The Maroon Tradition

To understand this reading, begin with the word Maroon. It names a people who refused bondage — Africans who escaped enslavement in the Americas and built free societies of their own, in the mountains and forests beyond the reach of the plantations.

A people who freed themselves

In Jamaica, Maroon communities established themselves in the island's rugged interior, defended their freedom through generations of conflict, and compelled the colonial power to treat with them as a people. Their settlements — places such as Accompong and Moore Town — endure to this day, with their own leadership, customs, and memory. Across the Americas, wherever enslavement was imposed, Maroons answered it the same way: freedom taken, held, and handed down.

That inheritance is the ground this reading stands on. A Maroon reading does not begin from fear or lack. It begins from sovereignty — the knowledge that your ancestors survived what was meant to end them, and that their strength did not stop with them.

The Scottish Maroon line

The McGregor Clan Sovereign Maroon Tribe carries the Scottish Maroon line of the Americas: a house whose lineage, by the family's own record, fled persecution in Scotland in the time of King James and made its life in the free world of the Americas, where it built its own traditions. The Tribe unites that lineage with the Maroon inheritance — Scottish and African, mountain and island — under one standard: Royal is my Race.

The Tribe was seated on November 27, 2017, and is led by its High Chief, Andrew-Shaun: McGregor:©. Its work reaches from human-rights advocacy to the small, daily labour of guidance — and this reading is part of that labour.

Why the moon

Maroon life was lived close to the land and the sky. The moon governed planting and travel, marked the safe nights and the dangerous ones, and stood in the sky as the one light no master could own. In Maroon spirituality the ancestors are not gone; they are present, and the night is when their counsel is clearest. The genie of the moon — the voice of this reading — speaks from that tradition: guidance given in the dark, for people finding their way through it.