Healers

What does healing look like in the context of Afro-Indigenous traditions? What is required to maintain healing traditions across generations? These are some of the questions asked of those we interviewed.  

Within the Christian colonial framework, healing is sometimes conceptualized as an end-point –  something we achieve through medical, religious or psychological or other kinds of interventions. You are ill, then you are no longer ill. You are healed, cured, or saved. But what happens when salvation, cure or perfect health is neither desired nor achievable? What happens when the conditions with which you live are permanent? When the conditions in which your family lives are permanent? Or when change is not an endpoint, but rather, a cycle of deepening and growing and expanding? What if all we have is the set of tools, herramientas, with which we can do our best to achieve our destinies? 

There are many powerful theoretical and theological questions that emerged from our conversations with elders. 

The first set of relationships we had to untangle were those between the living and the living, the living and the dead, the living and the ancestors, the living and the elementals, the dead and the ancestors, the dead and the elementals, the ancestors and the elementals – and then all of these in relationship to creation itself. 

The second set of relationships we had to attempt to understand were the relationships between people and place, people and land, people and waters, people and plants, people and animals, and the broader relationships between peoples (pueblos). 

The third set of relationships we had to untangle in our own understandings of “healing” was a healer’s relationship to the body, to health, to illness, to life and to death. Each of these relationships have detailed theological and cultural frameworks that challenge what we understand our “being” to be. Sometimes, illness is not located in the physical body, but rather within a set of ill relationships between the living and the dead. Sometimes, envy is enough to produce a health crisis. But what is envy? Is it an energy? A spirit? A being? The answer to that depended on the healer. 

And lastly, several years into our research we learned about the framework of “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” (TEK). While this framework is highly debated, we find it useful for thinking through how the struggles of tradition keepers and healers in the Caribbean are linked to those of other Indigenous and displaced peoples throughout the hemisphere, including Indigenous and Black communities in the Pacific Northwest. When we talk about TEK, we are referencing the concept of Indigenous knowledge, which Melissa K. Nelson defines as “the multiple knowledge systems, epistemologies, worldviews, and traditional practices of the world’s roughly 370 million Indigenous peoples” (Melissa K. Nelson. 2014. “Indigenous Science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Persistence in Place” in Robert Warrior, editor The World of Indigenous North America, Routledge, pp. 188). The tradition part of TEK refers to those cultural practices, knowledges, and ways of being that have been “practiced or used by ancestors of an Indigenous group and has been passed on intergenerationally through the oral tradition” (190 – 191). In this project we document specifically traditional knowledge valued and preserved by Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples, culture and/or community. The term ecological refers to the relationships and context we named above. And knowledge – as we learned from our elders in the interview process – is a very practical way of ensuring a healthy life.   

It has been a profound process to understand that helping someone recover from hepatitis is not just about the herbal concoction that was prepared; that stopping sexual violence requires intergenerational commitment; or that mental illness and pain do have somatic dimensions as well as spiritual ones. In one case, a headache was explained to us as a block that was produced by a lack of light to the person’s crown. This lack of light was produced by the person being surrounded by those who did not wish them well, by envious people, by people with poor intentions. In another case, mental illness – severe depression – was explained to us as a person having their “head robbed,” and was remedied through a misa espiritista in which the dead and ancestors intervened to locate the person who had caused the harm. Tuberculosis was explained as a bacteria, but the bacteria had penetrated the lungs not by physical exposure, but rather because the person’s spirit was debilitated. To remove the tuberculosis from the body, the person had to prepare a concoction with hojas machucadas and milk, every day, but also receive healing at the hands of the curandera who had provided the original diagnosis and treatment. That healing included prayer over the person’s body, and a constant vigilance over their herbal preparations. A woman’s case of syphilis, it was explained, is treatable with a botella (a combination of herbs), but only if the person also prays to Santa Marta to help her conquer the ill wishes sent to her via her sexual partners.  

Healing also is about creating spaces to pass down ecological and medicinal knowledge across generations. It can also be about reclaiming Indigenous lands stolen through colonization and genocide, about remembering publicly Black communities’ history in a place, about stewarding the waters where one’s ancestors drank or fished, about re-learning how to care for traditional foods like acorn by lighting traditional fires.  

These are only some of the stories we heard. 

As we delve deeper into the stories shared by elders in the Caribbean and the Pacific Northwest, we encounter people whose service heals the Earth one person, one plant, at a time. They are tradition keepers seeking to sustain life in all forms.  

Here, we provide some brief glimpses into our elders’ worlds, glimpses that we understand lead into other ways of being and knowing. 

Who We Are