Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science

by Jessica Hernandez

Slavery stole the Indigeneity of the Black community, and Indigenous peoples, without negating the existence and identity of Black Natives or Afro-Indigenous peoples, must dismantle the anti-Blackness that exists in our communities and embrace the Black community in our Indigeneity discourses.

This, to me, is a layer I have to decolonize in my communities as I believe that in order to dismantle that layer of anti-Blackness in our communities, we must understand that the slavery discourse fails to highlight and explain the Indigeneity of Black people and that Black people have to reclaim their Indigeneity in order to heal.

Settler colonialism taught us that as Indigenous peoples we were not created equal despite the Americas being our ancestral homelands.

In the environmental justice movement, we must reflect on who are the voices left out from platforms, from the advocacy we continue to lead, and the recognition that is not granted to those who have been doing this kind of work for generations.

We are the research subjects but rarely the researchers. We continue to be given roles that continue to take our autonomy from us as opposed to letting us lead and steward our environments. Our knowledge systems continue to be dismissed and their validity questioned.

Decolonization is a movement Indigenous peoples must lead in the Americas as these are our lands, and this means that the layers of settler colonialism must be dismantled through our leadership.

Decolonization is something allies can support, but not co-opt.

Since tears have healing properties, which Western science has also concluded to be true,29 our ancestors communicate through us in our tears because when we are healing, they are also healing.