Before the days of modern medicine, African and Indigenous people relied on their wisdom of the land and the pharmacy of medicinal herbs provided by Mama Nature

This important aspect of our history is being left out of many mainstream herbalism conferences. But don’t worry. Black and brown healers from across the globe are getting the facts straight during the first ever BIPOC Herbalism Conference on Oct. 21. The all-day virtual experience will feature speakers sharing their encyclopedic knowledge of various therapeutic practices from Africa, China, the Caribbean and other regions.

According to the conference’s website, these Black and Indigenous traditions are not featured in other conferences, continuing a troubling legacy of erasure that has existed in the herbalism space since the mid-18th century when laws prohibited enslaved people from learning herbal medicines.

One of the speakers who will grace the screen is Caribbean traditional shaman and herbalist, Sistah Yaya. After her family was displaced from New Orleans during Hurricane Ida, Yaya landed in Yucatán, Mexico, where she heals women’s wombs, inner children and energy through her wellness group Soul Tribe Heals. While Yaya specializes in ancestral healing rooted in Maroon and Arawak indigenous spiritual practices, she is always looking to expand her expertise. She’ll complete her Mayan Shamanic Initiation in June 2024.

The daughter of Jamaican and Haitian parents, Yaya was raised in a spiritual community in New Jersey where Caribbean healers married Christianity with Indigenous traditions. For five days a week, church was a haven for Yaya where she would sing, dance and witness different rituals and exorcisms. Her proximity to these practices schooled Yaya on different plant medicines.

“I was learning how to use it. How it is applied in different situations, and being able to identify the spirit of a plant,” Yaya  said. “It helped me a lot when it comes to plant identification and knowing the essence of plants and how to communicate with it.”

Learning how to merge her cultural knowledge with spiritual gifts didn’t happen until Yaya was in the belly of the beast of trauma while living in Atlanta in 2012. She was exiled from her family after standing up against sexual abuse. The pain of isolation was amplified by a series of illnesses, including cervical cancer and pre-diabetes. Depression prevented her from going to work or completing her studies at Emory University. Despite the chaos, Yaya said she felt something in her spirit saying, “There is an herb.”

So she started nursing herself with soursop, which eases anxiety and helps with sleep. The blood-pressure dropping effects of an herb called “search mi heart” helped with forgiveness of herself and others. These herbs and other staples in Yaya’s plant medicine cabinet helped her find new meaning in life that she wants to share with others during the conference, where she will talk about how herbalism can heal mother wounds. Yaya talked to Black Joy about celebrating our heritage through herbalism and the importance of Black spaces like the herbalism conference.

Since you grew up among spiritual people and herbalism, I would love to hear about  what you experienced in that environment.

We were part of a spiritual group, and people would come from the islands – we called it “overseas” – to the States for spiritual and energy work, healing services and things like that. So we would get people and they would have headaches, stomach issues or things like that. So my grandfather and my mom always had herbs growing in different places in the yard. So someone will complain of something and they’re like, ‘Well, go outside and get – if it’s something dealing with the stomach, it’s always going to be mint for whatever reason. If it was a skin issue, we would pick up aloe vera, pick out the insides [of the aloe plant] and then we would put it on the skin or you can simply take it internally for cases such as constipation. Detoxing is a really, really important factor in our culture. In fact, that’s the first thing we do in any healing process is to offer cleansing. Cerasee was one of the herbs we used to cleanse the body but also people would use it as a tea as well to do some internal cleansing.

There was a case where something was missing and it was assumed someone had stolen the item. One of the ladies in our group wanted to find out. So she divined using sea salt, alcohol and fire. She placed the salt in a frying pan and added some alcohol in it. She mixed it around a little bit so it would slightly dissolve. Then she lit that on fire. Of course, it completely ignited and then it dried. She read the crystals of the salt and we were able to find out who took the item that was missing. That’s not really herbalism, but it was one of the things that we used to solve some of our problems in our communities – going to spirit, going into stores in a variety of different ways to kind of figure out like everyday stuff.

I thought it was beautiful when you said you got to know the spirit of plants growing up. Do you mind going more into that?

Aloe vera is an entity. Thyme is an entity. And these entities have properties. Aloe vera is very soothing. Very comforting. It can be very protective as well. How do I know?  Look at how it visually shows up in our lives. Aloe vera has that jelly on the inside. It’s slippery and slimy, but it’s cooling. It also has those ragged edges on the side. So I know it has something to do with being inflammatory. It also retains water inside. So I know that it has something to do with helping to heal emotions, like high-inflamed situations like  anger and irritation.

Plants talk to you. They’ll tell you, “Hey, I go good with lemon balm.” Or “Go grab some guava leaves, mango leaves and soursop and put these three together to make this potion for so and so.

How does herbalism play a role in our heritage as Black people?

We’ve always lived off of plants. We’ve always used medicines to heal not just the body, but the mind and the spirit. People of the land are connected to everything of the land, which includes the animals, the birds and the plants. So this is our natural heritage. And sometimes our parents might get disconnected or our grandparents might get disconnected. We might feel like we’re disconnected, but we have to know that we have thousands, if not millions of years of ancestors who’ve always had a very close connection to the earth. Just because one or two generations might have missed it, that doesn’t negate all of the history. I find the more we are in nature and spend more time with plants, that helps us to feel reconnected.

It’s all inside of us – this heritage of connecting with that land, the earth, the mountains. I think it’s incumbent that we just awaken and remember just who we are. This wisdom is for us.

You have been in the game a long time. How have you witnessed the colonialization of herbalism over time?

More non-Indigenous people have taken our wisdom, white washed it, applied their own cultural slant to it and made it theirs. Then they tell us that we don’t have a history. We don’t have a culture. That’s not true. They control the media and a lot of the libraries and have subsequently destroyed a lot of our Indigenous libraries – which for us our libraries are our elders. Those are people in the community who were meant to retain this information. But through colonialization and the breaking apart of the family, those ties are no longer there.

Why are spaces like the BIPOC Herbalism Conference important?

A lot of people are not aware that this healing information still exists, and the BIPOC Herbalism Conference has such a large reach worldwide. It’s bringing to light that “Yes, we are still here. Yes, the seeds of our ancestors have sprouted, and here we are shining in our different ways.” It helps to keep that wisdom, knowledge and understanding going and flourishing in places where previously it had gone dim. So it’s important that we have these types of  gatherings because in reality, it helps us to remember who we are and when I shine that means you shine and we all shine together.

I thought it was very interesting that you chose to talk about herbalism and how it can mend the mother wound. How did you end up choosing that topic and how does herbalism play a role in that?

I chose the topic based upon my life experience. I realized how my mother wound was blocking me emotionally because I had so much unforgiveness, anger and frustration around my relationship with her. I realized that was a door that I needed to walk through in order for me to be free…when that relationship is in need of repair, it’s the inner child who suffers. When the inner child suffers within the big child, which is you and I, we’re not happy. Our relationships are messed up.

It’s not so much about looking at what our mothers did wrong. We’re looking at how we can reparent ourselves. How we can mother ourselves. So I talked about using [the herb] search mi heart when it gets challenging and I’m feeling like that unforgiveness and that hot, hot anger towards a mother myself. I use that herb to calm my nervous system to administer love and care and comfort to my heart.