Ethnobotany in Secwepemcúl’ecw: Making Place for Indigenous Epistemologies

This presentation comes as a personal response to the overwhelming over-representation of Indigenous peoples in statistics on health crises. We hear so often about how Indigenous peoples are less healthy and more vulnerable to health inequalities than our non-Indigenous neighbours. As a result, I began research on ethnobotany and the idea of traditional medicine restoration being part of a solution. In this presentation, I look to a system that will validate and view Indigenous healing as equivalent to biomedical approaches to health and wellbeing, rather than dismissive of them. Health issues faced by many Indigenous peoples are a direct reflection of the lasting impacts of colonialism, assimilation policy, ethnocide and genocide. Solving these health problems rooted in this horrible past and the intergenerational traumas left in their wake, requires not just acknowledging truth and reconciling differences, but a social transformation whereby dominant settler colonial society validates indigeneity and First Nations ways of being and knowing as equal epistemological systems. This project is an act of resistance against colonial knowledge forms that looks to create space for, and validate, Indigenous epistemologies. The acknowledgment of different ways of being and knowing as an equal to colonial knowing will forever change the way Canadian First Nations are understood and respected. It will lead to healing of the intergenerational trauma imposed on our Indigenous peoples. The breaking of hegemony and racist discourse that engulfs society today starts with every individual person in society taking a stand and being able to acknowledge and see these almost undetectable systems, that still today assimilate and marginalize First Nations