Land, people, and place: Ethnobotany in Secwepemcúl'ecw

This project arose as a personal response to the overwhelming over-representation of Indigenous peoples in statistics on health crises. We hear so often about how Indigenous peoples are less healthy and more subject to health inequalities than our non-Indigenous neighbors. As a result, I began research on ethnobotany and the idea of traditional medicine restoration being part of a solution. In this paper I argue for a healthcare system that will validate Indigenous healing as equally authoritative to Western approaches to health and wellbeing, rather than dismissive of them. Ethnobotany mediates the relationship with land, souls and self while colonialism obscures the importance and relevance of Indigenous consciousness. Health issues faced by many Indigenous peoples are a direct reflection of the lasting impacts of colonialism, assimilation policy, ethnocide and genocide. Solving these health problems rooted in this horrible past and the intergenerational traumas left in their wake, requires not just acknowledging truth and reconciling differences, but a social transformation whereby dominant settler colonial society validates indigeneity and First Nations ways of being and knowing as equal epistemological systems. “For the First Peoples of Canada, the past cannot be forgotten, deliberately overlooked, or discarded as no longer relevant. The past is still present, but in a different form that must be addressed again in the new conditions in which it appears, now and into the future” (Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures, 2005, p. 24). Thus I view this thesis as an act of resistance against colonial knowledge forms. It looks to create space for, and validate, Indigenous epistemologies. The acknowledgment of different ways of being and knowing as equals to colonial knowing will forever change the way Canadian Indigenous peoples are understood, respected and will lead to healing of the intergenerational trauma imposed on our Indigenous peoples. The breaking of hegemony and racist discourse that engulfs society today starts with every individual person in society taking a stand and being able to acknowledge and see these almost undetectable systems that still today assimilate and marginalize First Nations. This research project is the embodiment of a journey to acceptance and healing through personal discovery and the justification that we live in a world that needs to adopt diversity as second nature.