Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science

by Jessica Hernandez

As a displaced Indigenous woman, anywhere I end up I carry these roots with me and replant them in my new location. They are the foundation of my existence, resistance, and resilience. Who I am has shaped what I have become.

Everything in our environments has a relationship with us

I also refer to these as Indigenous science because they embody our ways of knowing that are rooted from ancestral knowledge and valid sciences. I personally do not like to use traditional ecological knowledge, even though sometimes this is the only way we can refer to our Indigenous knowledge systems, because to me, traditional ecological knowledge places us within past contexts. It is important to note that the same way our environments have adapted, our Indigenous knowledge systems have adapted, and this is why I view it as a science in itself—Indigenous science.

long as we protect nature, nature will protect us.

Agriculture is a branch of capitalism because it aims to grow many crops in a land plot in order to sell massively and sometimes export to wealthy nations like the United States.

Caring for the plants in his small garden and watering them brought him back his joy that had been stolen from him as a child because of war. He always believed that when we take care of nature, nature takes care of us. I saw that through him because as he was taking care of nature, nature was taking care of his healing from the trauma war left on him.

Ecocolonialism ultimately is the altering of our environments and landscapes due to colonization of Indigenous lands and the paradigms that are upheld to grant settlers (white people) the power to continue managing our environments and landscapes.

why many Indigenous peoples have to leave their rural places of origin to relocate to cities. The lack of job, educational, and other essential opportunities forces them to make a choice to move to a city.

Healing our Indigenous landscapes can begin with simply starting to center Indigenous peoples and placing them on the front of everything as opposed to continuing to treat them like footnotes and afterthoughts.

tribal sovereignty needs to come to the forefront of these initiatives and policies; otherwise, it is a form of ecocolonialism that continues to grant only white people the right to govern over our lands.

The bottom-up approach is also an important step when conducting community-based participatory research (CBPR). CBPR is defined as a collaborative approach to research, especially in the health fields that tend to work mostly with communities.

As societies throughout the Americas, we must advocate for the recognition of Indigenous women as movements are not easy to lead and require a lot of work, time, and dedication.

I often explain decolonization to my students using the metaphor of peeling onions. It is important to mention that colonialism introduced many layers that need to be dismantled, so in order to truly reach decolonization, all these layers must be dismantled. This means that like onions there are multiple layers embedded in ourselves and our systems that need to be peeled off.