Healing Forests: Introduction

In flourishing forests exists a pharmacopoeia of plant medicines. Making these forests and their diversity an important aspect of human health. When forests have been damaged by invasive development, how do these changes impact plant communities and therefore human health? In this project, we seek to understand how Indigenous healing traditions are directly impacted by changes in forest health, and in turn, how altered forest ecosystems impact Indigenous healers’ capacity to provide treatment.

We partner with Indigenous healers to better understand their relations with medicinal plants and efforts to tend the medicines when forests have been damaged. We look to better understand Indigenous biodiversity management and myriad approaches to traditional ecological knowledge today. Here we focus on Indigenous Khasi approaches to forest management.

Composed of approximately 1.5 million people whose homeland is based in the semi-autonomous state of Meghalaya in Northeast India, Khasi communities have vibrant traditions of tending sacred groves and managing local forests. As part of this tradition the Khasi people are avid practitioners of dawai khasi (traditional Khasi medicine). Led by our dawai khasi practitioners, we focus on intergenerational tending of medicinal plants, matrilineal land management, forest regulation, and the role of traditional Khasi religion to understand how Khasi care has supported forest abundance.