Hailey Allen 
As traditional food systems have faded, our health has suffered. The foods we eat now cause chronic health problems and differ greatly from the diets that once matched our local environments. In losing these traditions, we have also lost food’s roles as medicine and as a way to bring people together.
Exploring the benefits of daily herbal teas—blueberry leaf, ginger, peppermint, chamomile, and green tea—for sleep, digestion, blood sugar, and well-being.
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.
© 1994-2026 Center for World Indigenous Studies
The Center for World Indigenous Studies is a Nonprofit 501 (c) 3 research and education organization
Our mailing address is: PMB 214, 1001 Cooper Pt. Rd. SW #140
Olympia, WA., 98502-1107 USA
