In our ancestral past, this instinct would have been important because early tribes were always under threat from raiders.

The need to reconnect with one's ancestral past and folkloric heritage and to make sense of it now.

We are afraid of nature, which in our ancestral past had red teeth and claws.

This in turn makes it difficult for descendants of enslaved people to piece together their ancestral past.

Black power utilized all available forms of folk, literary, and dramatic expression based in a common ancestral past to promote a message of self-actualization and cultural self-definition.