Healing with Cash Crops

Healing With Cash Crops is a 3 part immersion for healing our relationships to plants that were exploited alongside African and indigenous Americans during colonization. Many of these plants continue their status of cash crop in the global economy, and many of us have complicated relationships with them rooted in generational and cultural trauma. Despite their medicine and significance in human life, these plants are often vilified and abused for capitalist consumption.

During this immersion we will focus on 3 cash crops specific to the southern United States and Caribbean: cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Each week, we will commune with a different plant tracing lineages of ethnobotanical use from modern day to ancient times. Through story medicine, herbal and nutritional education, and somatic practices, we will reimagine and recover our relationships with these sacred plants. We will share practices for healing generational wounds rooted in Black and Native American folk medicine and discover how these “cash crops” can become con-conspirators in our liberation.

About Your Guide:

Rochelle Jamila Wilbun is a southern Black dancer/ choreographer, meditation teacher, folk herbalist, and doula from Memphis, TN. She is currently blossoming on unceded Lenape and Canarsie land in Brooklyn, NY. Rochelle’s work weaves dance, song, meditation, story and earth-based communion to embody liberation. She calls on the wisdom of her ancestors and elders to create space for joy and alignment with Nature.