Indigenous communities have relied on chokecherries for medicine, food, and tools, with its role sustaining through winter, supporting digestive and respiratory health, and providing wood and dye.
Hailey Allen
Indigenous communities have relied on chokecherries for medicine, food, and tools, with its role sustaining through winter, supporting digestive and respiratory health, and providing wood and dye.
Nervine herbs are plants used to calm the nervous system, ease anxiety, support sleep, and restore emotional balance. This blog explores nervines such as kava, valerian, passionflower, skullcap, and St. John’s wort through traditional use, community knowledge, pharmacology, and contemporary research.
Indigenous medicine is layered, symbolic, embodied, and relational, deeply rooted in connection to land and the ecosystem. In Indigenous worldviews, pedagogy unfolds over time, through relationship and responsibility, rather than through the rapid extraction of knowledge.
Within Indigenous traditions, dreams are sites of instruction, correction, and foresight; they also serve as a form of surveillance. As regulatory science relies on instruments and sampling, Indigenous methods utilize land-attuned, reciprocal assessment of imbalance across land, water, food, and physiology, enacted through ceremony, kinship, and vision.
The healing capacity of fungi, such as psilocybin mushrooms, and certain plants, such as peyote cactus, is increasingly supported by a growing body of research. For thousands of years, peyote has offered a profound source of spiritual connection and healing. Within ceremonial contexts, it can serve as a gateway and a passage into altered states of consciousness that support reflection, insight, and restoration.
This first installment of the Hanford Series explores the lasting impacts of nuclear contamination on Indigenous health, land-based lifeways, and cultural continuity among the Sahaptin peoples. Through personal reflection, historical context, and Indigenous environmental perspectives, the article examines how contamination moves through water, food, ceremony, and community across the Columbia Plateau.
Explore how Indigenous health systems, grounded in relational and ecological practices, can expand evidence frameworks, advance health equity, and bridge global health research.
Skateboarding is emerging as a powerful form of embodied healing for Indigenous women, creating spaces for cultural reclamation, community building, and emotional resilience. From Bolivia to the Navajo Nation, movement becomes medicine—supporting self-expression, regulating the nervous system, and restoring connections between body, land, and community.
