Center for Traditional Medicine

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Calm and Restore

Calm and Restore

July 30, 2026

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.

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 Nuclear Expansion and the Fight to Protect Our Relatives: Hanford Series Part 3

 Nuclear Expansion and the Fight to Protect Our Relatives: Hanford Series Part 3

July 23, 2026

​​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.

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The Land as Sacred Pharmacy: Hanford series Part 2

The Land as Sacred Pharmacy: Hanford series Part 2

July 16, 2026

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.

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Spirit Molecules, Part 3

Spirit Molecules, Part 3

July 9, 2026

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.

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Nuclear Contamination and Indigenous Health

Nuclear Contamination and Indigenous Health

May 22, 2026

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.

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Reclaiming Cultural Diversity as a Pathway to Nutritional Justice

Reclaiming Cultural Diversity as a Pathway to Nutritional Justice

May 14, 2026

An exploration of how cultural diversity, Indigenous food sovereignty, and ancestral knowledge offer pathways to nutritional justice. This post examines nutrition trauma caused by colonization and globalization, and highlights how reclaiming traditional food systems strengthens community resilience, health equity, and cultural identity.

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Indigenous Ways of Knowing

Indigenous Ways of Knowing

May 7, 2026

Explore how Indigenous health systems, grounded in relational and ecological practices, can expand evidence frameworks, advance health equity, and bridge global health research.

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Elina Vesara
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