Land and Healing: A Decolonizing Inquiry for Centering Land as the Site of Indigenous Medicine and Healing

Abstract

One characteristic of settler and other forms of colonialism was the unleashing of Eurocentric ideologies and worldview on indigenous populations in a colonial project that subjugated and devalued indigenous people, their knowledges and cultures. However, the history of indigenous people did not begin with European contact. They had existed in their ancestral lands for millennia, with their own cultures, languages and knowledges developed from their understandings of and relationships with their environments. In indigenous epistemology, land has always been central to indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge production. This chapter explores the relationship between land and Indigenous healing and argues for the centrality of land in indigenous healing and medicine, and calls for decolonization of indigenous healing through reclamation of relationships with the land.