When ancestral landscapes have become “wounded” by settler violence, how do communities tend these ecosystems to meet therapeutic needs, when the landscapes themselves suffer from trauma? Amid the COVID-19 crisis in 2020-21, Khasi healers drew upon ancestral knowledge from the 1918 flu pandemic to combat the virus. However, the urgency to gather medicinal plants exposed shrinking habitats due to deforestation and mining, leading to a decline in biodiversity. The research aims to understand the interconnectedness between traditional healthcare, wounded forest ecosystems, and forest-reliant Indigenous communities striving to restore and protect altered ecosystems. It seeks to investigate how Indigenous healthcare providers work to manage medicinal plants and nurture future generations of knowledge keepers while restoring forest biodiversity. Through community-based participatory research with the Indigenous Khasi community, the study plans to conduct a biodiversity audit in threatened forests, mapping forest degradation from the perspective of healers and forest managers. By collaborating with Khasi healthcare providers and partners, the project intends to develop tools to monitor and address biodiversity loss, deforestation, and ecosystem changes, empowering the community to protect vulnerable species and ecosystems. The ultimate goal is to create decolonial maps that emphasize Khasi land relations and holistic ecosystem management strategies, involving Khasi trainees and students in shaping the project's direction toward enhancing biodiversity conservation and sustainable ecosystem practices.
Collaborators: IRL researcher Erica Goto works on this project in collaboration with ann-elise lewallen (University of Victoria) and Jane Warjri (independent researcher in India).