Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions, is a multi-year collaborative research project developed by Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos and Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara, funded, and supported by the University of Oregon; and co-produced with digital librarians and technical professionals from the UO Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) department under the leadership of Kate Thornhill, Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Franny Gaede, Director, Digital Scholarship Services.[1] This digital humanities project contributes to existing Black Digital Humanities by centering deep-listening and digital decolonization methodologies that prioritize human dignity, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and data stewardship. More specifically, Caribbean Women Healers highlights how Afro-Indigenous (Black and Black-Indigenous) women elders mobilize their intergenerational knowledge and roles as healers, teachers, and community leaders within Caribbean healing traditions to effect change well beyond the traditional centers of those communities.

In 2016, after four years of meeting and spending time with Caribbean women that keep their Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous and Afro-descendant healing traditions alive, Reyes-Santos and Lara were inspired to conceptualize a project that validates healers’ knowledge in a world where Eurocentric notions of health and medicine vilify and dismiss them. As healers and ceremonialists, themselves, Reyes-Santos and Lara’s journeys within Caribbean communities throughout the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest region, seeks to interrogate and to interrupt the colonial gaze that historically vilifies and demeans our elders as “uneducated,” or “simple,” or “primitive,” and that deems their knowledge simply “folklore,” “popular religion,” or “supersitition.”

As a space pushing back at these settler mentalities, Caribbean Women Healers documents Afro-Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Indigenous healing within a TEK context that includes preserving food and medicine forests and gathering grounds, transmitting traditional food and medicine knowledge to others, caring for and treating their families, and members of their communities. Healing work includes attending to people who seek help with the health of their lands, plants, animals and human bodies. Healing entails attending to physical, emotional, psychological, social and spiritual dimensions of health and well-being. As such, the healers documented for this project also manage encyclopedic, communally-sustained knowledge of spiritual traditions kept alive in spite of colonial and nation-states’ attempts to disappear and vilify them. The healing practices and ethnobotanical knowledge disseminated through this digital humanities project are legacies of survival strategies in the face of colonization and slavery, anti-Black racism, and anti-Indigenous genocidal practices.

Caribbean Women Healers is informed by the positionality of its researchers, two Black-Indigenous women who are a third generation curandera and tradition keeper from Puerto Rico (Reyes-Santos) and a fifth generation curandera and tradition keeper from the Dominican Republic (Lara), both living in the Pacific Northwest.[2] The researchers’ own rootedness in relationships with elders and healers were central to the relationships that were developed prior to and will continue to be maintained after the project. The healer partnerships cultivated and traditional ecological knowledge documented by Reyes-Santos and Lara are represented by digital artifacts captured using sound, video, and photography. Taking lead responsibility for website conceptualization, writing and digital artifact creation, layout ideation, and conduit between the healers, Reyes-Santos’ and Lara’s direction positioned Caribbean Women Healers to be one for and about the healers’ traditional ecological knowledge.

Core to the project’s digital development was DSS’ specialization in co-creating open digital humanities projects that center cultural awareness through web development and design, online privacy, open source and proprietary web application development and management, and data stewardship. The library research team included Thornhill as digital project manager; Gaede as project administrator; Anna Lepska as graduate student digital research assistant; Azle Malinao-Alvarez as the interactive technology consultant with support from digital collections and preservation expert Julia Simic, as well as Corey Gillen and Ray Henry, members of the UO Libraries’ Library Technology Services department (now Applications Development and Integration). This library team will henceforth be referred to collectively as “the builders” the authors of this paper “the authors,” and Reyes-Santos and Lara “the researchers.” This interdisciplinary team placed the healers’ community at the center of the research project to publicly validate and share aspects of their knowledge with the healers, teachers, researchers, and students studying race, indigeneity, ethnobotanical medicinal healing, and intersectionality.

Since 2010, as Afro-Indigenous ceremonialists and scholars working in the fields of Black and Indigenous Studies, Reyes-Santos and Lara have collaborated in Afro-Indigenous survival and revitalization projects, ethnographic research projects, and on another digital project. They have spent the past eleven years travelling to Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Afro-Indigenous ritual, healing, and ceremonial spaces in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. While participating in and collaborating with these spaces, they have become students, apprentices, and allies working with elders to continue disseminating and valorizing their traditional knowledge through visits, fundraising, workshops, ceremonies, and academic research. For instance, in 2012, Lara and Reyes-Santos fundraised and planned a visit of Mexica elders to sacred sites in the Dominican Republic, where they met Afro-Indigenous healers and ritual leaders; in 2012, the Black Feminist Retreat in the Dominican Republic brought together U.S.-based Black scholars and artists, and activists, cultural workers, and traditional ceremonialists living in the Dominican Republic; in 2015, they also organized a trip of Mexica and Mezcalero Apache elders to meet Cuban regla de ocha communities in Havana. Both these events are examples of the kind of exchanges they have helped bring to fruition as efforts to disseminate and exchange traditional healing knowledge across Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Afro-Indigenous communities in the Americas.

They began to experiment with digital platforms as powerful tools to share information early on. In 2011 they interviewed Dominican feminist and queer activists on educational justice; Reyes-Santos edited short films documenting their experiences, and posted them to a YouTube channel. In 2017, Lara trained students in Reyes-Santos’ class in ethnographic methodologies to participate in a storytelling documentation trip in the wake of Hurricane Maria and create educational resources for the University of Oregon Puerto Rico Project. Some students travelled to Puerto Rico with Reyes-Santos, took photos documenting the catastrophe and how people organized themselves as communities, and completed interviews with people affected by the Hurricane in mostly rural areas. A student team edited content and created a blog to educate people in the Pacific Northwest about Puerto Rico’s history and to disseminate the stories shared by people in the island.

In 2018, the UO Libraries launched the DSS Faculty Grants Program. As an internal university award, UO faculty were eligible to apply for in-kind and budget support offered by DSS, and its sister library departments, for scholars to explore non-traditional and creative digital scholarship through either through a humanities, social science, or interdisciplinary lens. As a major strategic priority for the department, Caribbean Women Healers was selected because of its innovative approach to raising the voices of historically marginalized and colonized voices. It was also selected because DSS wanted to explore the question, “How might the sustainability of a digital project be conceptualized from a standpoint that considers humanity as a social construction and subject to change over time and place?” [Gallon 2016].

The Caribbean Women Healers WordPress site contains over 200 photographs and interview clips with eight healers, highlighting various research sites and depicting biodiversity in botanical plant life in different micro-climates and ecological areas. The website gives context for how Reyes-Santos and Lara partnered with healers and how the healers’ knowledge and approaches to sharing influenced the research’s overall ethnographic practices. Additionally, the site includes a digital map highlighting research sites and an extensive bibliography that introduces a variety of texts that serve as an introduction to the study of Afro-Indigenous communities in the Caribbean, and their spiritual and traditional ecological knowledges. And on April 22, 2020, the website celebrated its launch with over 70 people in attendance globally virtually attending on Zoom.

In order to allow democratic collaboration, co-design, co-creation, co-management, and co-evaluation through the Internet, openness emphasizes free, transparent, and unrestricted access to knowledge and information. Within the digital humanities, openness situates scholars to be self-aware and confront socio-technologic and economic frameworks that influence their research and teaching practices.

As digital cultural heritage materials have become more common online, in large part thanks to funding through private and grant funding agencies and foundations (e.g. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute of Library and Information Science), openness has become a norm for those working in custodial [Society of American Archivists 2021] and post-custodial [Society of American Archivists 2021b] digital stewardship [Society of American Archivists 2021c].

The relationships between openness, data, digital technologies, and Black and Indigenous studies demonstrate how digital technologies and data privilege white Western cultural traditions and power systems that systematically oppress human beings, societies, and cultures through violence, genocide, racism, and enslavement.[Gallon 2016] [Lothian and Phillips 2013] [Risam 2016] [Christen 2019]. The rejection of those oppressive traditions and power systems have given rise to a number of Black Digital Humanities archival projects that curate and provide public access to documents, maps, and other historical, material and textual materials. The Caribbean Sea & Land Project demonstrates the relevance of mapping and sharing historical and cultural information in accessible and interactive formats, specifically when engaging Black and Indigenous Caribbean populations. It incorporates a digital map to share geographical and historical information about different islands in the Eastern Caribbean. Slave Voyages; Black British History on Record; First Blacks in the Americas; and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, among others, illustrate how geographies and public access to historical records play a central role in Black DH practices.

The diasporic and transnational realities of Black communities, and the legacy of slavery and the Middle Passage, present those of us in the Black DH with opportunities to create platforms that represent transcolonial and transnational realities beyond textual representation, while incorporating different communities and learning styles. Caribbean Women Healers joins in the oral digital storytelling practices that characterizes projects such as None on Record; African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World; and Civil Rights in Black & Brown; and initiatives like the Caribbean Memory Project that foster public participation and co-creation of digital archives by Caribbean people.

Aligned with these Black DH projects, and as scholars who seek to work in the open, we seek to apply decolonizing methodologies connected to the ontologies of openness: access, transparency, collaboration, sharing, accessibility, and the choice of permanence. Caribbean Women Healers frames humanity within the context of historical colonial violence and the oppression of Afro-Indigenous people. It subverts the colonial gaze by giving respect, space, and validation for TEK through its imagery, interviews, and bilingual nature. A core attribute of this digital project is its approach to the openness of sharing and documenting TEK. This project’s knowledge work is rooted in authors’ participatory ethnographic documentary, Black Feminist, and open decolonization methodologies for working with TEK.

For the authors, this means centering participant’s dignity and cultural practices, and rejecting white, Western settler supremacy ways of being. Ownership and custody of digital technologies and digital cultural heritage is a core issue for how the authors operated throughout the project as researchers and builders. The work of Kim Christen [Christen 2012] [Christen 2019], Christen with Jane Anderson [Anderson and Christen 2019], and Trevor Reed [Reed 2021][Reed 2021b][Reed 2021c] offer directions for open engagement within an ethics of care [Caswell and Cifor 2016][Archer and Prinsloo 2017] and participatory cultural heritage collecting frameworks [Gilliland and McKemmish 2014][Allard and Ferris 2015] [McCracken 2015] [Earhart and Taylor 2016] [Becerra-Licha 2017][Benoit and Eveleigh 2019] foregrounding the cultural underpinnings and politics regarding indigenous knowledge and sovereignty. Centering the healer community's individual choice, cultural access protocols, and applying their own deep listening practices was the highest priority.

Reyes-Santos and Lara’s emphasis on Afro-Indigenous narratives honors the historical reality of palenques and manieles, sovereign communities where Indigenous and African peoples came together in freedom; where Indigenous peoples shared herbal, medicinal knowledge with recently arrived Africans; where African communities shared their ancestral healing and ceremonial knowledges, and found ways to retain their traditions far away from home; where Indigenous and African peoples came together in kin relations and treaty building. Their methodology honors the Afro-Indigenous paths of resistance that have enabled the maintenance and dissemination of traditional healing practices and ecological knowledge for 528 years. The healers featured in Caribbean Women Healers are steeped in these histories and the traditions born out of them. The methodologies used for this project enabled this to come into being, and how, specifically, these methodologies and website contribute to breaking down the marginalization of Black Digital Humanities. [Gallon 2016]

As Afro-Indigenous communities gain visibility, this project initiates what must be a broader dialogue in Black DH about what it means to bridge the concerns of Black and Indigenous methodologies and community needs in the U.S. and internationally for the successful implementation of open scholarship projects. It foregrounds Black Feminist DH practice deeply informed by Indigenous decolonial methodologies for community-based research applied to the digital sphere. The methodological approach to the stories and ethnobotanical resources shared on the site and digital stewardship techniques draw from the norms for social interactions and information sharing exemplified by the healers themselves, as well as healers’ intentions.

The project was always meant to be open, shared beyond the healer and scholarly communities from whence it came. It has been motivated by the needs and desires of the healers themselves. All community participants were excited and saw a need to make traditional knowledge available through new technologies. Rather than see the Internet as a hindrance to their world and belief systems, they articulated an understanding that presenting their work and knowledge to the world was a way to safeguard them and their knowledge. Healers, like the Cuban-American Iyalocha Jannes Martínez, were specific in their critique of what they saw as decontextualized traditional knowledge permeating the Internet. Technological access acts as a supplement to relationship and practice. As Jannes stated in her interview with Reyes-Santos and Lara, “Reading something on the internet doesn’t mean you know it and understand it.”

Many of those who participated, in particular those from Puerto Rico and those living in rural areas in the Dominican Republic, stated there has been a rupture to traditional forms of knowledge transmission and production. They theorize that these ruptures are produced by three primary factors:

Their theories speak to scholarly findings in the field of Black Studies and Reyes-Santos and Lara’s engagement with the field. Reyes-Santos and Lara understand that the social violences discussed by healers as the reason behind “early death” are an extension of colonial-modern state policies that fail to produce the conditions for sustaining Black life, as well as colonial-modern ideas about race, gender and sexuality that foster the punishment of gender and sexual difference, and the devaluation of Blackness. (Wynter 2003) Neoliberal economic policies and state participation in globalized capitalism have contributed to rapid urban migration and emigration to Latin America, Europe and North America that have left rural areas depopulated and/or disenfranchised, and elders caring for land and knowledge on their own [Reyes-Santos 2015] [Thomas and Clarke 2013].

Ethnographic and historical research by Lara documents that Christian colonial violence leads to the ongoing ostracization of traditional healers, the demonization of Afro-Indigenous practices and traditions, the dismantling of altars and the destruction of sacred sites [Lara 2020]. Even with all of these obstacles, and perhaps because of them, healers expressed the need to continue transmitting knowledge to their families, communities and future generations. That impulse has shaped this project from beginning to end. Moreover, the fact that both Reyes-Santos and Lara are themselves Afro-Indigenous Caribbean healers and keepers of traditional ceremonies opened up spaces for connection with elders, for sharing and meeting healers in ceremony, and understanding the worldviews articulated by the healers in multiple Caribbean traditions. Often, once Reyes-Santos and Lara were recognized as healers and ceremonialists, a deeper conversation ensued with interviewees.

As stated by Winona LaDuke, “Traditional ecological knowledge is the culturally and spiritually based way in which Indigenous peoples relate to their ecosystems.” Here we highlight how Afro-descendant and Afro-Indigenous communities have a wealth of resources to contribute to TEK in the Americas. Our Black Feminist DH approach required that the authors be willing to be transformed by the people Reyes-Santos and Lara were honoring in the documentation process; Reyes-Santos and Lara had to be open to transform how they imagined the work, how at times they were trained to undertake this kind of endeavor. The researchers centered Black/Afro-descendant women and queer healers’ voices and ways of knowing, while destabilizing colonial distinctions between researchers and research subjects [McClaurin 2001]. [Simmons 2001] The authors had to become research subjects as well; all of us from our specific social and academic location observing how we responded to systems of knowledge that have historically been rendered invalid in academic setting: Black, Indigenous, female, queer, healer, oral, collective.

Healers, researchers, and builders were engaged in a collaborative process of knowledge production to together imagine what would be the best ways of representing the information on the website. We privileged oral transmission of knowledge over archives while still providing access to relevant archival projects, scholarship, creative work, and educational tools. We recognized the orality that characterizes interactions with healers and the relevance of sustaining oral traditions in the contemporary moment; specifically, honoring how women and queer people have maintained traditional ecological and medicinal knowledge alive while facing high levels of social vulnerability and violence whether in the Caribbean or the U.S.

As articulated by Moya Bailey, “The ways in which identities inform both theory and practice in digital humanities have been largely overlooked. Those already marginalized in society and the academy can also find themselves in the liminal spaces of this field. By centering the lives of women, people of color, and disabled folks, the types of possible conversations in digital humanities shift. The move “from margin to center” offers the opportunity to engage new sets of theoretical questions that expose implicit assumptions about what and who counts in digital humanities as well as exposes structural limitations that are the inevitable result of an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity, and ablebodiness” [Bailey 2011].