Art by the late Susan Seddon-Boulet
Ever since my health crisis back in 2001, in which I was plunged into my subconscious and the tattered subconscious of our culture (it was gruesome)…I have been walking the path of remembering…remembering what has been lost and what has been wounded…and what is begging us to be reclaimed…
One of the main themes of my healing has been to reclaim the severed psyche of the European…more specifically, the indigenous European. On a personal note, the beautiful reward of working through the grief and pain of all of this has been what resides on the other side of it all…relief, healing dreams, mystical situations, and the recovery of bits and pieces of my imaginal mind (or mythic consciousness).
…more on that some other time…
So, here are resources I share with any intern that comes under my wings to learn about plant medicine and herbalism. It helps give them a context for why the craft of herbalism was almost lost; well at least for “white” folk. I’m compiling everything here to share with others, as well as serve as a blog post to share with future interns.
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1. A one hour film called The Burning Times
2. Lyla June does an amazing job of outlining the loss of soul of “white” people…who have been systematically forced or coerced to forget their distant, pre-colonized, ancestral roots. Her writing is deeply moving…
Here are some words from her article, Reclaiming Our Indigenous European Roots:
“But one day, as I sat in the ceremonial house of my mother’s people, a wondrous revelation landed delicately inside of my soul. It sang within me a song I can still hear today. This song was woven from the voices of my European grandmothers and grandfathers. Their songs were made of love.”
And, a great interview with Lyla June called Healing Our Indigenous European Ancestors.
3. Tad Hargrave has done a lot of work in this regard. One of my favorite posts of his is called, Cultural Amnesia: How the Celts Became White.
4. “Over the last two or three centuries, a heartless culture-crushing mentality has incremented its progress on the earth, devouring all peoples, nature, imagination, and spiritual knowledge. Like a big mechanized slug, it has left behind a flat, homogenized streak of civilization wherever it passed. Every human on this earth — African, Asian, European, Islanders, or from the Americas — has ancestors who at some point in their history had their stories, rituals, ingenuity, language, and lifeways taken away, enslaved, banned, exploited, twisted, or destroyed by this force.
Now what is indigenous, natural, subtle, hard to explain, generous, gradual, and village-oriented in each of us is being banished into the ghettos of our hearts, or hidden away from view onto reservations inside the spiritual landscape of the Earth body…
Meanwhile, our natural souls, which are like Bushmen or rare waterbirds, know that our minds and our souls should be working together to maintain or replaster the crumbling hut of life. Instead, our indigenous souls are being utterly overlooked and pushed aside in the bustle of the minds’ competitive activity, until our true beings feel just like tribesman in a big, trafficky city: unwelcome, lost, and homeless.” ~ Martin Prechtel
And, Martin Prechtel on Grief and Praise (video).
5. A distillation of Daniel Quinn’s work, an article on The Great Forgetting.
6. Forager and Primitive Skills teacher and author, Arthur Haines and his book A New Path. And, his video, the new aboriginal.
7. The book Hi My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, by Chellis Glendenning.
8. Daniel Foor’s book on how to honor and be engaged with the ancestors.
9. A resource, I have not had the chance to read yet, but I wanted to place a link here as it was suggested by a friend who dose decolonizing work. It’s called Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
10. Documentary film ‘Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding Schools‘ is a necessary film to watch to realize what religious-industrial schooling has done to whites and what it did to the First Peoples in what is now the US.
Lindsay Kolasa 