Keynote: Herbal Legacies: Sources, Silences, Challenges

Working as researchers and practitioners within the herbal legacy forces us to confront questions about the limitations of our historical information on medicine, health, and beneficial plants. We face the challenge of educating ourselves and our clients while studying the available archives that were created by authors who projected their bigoted and incomplete beliefs on to what they observed yet frequently did not fully comprehend. Our herbal legacy was too often created in ways that abused Indigenous peoples and silenced their traditional plant and medical knowledge. This discussion explores ways to attend to the sources, silences, and challenges of our herbal legacies, so that we might be able to practice herbalism in a manner that discontinues harm to communities, repairs relationships between plants and people, and that privileges, without appropriation, the voices and expertise of the original plant knowledge holders.