Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions

The Healers Project is part of the UO Libraries Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) in a partnership with the Mellon Institute for Racial and Climate Justice, a collaboration with Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos and Dr. Ana Lara. Their initiative, the Caribbean Women Healers Project: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro Indigenous Traditions, launched in Spring 2020.

Since 2016 they have conducted ethnographic research with women healers in the Caribbean and the quickly expanding Caribbean diaspora in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Their research contributes to existing scholarship on Caribbean healers by highlighting how women mobilize their knowledge and roles as healers, teachers, and community leaders within Afro-Indigenous Caribbean healing traditions to effect change well beyond the traditional centers of those communities.

This digital humanities project provides open access to interviews with women healers, and an ethnobotanical guide for researchers, students, and the general public with support from UO Faculty Research Award, Center for the Study of Women in Society Research Grant, and the UO Libraries Digital Scholarship Center’s Faculty Digital Projects Grant Program. It also gives a virtual space for Caribbean communities living in diaspora-away from the islands-to maintain intergenerational transmission of traditional healing methods and knowledge production, and a virtual space for interviewees to share their healing traditions with the desire to use media as a way to reproduce knowledge across generations as well as across communities.