Since receiving the Keepers of the Earth Fund grant, Eastern Woodlands Rematriation has trained 12 apprentices our 1-year apprenticeship concluded at the beginning of May. In it, participants learned about plant identification and harvest, cultural relationships with plants, making medicines and clinical application, along with home first aid, maternal health, prevention, and recovery. Given that the apothecary plays such an essential role in the community, expanding the number of trained individuals who understand Indigenous medicine through the Apprenticeship Program was the logical next step. The apothecary is a space where we can deliberately assure the continuance of traditional healers. By training and convening healers in our communities, we are building and reclaiming ancestral knowledge and making non-pharmaceutical health more accessible while reducing our reliance on pharmaceuticals. One of our primary projects is the Wabanaki Herbalism Apprenticeship Program, which aims to foster exchange, dialogue, and sharing of knowledge of Indigenous health practices with the long-term goal of developing a Tribal community apothecary and trained traditional birth and death practitioners who can serve local communities. In the north, we work with the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamquoddy, and Penobscot Peoples and families in the south, we work with Nipmuc, Wampanoag, Massachusett, Narragansett, and Mohegan Peoples and families, as well as urban, mobile, and displaced Native people. The projects EWR carries out take place throughout New England. By centering Indigenous womxn and Two-Spirits as medicine people, midwives, and food producers, we are rematriating our food and economic systems in a way that’s more resilient and just.įamilies harvesting reclaimed white flint corn in the Assabet region of Nipmuc homelands. Rematriation re-powers our people and allows us to remember that we have what it takes to live healthy, balanced lives. In a matriarchal framework, power becomes transformative. What we desperately need as womxn and Two-Spirits are spaces to heal, organize, and strategize on ways to escape the colonial systems that are designed to keep us oppressed, unhealthy, and disconnected from the earth and our way of life. The trauma of surviving more than 400 years of colonization and genocide has manifested through lateral violence, partner abuse, and high rates of substance abuse and suicide in many of our communities. Yet this balanced way of life has been violently tested, limited, and stripped away from our womxn, Two-Spirits, and youth. We believe the process of rematriation supports the expression of our power from within this expression is reciprocal and in generosity to our relatives. Led entirely by Indigenous womxn and Two-Spirits, EWR aims to be non-exploitative and regenerative. We focus on local infrastructure needs of their various food cultivation spaces with the goal of building capacity through trust and care to others. Our projects are rooted in the reclamation of healthy food, wild medicines, and traditional knowledge through exchange, mutual aid, and apprenticeship within Tribal territories of the Northeast.
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To that end, Eastern Woodlands Rematriation (EWR) is working to sustain the spiritual foundation of our livelihoods through Indigenous food and agroecological systems. Now more than ever, centering Indigenous food systems and restoring kinship is necessary to save our planet and the most vulnerable communities from the devastating effects of climate change. Medicines gathered by Wabanaki herbalism apprentices at Penobscot Nation.