Oral Tradition and the Impact on Black Herbalism History
Class 2 in Intro to Black Herbalism Praxis 101 with a bonus book list of Black herbalism authors.
Housekeeping: If reading text is not your thing, you’ll always find an audio recording of the lesson text at the bottom of the page. All lessons within this course are under copyright.
Welcome Back.
How did your time sitting with spirit treat you? How have your dreams been? At this point, with consistency (yes, I’m eyeballing you like a stern friend), you should have some answers or at least be experiencing more synchronicity in your everyday life. You know, the little moments where you’re like…was that spiritual or am I overthinking it? Sometimes in our search for confirmation, we definitely overthink it. However, once we open up those channels and let our spirits know that we are listening, it can get fun. My prayer for you all is that you are experiencing this communication and finding your purpose and path when it comes to Black herbalism.
Diving In
I want us to explore a question in this particular lesson: did our use of orature impact Black herbalism negatively? As we talk about oral history, we have to examine first where that comes from. We are, without a doubt, African descended and it is deep within our collective culture as diasporans to communicate orally. This is not just relegated to things like herbalism, but the story of existence as a whole. We have used the tradition of oration to tell how life formed, how family lineages came to exist, why the turtle crossed the road, you name it - we’ve talked it through generations.