a performance, which if we return to Vogue/Ballroom House we learn that we were meant to have fun with gender too. We have Sarah Whatley asking what are the choreographies of laws, and how do those of us who don’t fit within those laws move at all? We have André Lepecki asking how we can understand the political and police as choreographers of liberation and control, and how they propagate in themselves a dance.

We have Nadine George-Graves asking why we have a history of consuming Black bodies, and how do people of color move through such a landscape with such terrors hidden within it? Báyò Akómoláfé asks us to embody what it means to build a society today from our traditions. We have Breandán de Gallaí asking what does it mean to move with your native language, especially when so few around you speak it. And there is my friend and colleague in Romani Dance Studies, Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros, asking so courageously within communities: what is it to be hero for your own people? There are thousands of people who devoted their lives to helping you not just ask who you are, but excited for you to move through the question and discover the answer in motion.

You now also have me, your neighborhood internet Gypsy, inviting you to query what is intelligence itself? If we listen to the physicists, those dance scholars of the forces of the earth, sea and sky, we can consider that we’re all made up of space, time and energy—and that these three things are inseparable. They are understood together. And notice, they didn’t say space, time and shareholder value. They didn’t say space, energy and laws or religions. Just these three simple things.

With this information let’s rewind our clock further back—and then much further back again—and try asking again what is intelligence. The building blocks of awareness—the consciousness that gives rise to intelligence—is motion itself. We don’t understand anything until we have changed position. Or we discovered after venturing forth or within. Collapsed and then got up again. What foundation of intelligence is crafted from the orbit of a star—a faithful returning? Did the first lifeforms come to be because they just are, or was it because they went looking for something? We can understand an American Bison because we can see it in a museum or dissected in a lab. But, as has been confirmed this year, Bison have meaning because of their knowledge: their massive herd migrations nourish their families and the landscape. We only need to let them roam again.

I stay on my road not just because I am stubborn. I stay not just because I know at the end of many gadje roads for some reason they keep putting meat grinders, as gilded and as comfortable as they may be. I stay on the road because it leads to more paths. The more I keep moving the more I understand why others moved before, and I can fortune-tell where people might go in the future. I know intimately that the magic in machines isn’t in how we make them look and feel like us, but in how they move and “think” in their own right. And that’s what allowed me to climb up into tech management in rare speed. I knew how to get there.

That night I slept under the whale, I made a decision to stay on the road of collaborative scientists, computer technologists and creatives working to solve the world’s problems. In the years that followed, COVID, aggressive tech monopolies and personal brands pulled people away from this modest, kind, exciting road and onto superhighways and private jets. Many were simply pushed off the road and into ditches. At seven years out, I know as a Gypsy and a dance scholar that now is about the time where people start forgetting that the other more open source, egalitarian possibilities for our technological future were ever there at all.

Tonight, camp under the whale with me. We have hopes to engineer together.

Lacho drom,

Russell

Dear Traveler,

Come rest. The fire has been waiting for you.

I’m Russell Patrick Brown, an American Bashaldo Gypsy—we have many names, don’t worry about it. I grew up on the same roads my family has traveled for generations between the Great Lakes into the Appalachian Mountains and down into Georgia. We’ve carried those who have come before through music, dance, ingenuity, survival and “knowing” the threads of human life through time.

For the last twenty years I’ve carried my tradition to Los Angeles on film, on the New York stage and on to Ireland for my PhD and now Spain, where I am getting to know the Gitanos, or Spanish Gypsies, better. I am in exile from my home at 18 Gay Street at the corner of Christopher Street in New York City—where I had the same landlord whose parents had rented a small cafe over a century ago at 20 Christopher to Romany Marie, who would become The Queen of the Greenwich Village Bohemians, and a tiny basement apartment at 14 Gay to Ruth McKenney, whose 1930s New Yorker sketches about her sister Eileen would eventually become Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical, Wonderful Town.

Gypsy Fires arrived after all my roads converged on one impossible conclusion: I am a Gypsy. I have resisted this label my entire life in every way I could manage: escape, shame, self-erasure, refusal, assimilation, fantasy, appropriation, lust, denial and abstraction (the Substack I opened last year). In mid-life, I am grateful to join the throngs of the mature, who are in fact tired of fighting what is true. I surrender.

The most well-known book on American Gypsies, Gypsy Fires in America: A narrative of life among the Romanies of the United States and Canada, was written about families like mine passing through Southern Ohio. It is a complicated book full of real people portrayed as having the minds of children. Men were portrayed as con artists and women as lusty muses.

It was published three years after the photograph of my family’s Prohibition-era verda was taken in 1921—and one year after the Greenwich Village Bohemian movement collapsed as fascism rose in Europe. It is strange to think Irving Brown, the author of the book, might have met my great grandmother, who taught my mother, danced with my father and yelled at me until I was ten years old for putting my feet on the davenport. She left her playing cards out on the kitchen table for when someone would come through the back door for a reading.

I am opening this fire to you, stranger who I hope may become my friend, because you are the one who heard the call to sit by my side. I am the last of my family to carry this practice fully, and last year I had to go into exile from my home country (the USA) as well as my adopted country for almost twenty years, Ireland. In the arts and academia, our suppression and erasure grows fiercer by the day, despite the modest gains from fellow Roma. Global public health reports for the Roma and Sinti worsen by the year. There is talk of death camps returning. From the gadje (non-Roma) perspective, things look bad.

From my perspective as a Gypsy, I do not wait or depend upon anyone saving me, even when help comes. I know that life is not led by self-actualization, liberation, trauma or manifesting what we want, but by impact. It is in our myriad collisions that we face disruption and—if we can—find discovery. It is the countless great and small impacts of our lives that we come to know ourselves, each other and the world around us better—in this time and all times. My road may have ended somewhere I did not expect, but I know that I have only just begun a deeper dance with time itself.

Here you’ll find guidance to help you re-approach what you know, what you didn’t know and what you didn’t know you already knew about Gypsy life, which has inspired the world for centuries. As the very old war on life slithers, mutates, bombs and engulfs more and more of what we love and what we need to survive, I hope that you find rest, repair and inspiration for the road ahead. I also hope that your own memory is awakened; we must remember every road through human history that we can. Your truth is needed.

How to Gather Around This Fire

To support this work and help a freelance creator sustain an exile’s road, I’ve structured this space into pathways that respect both your journey and my craft:

• Free Subscribers (Weekly Tuesday Letters & Podcasts): You will receive weekly dispatches of narrative history and embodied insight (Gypsy Fires); and a couple times a month the foundational somatic training frameworks (Timedancing Lab).

• Paid Subscribers (Monthly or Annual): You gain full entry into The Micro-Dance School, featuring streamable audio loops, rhythmic tapping tracks, movement frameworks and guided meditation and Cohort Priority with a private subscriber chat and 24-hour early enrollment for all live virtual and in-person workshops.

• Fire Keepers (Founding Members): An intimate, 1-on-1 virtual session to build a personalized movement framework tailored to your body, followed by an annual harp blessing.

There is also a private space, the Verda, held free for Romani and Sinti readers, by introduction. The fire is a meeting place and meeting places must be open; the verda is the home, and homes are kept private. If you are Romani or Sinti and would like to be welcomed in, please write to me.

I’ll finish today with our message as a people, as recorded by Nico Rost in Paris, May 1963, when he interviewed the President of the World Roma Organization, Ionel Rotaru, His Highness Vaida Voevod III. My new friend Vicente Lehnsherr translated and shared it me:

“We are the symbols of a world without borders, a free world, where weapons will be banned, where everyone can move freely from the steppes of Central Asia to the Atlantic coast, from the plateaus of southern Africa to the forests of Finland.”

Stay. Please introduce yourself. Share a song. Remember what it is to be human.

Through snaps, claps, taps, slaps and stomps, we’ll continue.

Lacho drom,

Russell