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African-Black Herbal Futurisms

  • The body is epistimology

    Colonial epistemology deposited plant knowledge into taxonomies and institutions and called this preservation.

    What it could not understand, it declared primal information. Except knowledge that lives in the hands, in the voice, in the passing of a method between bodies in dance, that knowledge was never meant to be collectively understood.
    Embodied transmission is the form of knowing. Our work begins there.

  • Fracture as Evidence

    The violence of colonization and forced displacement has been narrated as erasure.
    A before and an after with nothing legible in between. Though we could never be separated from our inner worlds world. We carry it, reroute it, plant it somewhere new, and call it something the colonizer doesn’t recognize.
    The presence of Central and West African plant knowledge inside Caribbean bush medicine, Southern root work, and Black folk tradition is the evidence of people naming their world under conditions designed to silence them.
    THUTH reads those transformations as the primary text.

  • Relationship as Research

    Western botanical science positions the researcher above the plant as observer and object.
    Subject and specimen.
    THUTH operates from a different ontology: the plant is a thinking, relational entity with its own intelligence and its own history of relationship with human communities.
    To engage the plant only through extraction, of data and utility, is to reproduce the same logic that extracted people. Ceremony, preparation, and sustained relationship with plant matter are the methodology.
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Decolonial Spiritwork Ethnography: Issue #1

“Tubman wasn’t working within the system; she saw clearly that the system couldn’t be reformed or repaired, only broken and replaced.” - NYSNA, 2016

Rooted Futures: Field notes

Research questions

What bodily cues guide herbal practice?

How is care learned outside formal medical instruction?

How do land, labor, and spirituality shape embodied knowing?

How has this knowledge shifted since the early 2000s?

Black Herbal Futurisms

Articles to explore:

Ecologies of Resistance: The Underground Railroad Ethnobotany Project

Booker T. Washington: Mid-19th Century Plant Uses

Spirit work Ethnography

In Honor of Araminta "Minty" Ross (A.K.A) Harriet Tubman

PHOTO BY SUSANNE WARREN,

at: Bennington VT. 1998

From "A Reflection on Harriet Tubman's Relationship with Nature," by Zoë Polk"

In fact Black people on the Underground Railroad weren’t traveling via loud machines on trails made of concrete, iron and steel. They quietly hiked on grass, dirt, moss, and through rivers.  They relied on the illumination of the moon to light their paths.  They foraged for herbal remedies and food. Their leaders, Harriet Tubman and other 'conductors,' weren’t steering massive machines and shoveling coal into fires. Instead they were following memorized paths, gazing up at the vast night sky to identify the Big Dipper and the North Star. They studied bird calls and mimicked them to communicate danger and safety.  They used their relationship with nature to get them to freedom."

Source