Sade Musa is a folk herbalist, wellness educator, and activist. She founded Roots of Resistance, a project aiming to reconnect people with their ancestral healing practices, and address health injustices impacting marginalized communities.You can learn more about her work by following her on Facebook or Instagram. Editor’s note: While published here for the first time, this conversation occurred in the spring of 2018. I’m really curious about where you grew up and a bit about your upbringing, and if any of the work you’re doing now was informed by that? My Black ancestors are from the American South, via the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. My great grandma migrated to southern California from Arkansas during the Jim Crow era. I grew up an hour east of Los Angeles, in a predominately working class latinx community near the Stringfellow Acid Pits — the country’s worst superfund site. A superfund site is a place that’s so polluted the government actually takes responsibility for it. My family lived next to this site, and was never informed of its possible effects on our health. My upbringing was tough. I was kept out of school so that I could work. My parents owned a janitorial service, so I was cleaning truck stops in the morning, and elementary schools at night. The cleaning chemicals that we used were toxic; between this work, the superfund site, and the nearby freeway, I was surrounded by chemicals. On top of everything, I lived in a food desert: a place where healthy food wasn’t plentiful. Which is so ironic in California. Exactly. The air, the water, the soil– everything around me was poisoned. Thus, I developed health problems, the same ones that plagued my family and my greater community. My experience with environmental racism is what led me to center it in my work as a disability and health justice activist, and is what brought me to healing work. I initially studied to be a medical doctor after noticing the lack of culturally competent care in Black communities. Later realizing that career trajectory wasn’t financially accessible to me, I ended up in research science where I focused on nutritional sciences. As a hobby, I started teaching public wellness classes on topics such as nutrition, food preservation, and herbalism. Over time, my interest in herbalism grew so I committed myself to formal training. I went to conferences, I read books, I did correspondence courses, I apprenticed. The learning spaces I entered were overwhelmingly white, with virtually no representation of people with my background, or that looked like me. As I moved through my studies, I couldn’t help but feel erased by the narratives I encountered: a common one being that African peoples, throughout the continent and diaspora, didn’t have any healing traditions to speak of. There were constant references to the ancient healing systems of the Chinese, Indians, and Greeks, but there was a deafening silence about Africa and her people. This confused and angered me, so I began researching. I learned much of what I had been taught was simply untrue. I learned that many plants that are claimed as European are often found throughout Africa as well, sometimes having originated there. Similarly, there were plants that Western herbalism introduced to me as Indian in origin, but that have nativity and use all throughout the African continent — ashwagandha being an example. I found out that many plants used for medicinal and culinary purposes throughout Latin America, were introduced from Africa during the transPacific and transAtlantic slave trades. One plant that was introduced via these trade routes was the tamarind tree. I grew up drinking the fruit in the form of tamarindo, but due to colonial narratives I had no idea of its African nativity, nor my ancestral ties to it. Erasing the African connection to plants —as is done with ashwagandha and tamarind — shortens their histories and erases their medicine. Erasure downgraded tamarind from a sacred healing tree to merely a tasty beverage, in just a few hundred years. Much of my work these days involves decolonizing these plants, challenging their white-washed histories and telling their true stories. When you were describing your experience with white-washed herbalism, you named soul-loss as cause of it. I wonder if you want to describe what that means? Soul loss is a soul wound, a fracturing if you will, created by trauma. The experiences that can cause soul-loss are those that are severely traumatic, like genocide, forced migration, displacement, and forced assimilation. The damage you sustain by a soul-wounding is so profound that it can impact your offspring, and many of us inherit these wounds from our ancestors. Indigenous people around the world have been talking about how we’re linked to our past and future family. We call this phenomena of intergenerational connection many names. Science is now recognizing it in the field of epigenetics, which acknowledges that our experiences can be imprinted on both the DNA we inherent and pass along. It sounds like there’s also different degrees of someone’s awareness about this in their own self and in their collective. I imagine the descendant of a white, western European person would be less aware of this than someone who has still an oral tradition and visible memory of a mass displacement. Yeah. Soul wounds can be subconsciously felt and yet go unrecognized. Racialized peoples, oppressed under white supremacy, are more aware of spiritual disturbances happening within them — as they are highly motivated to recognize white supremacy and heal from the effects of it. White people, who are invested in ignoring our collective traumas and the presence of white supremacy, are often unaware that they are carrying a wound. When people become displaced, or migrate from their place of origin, they’re no longer surrounded by the plants, or animals, or the earth that once held them — and this leads to a loss of connection with the earth, our oldest mother. While some of the white folks that settled in the USA were forced migrated (often as a form of punishment), the majority left their homelands willingly. Even those who voluntarily abandoned their ancestral lands may come to mourn that loss. Regardless of the nature of their arrival, losing connection to our ancestral homes creates that wound that must be tended to. I believe people are driven to appropriate the spiritual practices of others, those people who don’t have the power to deny them, by a need to fill the cultural void and loss within themselves. “Healing spaces” are filled with white folks trying to “find themselves” in someone else’s sacred tradition, but how can they have this emotional-spiritual-physical healing of their ancestral wounds when they’re trying to connect with my ancestors? They need to go feed themselves with the same things that sustained their ancestors, reach back and reclaim their ancestral practices, and leave my traditions out of it. Thanks for making so clear how the violence is actually a result of loss. I’m visualizing a white-occupied space that smells of sage, is adorned with a Hindu goddess statue, and is selling a weekend workshop with plant medicine. White people homogenized the ethnic groups amongst themselves to create a unified identity that is whiteness, which they weaponize against us. The power that whiteness grants them, also instills a sense of entitlement that leads white folks to both commit and defend cultural appropriation. They outright deny the harm their presence in a closed space or practice can cause, or claim themselves too well assimilated to reclaim their own ancestral practices. To the first statement I say: listen to poc when they tell you what they need, even if that includes you putting down that which you are not welcome to. To the second, I would point out how despite being kidnapped from our ancestral lands, stripped of our tribal identities, and not represented in history books, Black Americans still managed to create new cultures and new identities from the fragments we held on to. When our drums were taken away, our rhythmic heartbeat was reborn in hambone, in tap dance, in Black girl clapping games. We adapt our cultural ways to keep the memories of our ancestors alive, and in this way we heal ourselves from the empty spaces that colonization leaves. Eurocentric historical records favor white people, and provide so much more documentation regarding their family stories. They can use that access to not only reconnect to their lineage but to study their past mistakes and build futures not steeped in violence. I have to emphasize the phrasing right there. The lost and found language. A loss leading to a need for “finding.” How can we start to talk about collective freedom– which is so obviously inherent in individual freedom– because I feel like this is missing a little bit here.. Because what you’re hearing is “I’m experiencing freedom in this moment so how can this be bad.” Healing our fractured spirit-bodies requires embracing our own history — and white Americans have yet to reconcile with theirs. POC have long been doing the healing work that is liberating ourselves from the violence of colonialism, and it’s time for white folks to join in this fight for collective freedom — or at the very least get the hell out of our way.
