Methodology

Walking together through town. Ana and Eugenia on their way to visit with women elders from Eugenia’s community. PHOTO ID: WebsiteMaterials-Methodology-Walking_EugeniaAna

Since 2016, we have conducted interviews with healers and tradition keepers in rural and urban communities in the Caribbean and Pacific Northwest. In these interviews, we have focused on the world views of the elders who shared their knowledge with us. Our approach is grounded in a critical Indigenous approach (Smith 2011) whereby our interlocutors determine the parameters of shared knowledge, and in conjunction with us, determine the kinds of questions and methods by which those questions are answered. This approach is not only critical; it is absolutely required. As younger women engaged in respectful relation with elders, we can open the possibility of conversation, but they are the ones who determine what it is we should, could and need to know.  

Critically engaged methods include the collection of oral histories (Smith 2011), observant participation (Emerson et al 2011), and transparent data collection (Smith 2011, Simpson 2014) in ways that prioritize the locations and points of views of each elder. Gathering this knowledge takes place in the midst of healing sessions, at family gatherings, hanging out in peoples’ patios, at the dinner table, at dance parties, hiking, resting, and just spending time together, compartiendo. We spoke with regla de osha priestesses, servidoras of la 21 división, sobadoras, and tradition keepers drawing from their Indigenous and Afro-descendant ancestral knowledge; people we have met as we heal ourselves, while dancing at the rhythm of Caribbean batá or atabales drums, or just walking down the street in a place that is new to us. 

These methods also include a practice of deep listening.  

Over the last decade, we have learned to understand deep listening as a practice that is central to the pedagogical methods of Caribbean spiritual traditions. It involves listening with the whole body, to what is both articulated and unarticulated, and paying attention to what is seen and not seen. Deep listening is about observing collective ritual behaviors and the utterances that take place between people. To listen deeply is to be a part of, extending beyond ethnographic participant observation and into the realm of being in loving community. To listen deeply is to also listen to dreams, to listen to “the counsel of spirits and ancestors” (Abebbe Oshun 2016), to dance to music, and to be present to the ups and downs of our elders’ (and their families’) lives. Deep listening has changed us, as researchers, because it has changed our orientations to “being,” to space-time, and to our relations. Deep listening served us well in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Northwest as we followed elders in walks through tropical forests in the Dominican Republic, as we went on drives through green, curvy roads, in Puerto Rico, as we learned about cultural fires in the beautiful landscapes of Oregon.  

By engaging in the practice of deep listening, we have learned that our Caribbean elders have unique and powerful understandings of the divine, known variously as Bondieu, Papa Dios, Olofi, Ometeotl and Gran Espíritu. This relationship to the divine is central to their understandings of who they are as a people, who they are in family and community and what healing and tradition even means. We then learned about the unspoken understandings of our elders’ relationships to their ancestors, to our ancestors, and to all living beings in the Caribbean and the Pacific Northwest. These relationships with ancestors are required for healing, for the transmission of knowledge and for the fortification of community.  We learned about the parameters of what is considered “alive” and “dead” (e.g. all of existence is alive, but plastic is dead). We learned about the context in which life is prolonged and death is accepted- or not. For Adela, death comes when she may – for Abebbe Oshun, death is someone to bargain with. We learned about how current economic, political and social conditions are understood in relationship to the prolongation and/or decimation of the lives of our elders, their families, their communities and the land itself. We learned that in different traditions, healing is directed either towards the prolongation of life, or toward the aversion of death. These distinct orientations translate into relationships with the plant world, relationships with the spirit and ancestral worlds, and relationships to living, breathing human beings. 

In addition to deeply listening, we also walked. Miriam Ricourt (2016) describes walking as a practice of disruption and meaning-making (p. 76) that was and continues to be a maroon(cimarron)  praxis. Walking is critical to our understanding of elders’ worlds. We walk with them through their communities, through their forests, within their churches, homes, and ceremonial grounds. Walking together, and being together in walking, allows us to assert our mutual humanity (we were all hot) and limitations (when we got tired, for example, much to the amusement of those who could keep going). Walking together allows us to understand how our elders move through space and why. Walking enables us to understand their specific geographies – the trees, plants, and places where they make meaning on an on-going basis, the ways they tend these spaces, and the sense of loss that is an increasing part of the human experience in the face of rapid climate change. In walking, we have photographed plants, groups of plants, and we simultaneously listen to the stories that are shared with us about the specific places. There are stories of disappeared species, of disappeared peoples, of new constructions and new economic forces. There are stories of successful healings, and of challenging circumstances. There are stories of plants transplanted and of the spirits who reside among them. There are stories of lands seeing cultural fires again; of people returning to the landscapes their ancestors were forced to leave; of traditional foods claimed and stewarded for generations. All of this is possible to learn when we walk together.  

Deep listening and walking require us to shift from an emphasis on video clips in our original project description to audio clips that are not completely clean of contextual noise. We have found that the requirements of the microphone to secure sound from our interviewees creates an uncomfortable situation in spaces where knowledge is mostly produced through communal conversation, questions, and interactions with the human world and plants. Moreover, most of the people we have interviewed do not feel comfortable being recorded on video and shared their most insightful stories while receiving patients or taking a stroll to show us specific plants. To produce a website with equal representation, we decided to privilege audio over video to share information. Audio clips are short and speak to specific themes relevant to the project. And we left contextual noise in them to enable the listener to get a feel of what it was like to be in conversation with the person in their everyday practice, and subtly convey the context in which we found ourselves. We are not documentary filmmakers and are aware that we are not seeking to produce documentary-like material. We are documenting some of the wealth of knowledge we have received over the years from elders and are sharing that knowledge respectfully with others seeking to value it, research it, and connect with it. We hope to create entry points for other people seeking to decolonize how we have come to construe knowledge in the Americas and what our elders have to offer as we approach a variety of social and environmental challenges here in the twenty-first century. 

Lastly, transparency is central to how we do our work. In order to honor the sacrifices our elders and communities have made and continue to make to sustain traditional knowledge, we make sure that those we have interviewed have a final say at each stage of the interview, redaction and dissemination processes. At each step in the process, we printed photographs, shared audio clips and received the authorization to continue not just from our elders, but also from the guardian spirits that guide them. This multi-layered process of knowledge ratification extends beyond the ethical boundaries of university human subjects committees and is directly and permanently rooted in the ethical parameters of the traditions themselves.