Results of the Garifuna Midwife and Garifuna
Traditional Health Practices project with Yaya
By Wendy Griffin (2014)
1993--Seminar
on bilingual Intercultural Education and Values Education and the Formation of
the Support Committee for the Garifuna bilingual Intercultural Education
project with the leadership of local Garifuna Fausto Miguel Alvarez, who was
the national coordinator of bilingual intercultural education in Tegucigalpa,
1993. Seminar funded by the UNAH. This
was the first year for which bilingual education was authorized for the
Garifunas.
Two female
teachers of the Committee Justa Silveria Gotay and Profesora Angela Batiz
introduced Wendy Griffin to Yaya as a knowledgeable person about medicinal
plants. Two Biology students who were working with Dr. Sonia Waite-Lagos came
to Trujillo and interviewed 50 Garifunas, including Yaya, about medicinal plant
use for the TRAMIL project and Wendy Griffin accompanies them in Trujillo and
Santa Fe. Sonia Waite Lagos herself comes another time with students and does a
special walking tour in the mountains with Yaya to collect medicinal plants
which the Garifunas often do not know the name of in any language. The idea behind the UNAH Biology Department’s
participation was because we hoped they could put the scientific and Spanish
names to the plants the Garifunas either know no name for it is just “monte” or
that they only know Garifuna names for. Dr. Sonia Waite Lagos eventually
returns with a booklet of 15 medicinal plants of the North Coast to give the
Garifunas, even though she took information on more than 300 medicinal plants,
and she does not mention that the plants were used by Garifunas in the book.
The idea of
TRAMIL was intriguing. They said they were studying the medicinal plants of the
Caribbean so that they could say yes these medicinal plants are useful and it
would be a good idea to plant them in your garden or your village, so that
people around the Caribbean could maintain good health cheaper. It would also
help protect the rainforest, because if people were leaving medicinal plants to
grow, many of which require shade, then the rainforest would continue, and
people might even reforest certain plants that were becoming scarce, something
the Garifuna Emergency Committee would work on later. The difference was that
TRAMIL for unknown reasons ended up being another case of biopiracy.
After several years and attempts, Dr. Sonia
Waite Lagos refused to make available the rest of the information she collected
to the Garifunas but rather sent it all to Santo Domingo to TRAMIL. It was not
accessible through TRAMIL’s website. For example, if you typed in naranja
agria, bitter orange, which the Garifunas use extensively called kagela in
Garifuna, none of the scientific names that come up refer to the tree called
naranja agria in Honduran Spanish. For
many years Wendy Griffin visits often Yaya but refuses to do medicinal plant
studies due to the issue of biopiracy, about which she read a book on
reflecting on the Mexican Indians’ case. Wendy Griffin and the UNAH’s Biology
Dept. were no longer on speaking terms after this.
Some of the
things Wendy Griffin learned during walking around for a few days with the UNAH
students doing the study is that average Garifunas could name and lay their
hands on within 15 minutes at least 15 medicinal plants. They grew almost no
flowers in their home gardens (the national curriculum on Agriculture class of
the elementary schools says teach flowers for the first three years, while 50%
of Honduran students are no longer in school after 3 years), but medicinal
plants, especially trees that were also fruits and medicinal teas, were very
common. Sometimes things that we trampled underfoot proved to be a medicinal
plant. One midwife said, “that grass (monte) that you are standing, that is
what I use to speed up labor. I don’t know the name of it, but that is what I
use.” At least three different kinds of
grasses are used medicinally in Honduras, and one is proven to be antibacterial
and we have used it successfully to treat kidney infection, one lowers fevers
and has been proven internationally and one type that is short is used to speed
delivery.
One
Honduran Garifuna elementary school teacher Profesor Batiz the brother in law
of profesora Batiz, told us an interesting story when we interviewed him in
Santa Fe. He said he had a kidney infection.
His doctor said take bledo tea, that will clear it up. I don’t know what
bledo is said prof. Batiz. The doctor said, you must know bledo, it looks like
this. It grows in everyone’s yard up here.
When Prof. Batiz found out which plant bledo was, he said Oh yes, I have
bledo in my yard. I have been trying to get rid of it as a weed in my yard for
years, and now I take it and it has saved my life. His daughter later died of AIDS leaving him 5
grandchildren to raise, so it was good that he was still alive and healthy in
his old age. I had similar experiences with the Pech about apazote for worms.
The study
of the UNAH also proved very trying as the Biology students refused to write
down the recipes given for traditional illnesses, like vajo, called hijillo by
Ladinos, or other folk illnesses. Apparantly this was on the orders of the
ethnobotanists directing the study. One UNAH professor said, “I only want
recipes for illnesses that are going to affect me. Why would I want recipes
that only affect Hondurans?” To an
anthropologist these are very interesting diseases. Also an American woman who
had children with a Honduran anthropologist, she had her children diagnosed
with “empacho” and with “aire” and they got the traditional treatments and they
got better. In Honduras not only Hondurans or not only Garifunas suffer from
most of these illnesses. When I would mention one of Yaya’s treatments for
empacho or haito, my ladino guards, the Ladino maid, my Pech midwife friends
would say “Oh yes, this is how I treat
this or others have treated my children like this.” Even the Ladino Biology students who collected
the information, but did not write down the cures for hijillo, said they knew
about hijillo and would treat themselves for it if they went to a wake. While
most Americans are death on the topic of being cured of witchcraft, I have met
an American woman in Honduras cured by a Maya Chorti healer of witchcraft in a
dramatic and visible way on the recommendation of a Honduran friend, and she
got better.
1993-1996 I
visit Yaya several times a year, mostly to tell her whatever happened to the UNAH
students and professors who had come to study medicinal plants and never sent
back the list. I heard a lot about Paul House’s medicinal plant study with the
Tawahkas, which he eventually published.
After 1996, I moved to Trujillo and lived
there at least part of the year. 1996-1997 and in 2000 I was professor of
anthropology at the UPN in La Ceiba. At the end of the school year in 1996
(December) I went to Puerto Lempira and worked on giving the Miskitos the
information I had on their history and culture and did some interviews
regarding their current situation including with Walstead Miller of MOPAWI.
That is when he got me interested in the
question of midwives and midwives exchanges, but we never found any money to do
it. This is when my book Los Miskitos is written and the book on Los Isleños
mostly researched in 1996. I was living in a house and taking care of a garden
for the new foreign owner who had moved to Mexico. It turned out the house had
belonged to a Garifuna healer and midwife, so
with Yaya and the book Las Plantas medicinales de Honduras I began
studying the plants in my garden which included zabila (aloe vera), guarumo
(used to treat young children), mangos which have uses for leaves, bark and
tree, and chile leaves and hot chiles. I often visited older women to give them
the mangos from my trees. I helped promote non-traditional tourism through Honduras this Week articles,
sometimes together with Peace Corps volunteers, and so I got the medicinal
plant tour among the Pech of El Carbon,
and the Garifunas of San Juan, Tela. I was also helping David Flores
study dances, and so I was in a lot of Garifuna ceremonies which included music
and dances, where Yaya and I often saw each other. I had Garifuna anthropology
students who helped my study of land use differences between the Ladinos and
the Garifunas.
I taught Anthropology of the Family to 50
female Home Economics students at the
UPN and one of the assignments was to collect 10 medicinal plant recipes and
another 2 recipes for preserving foods—milk or meats or vegetables or fruits,
etc. (50 students in a class, collecting 10 recipes each is 500 recipes of
medicinal plants). They also did studies of poor people and middle class people
as far as what they ate and what kind of foods they were lacking which usually turned out to be vitamin C and
vitamin A and it was a requirement of the course that they grow a sweet potatoe
and plant lemon or orange or bitter orange trees and report how well they grew
during the course, complete with drawings every three days (an idea from a
science book for children). Most of
these students were teaching at the elementary school level so it could help
them concretely something they could do now. Most of them interviewed the women
who washed clothes for them, so it was eye opening to see how this class of
women lived.
One of the
reasons I taught about traditional foods of the ethnic groups in this class was
I was worried that they were teaching Honduran ethnic groups and even Ladinos to abandon traditional
nutritious foods like tortillas, beans and rice, or fish or hunting wild game,
in favor of US junk food like white bread and pancakes. This in fact turned out to be the case. One
Ladina student had the initiative to go out and interview the Tolupan Indians. They said they ate
tepescuintle, deer, guatusa, armadillo, quequeo (white collared peccary), etc.
all the rainforest animals in danger of extinction in Honduras. I was amazed at
how much protein they were getting, more than most Hondurans eat in a month,
and that these animals were still alive where they were, because they are
extinct in most of Honduras, but I was even more amazed when the university
student said, “So they are malnourished.” I asked why she thought they were
malnourished. She said, “They did not eat any corn flakes. It says right on the
box, part of a nutritious balanced diet.” It is true it does say that. The Rum
Plata signs also says, “The man who is really a man drinks Rum Plata”. That was why I gave the assignment I did not
want them teaching the Garifunas that eating all that fish and seafood (at
least 6 days a week) or the rainforest Indians that what they ate was bad and
they should instead adopt hamburgers and pancakes and apparrantly cornflakes,
which in fact they admitted they had been doing.
These Home
Economic students also did one community study about a social problem related
to families. One group studied homeless children in La Ceiba and the program to
feed them in La Ceiba. Where do they come from?
Why are they in la Ceiba? What was going on with their parents? Two groups also studied the issue of maras
(Honduran gangs) in la Ceiba and in San pedro sula. I did dozens of newspaper articles about the results
of their studies-different ways Honduran food plants are used and preserved
(the article on encurtido is now on another site on the Internet), Honduran
medicinal plants, the issue of street children in la Ceiba (still on the
Internet on another site), traditional stories about men and women’s roles in
Honduran society and a series on maras (gangs).
The students became afraid when they heard that the article on maras had
been published as they were afraid the mara members would hurt them. I felt bad
about that and no longer published student research about maras, but my articles
were some of the first in English about the topic which now predominates
international news about Honduras. The Wikipedia articles about Mara
Salvatrucha and MS-18 in English mostly refer to the activity of these gangs in
the US. The students also collected folktales and jokes about women and about
men, and about workers and about lazy people to see what really were the values
being taught in this kind of oral literature.
Some of the
students who did this research on medicinal plant use in this class and a
Anthropology class literally felt their lives had been changed by the class and
that assignment. One of the male
anthropology students found out a plantain field he had bought was full of
medicinal plants, planted there by a Garifuna woman who used to own the
plantain field who was a midwife and healer.
2000-After Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Seminar on
Garifuna Medicinal Plants, Trujillo, Colon, maybe in 2000. Yaya, Nao (another female buyei), presidents of Trujillo dance clubs, local women and members of the Garifuna
Emergency Committee and Wendy Griffin.
Local Garifunas gave names of diseases they wanted to know plants about,
Yaya and Nao recommended plants, and Wendy Griffin who had been an UNAH
professor and that time was a UPN professor,
wrote the plant recipe on the board and using the book Plantas
medicinales Comunes de Honduras developed by ethnobotanists at the UNAH
including Dr. Paul House from England and Dr. Sonia Waite Lagos of Honduras verified.
that according to international or national studies that plant is indeed
effective for that illness. This was mostly to try to help people to have an
“expert’s” opinion that their medicinal plants had value, that they did not
need to give them up.
Wendy
Griffin and Yaya and other older women and even some men in Barrio Cristales
worked on the draft of Los Garifunas de Honduras first in Spanish. An ODECO
employee notes that it is missing the question of land problems of the
Garifunas which results in a major rewrite in Spanish and then in English. The English version from 2000 The Garifunas:
Resource Loss and ILO convention 169 is in the Burke Museum, the Smithsonian’s
Vine Deloria jr. Library and some of other libraries like Tulane and University
of Pittsburgh.The early version of the Spanish version Los Garifunas is in the
UPN library.
2000-Wendy
Griffin teaches Seminar of Anthropology at the UPN in La Ceiba and the
Anthropology of the Family to Home Economic students. Her studies of traditional food and medicine
among the Garifunas, the Pech, the Black Bay Islanders, form a lot of the texts
that she wrote and taught from. Copies were given to other UPN anthropologists
like German Chavez and Adalid Martinez. Wendy Griffin writes articles for
Honduras this Week about medicinal plants and traditional Honduran foods and
the book Los Garifunas de Honduras submitted to the Comite de Emergencia
Garifuna and they submit it to the Edwards Foundation for a grant to publish
it.
2001-Edwards
Foundation accepted to fund the publication of the book, however it took
another 4 years to finish reviewing the book, updating it, putting more photos
the Garifunas wanted put in and taking more photos and having a seminar on ILO
Convention 169 land rights with all the major national Garifuna leaders and
local people in Trujillo, work on finding a publisher, getting it diagrammed
and review the proofs and publish it. Yaya helps significantly with the parts
on traditional food, agriculture, Garifuna dances and ceremonies including
adding some parts only known to bueyeis, songs and stories, as well as the
traditional medicinal plant and traditional medicine and care of the pregnant
woman, birth, and after birth care of the mother and the child. Meet with people of the Comunidad, all men,
who control the Garifuna’s land in Trujillo and go over their legal problems in
detail with them. This builds on talks with former presidents of the Comunidad
and with members of the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna who analyzed altogether
every chapter related to land problems of the Garifunas, eco-system by
eco-system, resource by resource. (2000-2003 Wendy Griffin worked part of the
year in Pittsburgh PA with EECM, including with Coordinated Care network).
2006-Finally
Los Garifuna de Honduras was published in Spanish in 2006, teachers trained to
use it in 2005 in three separate seminars (Trujillo, Santa Fe, and Iriona), and
the book was delivered to school teachers and
to schools in 2006. It was also given to most of the leaders of the
leading Garifuna organizations in Honduras. OFRANEH got so angry that they
refused to accept it and did not read it, and none have used it to fight for
land rights. Professor Batiz, whose wife had been one of the original women who
introduced me to Yaya, did use the book to train Bilingual Intercultural Teachers
in 2009. He said the book was written as if the person who wrote the curse of
study for the Garifunas wanting to be bilingual intercultural education studies
had read the book and followed that to write it. It is possible as I have given
the book to the national coordinators of bilingual intercultural education.
This book
in Spanish includes most of Yaya’s recommendations to care for pregnant women,
for delivering the babies, dealing with complications, and early childhood care
of children and postpartum care of the mother. There are copies in 22 US
university libraries in the US according to WorldCatt, plus it is at Harvard’s
Peabody Museum Tozzer library, the Burke Museum’s library and the National
Museumof the American Indians’ Vine Deloria Jr. Library.
The
inspiration for working specifically on midwife techniques was suggested by
Miskito Indian Walstead Miller’s concern about Miskito women in Cauquira who
like many Miskito women were having terrible results in maternal death and
dying. His help in my study Los Miskitos (1996) is noted in that book which is
in Honduran libraries and the University of Pittsburgh in the US. And so I
tried to study Yaya’s techniques to see if they could help the Miskito
women. I sent the book to the head of
the development agency which works with the Miskitos and Tawahkas MOPAWI in
2006, but they do not seem to have shared it. I sent copies to Miskito teachers
I knew in Brus Laguna and Puerto Lempira in 2012, but they are men, and they
seemed to not have shared it. In
Garifuna schools, the principal often did not share the books with the teachers
(even though they got 15copies a school), nor the teachers with the students
and they definitely did not share them with the Garifuna nurses in the public
health clinics in their communities even though they were Garifunas. I do not
know what that is about. The new head of
SEDINAFROH (Secretary for the Development of Indians and Afro-Hondurans) is the
only Miskito Indian doctor and he is one of few licensed ob-gyn doctors in all
of Honduras Dr. Maylo Wood Ronas, so we may see a much greater interest in this
project under the current government. Dr.Wood Ronas’s family members are also involved with bilingual intercultural
education in the Mosquitia since 1992 and have written almost all the books by
Miskitos abut the Miskitos including one on Miskito medicinal plants. A family
member is also the nurse who runs the
government health clinic which serves the whole country of Brus Laguna in the
Mosquitia. The issue of Miskito women dying in childbirth or the children dying
young is something they have been observing for over 20 years.
I also
worked with Coordinated Care network in Pittsburgh in 2002 and 2003, as the representative and grant writer
for EECM, and so I heard about the problem of Racial Disparities in healthcare
and particularly the issue of many NICU babies which is an expensive public
health problem in Pittsburgh and also about the issue of childhood asthma in
inner city Black children in Pittsburgh. Since I have also worked with Native
Americans in Pittsburgh in 1991, through the Council of Three Rivers American
Indian Center, I had also heard about special problems of Native Americans like
suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, and diabetis. I also took a course on Modern
History of Native Americans at the Community College of Allegheny County from a
lawyer and I got to hear about some of the issues like mental health and
dealing with Native America addiction and mental health issues in the prison
system in the US, like being able to offer sweat lodges. Homeless people,
Native American and African American, many of whom are very troubled, form part
of the learning and inquiry process as to what is causing these problems that
people are sick or troubled and not getting any adequate help, which often
leads to homelessness and jail, and I was fighting with my own issues of being
sick and not getting help and facing the possibility of homelessness. I tried
to look on the bright side, oh I have an ear infection. This will give me a
chance to try this plant and see if it works.
Oh Yaya said bitter orange leaf
tea is good for nervios (anxiety, often accompanied with trouble
sleeping) and the book on Medicinal plants says it has a natural sedative, I
will try that, that it has limoneno. We will see if it works or helps. Oh I am
having an asthma attack do I go to hospital in the middle of the night or to
Ted’s house and get some chile leaves. I tried the chile leaves and it worked.
I did an
interview with Yaya that was published in English Honduras This Week as a two
article series with her picture “Doña Clara: Conversations with a Garifuna
Buyei.” I asked Yaya if she wanted the article and the photo, that if she
wanted, I would write it but I did not want take advantage of her friendship. She said I want you to do it, and so these
articles were published. I translated them into Spanish and gave her the
English copies and the Spanish translation.
She has children who live in New York who could read the English. Yaya
never learned to read and write and has been blind for several years now. Her
daughter who lives with her seems to have a learning disability and did not
learn to read or write and her granddaughter who lives with is graduated from 6th
grade, but they think she can not read or write either. So I am giving her copies, even though I know
she can not read them, and in most cases, the children or grandchildren take
them from her without her permission.
2004- One
year, the year of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, a Tulane grad student came
to Trujillo to study Garifuna and wanted to do something to help the people. I
had him put together a book with line drawings of the medicinal plants that
Yaya knows, with the plant recipes she gave me in Los Garifunas de Honduras,
and the Ladino recipes for the same plants in the book Plantas Medicinales
Comunes de Honduras by Paul House, Sonia Waite lagos, etc. This book was given to the Comite de
Emergencia Garifuna and to the Garifunas of San Jose de la Punta who
participated in a medicinal plant seminar that an Italian volunteer did that is
in Los Garifunas de Honduras and who had a project to reforest medicinal plants
through the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras. The Garifuna nurse at Puerto Castilla has
used it and the Garifuna doctor in Trujillo has used it. In 2013 I brought a copy back to Honduras and
gave another copy to Yaya as her copy was missing and gave a copy to the
Socorro Sorrel school, the Garifuna elementary school in Trujillo, for their
intercultural education project. I have
taken it to the national program of bilingual intercultural education and they
showed not the least interest. I have offered it to the Intercultural
Agriculture people, they never got back to me. I gave it to people in La Ceiba
who wanted the CURLA which has a medicinal plant project with the Garifunas to
buy it, to just pay for the photocopies ,and the CURLA refused, so the person
took the book which he paid for back. Intercultural Education and Intercultural
Agriculture are names to attract funds, but generally are not in the schools
even more than 20 years after the first seminar.
When the
Tulane student was down, I had the idea to try to record Garifuna songs. Usually Garifunas will not let you record, if
you record them they will not tell you what they mean. The Tulane student in 6 weeks was not able to
record one men’s song. Yaya because we have been friends for so long, she will
sing me one of her songs and she also tells me why she wrote it. She tells me
what it means. Sometimes she tells me about conflicts that this song has caused
like writing a song on the occasion of her grandson’s birth and she wrote a
song about him growing up to be a Garifuna of hacha y azadon (axe and hoe) and
her son getting mad at her and saying he was going to grow up to be a Garifuna
of saco and corbata (suit and tie). She
wrote a song mentioning me related to people coming from Olancho asking her for
medicine, and how did people in Olancho know that she made medicine. She has
also told me about songs that were revealed to her by the spirits, before a
ceremony as a healing song. She would
tell me about which type of songs go with which type of women’s work and how
after you write a song, how you teach it to others to sing and how it becomes a
hit sometimes.
Where
Garifuna songs come from turns out to be an interesting topic among Garifunas
and some Garifuna men have analyzed how this belief about song ownership
differs from Western Law idea of Intellectual property rights as related to
songs. This is actually true of many Native American’s beliefs of songs and
stories. It is not just a situation of recording the story or the song or
hearing the song and people will tell you
what it means. The few stories Yaya has told me have turned out to be
key to understanding some things in Garifuna history and society. One is a
special Comadrona (the big midwife or co-mother) story. There may be a genre of uraga, traditional
Garifuna stories, that are only told by
women, that has not been reported on, as they occur in some other context rather than in
public, and maybe usually when men are absent. I can not see this story being
told by a man at a wake. Other Garifuna women said they told their children
stories when they were young, but now they do not remember them.
One of the
jobs of a buyei is to remember the traditional wisdom, and so she knew stories
and songs, and is another leader and traditional protector of lore besides the
head of the dance club who also knows traditional wisdom as she (or he if it is a male gay buyei who heads
the dance club) knows all the songs for every occassion. Yaya has shared with
me her philosophy on why Garifunas sing and dance punta and drum at a wake,
which is a time Europeans Christians tend to be sad and solumn.”The person who
is saddest should dance the most.” she said. It helps gets the sadness out of
you and make it more bearable. The words of punta songs are often incredibly
sad. “Yesterday you were fine and we were happy together, and then you caught a
fever and now you are dead”, is an example of a punta lyric. There is a special
Garifuna word for the sadness you feel when you have no close adult kin, and
that word is very common in Garifuna punta songs noted Roy Cayetano in the book
Black Carib-Garifuna. (In Jamaica the dance similar to punta is called Black
and White Dance. The people from the Congo do a similar dance. The Garifuna
name for Punta is Banguity which means New life and the Bantus of South Africa
also dance a dance called New Life at Wakes.)
I have also
introduced her to other researchers and her photo holding the medicinal plant
from which Castor oil is made which was growing in her garden is in David
Flores’s book La Evolucion de la Danza Folklorica de Honduras (The Historic
Evolution of Honduran Folkdances), published in 2003. (the plant castor oil is made from is of
African origin and was not native to the Americas). That book includes most of
what I knew about Afro-Honduran ceremonies with dances including Garifunas,
Black Bay islanders, Miskitos, and Ladinos. Much of what is published in my
book Los Garifunas de Honduras about Garifuna religious ceremonies which are
mostly healing ceremonies of illnesses caused by unhappy ancestors is from the
information I collected 1996-1998 for David Flores’s book. David Flores is
passionate about folk dances and so working with him I learned a lot about
folkdances and ceremonies with folkdances nationally and internationally.
Yaya was
also filmed for a video for Dr. Pashington Obeng,who teaches new world African
religions at Harvard and Wellesley who visited her with his cousin. She was
interviewed about midwife techniques for a training program in how to do
research in ethnic communities of IHAH, as were midwives in Santa Fe, but those
researchers never published anything nor sent back the reports of their
investigations, nor did Dr.Obeng’s cousin send back the video.
2006-2009-Wendy
Griffin worked more with Pech healer and midwife Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres
and her mother in law and husband with whom I wrote the book Los Pech de
Honduras. Sheet of medicinal plants given separately to the Pech as I was
worried about the issue of biopiracy.
2011--Writing
Yaya’s Biography as a Midwife and a
Healer
When she
was 91, it was obvious that bilingual intercultural education was never going
to take a serious interest in the topic of traditional plants or healers. I talked to her and offered to write her life
story. There is some interest in stories of Black women’s lives. I had thought about it before, but did not
because her own personal life is
complicated and might be looked down upon by Westerners reading it.
She had lived
at the time of the banana company, the Truxillo Railroad, a United Fruit
subsidiary (now Chiquita) and I was interested in that. I had included some of
that information in a two article series about the work of Black women during
the Banana Boom era in Honduras in the newspaper Honduras this Week,which
included a lot of interethnic sharing of traditional medicine use during that
period. It is also interesting how she
was called to be a buyei (and having to learn to play maracas correctly for
that job) and a healer and a midwife, these are all separate calls, the IHAH
researchers had asked me, “Haven’t you ever written down these stories?” There is some interest in Shaman and how they
are called and how being a female shaman affects their lives. The IHAH researchers came with Dr. Ronny
Velasquez, a Honduran anthropologist who usually taught at the Central
university of Venezuela. Two of the groups studied female Garifuna
midwives—Yaya in Trujillo and 4 in Santa Fe, with all being over 80 years old,
and their reports which I have never seen were turned into the office of
culture of IHAH. Shortly after that the
2009 coup happened in Honduras and the office of Culture of IHAH was disbanded
and the head of IHAH Dr. Dario Euraque had to leave Honduras suddenly as he was
sought after the coup. Adalid Martinez was part of the IHAH research group, but
he studied the Pech. Dr. Dario Euraque, a historian at Trinity College, wrote a book about his time at IHAH and the
aftermath of the coup and also spoke around the US.
I again
said I did not want to take advantage of her friendship but if Yaya wanted to,
I could interview her about her life and I would give her copies for all of her
5 children to remember her. She said she was interested in the project, so for
about a year, I would visit her and sometimes I would interview her, and
sometimes I would read back what I had written, and she would make comments. I
was pretty sick at the time, I could barely function, but it was nice to go and
visit her. I always learned something new. One advantage of having a 91 year
old blind friend, is she usually was
home, she usually was not busy, and so
she had time to sit and chat, although
she continued working as midwife until age 91 and at age 94 people still asked
her for advice on what to take and her daughter made the made the medicine and sometimes
she would still treat little babies. Some examples of what it is like to watch
her treat babies is in this document about her life.
I let her
talk about the topics she wanted to talk about, and she did not want to talk
much about being a shaman, she wanted to talk about being a midwife. This is really when I got to understand much
more in detail what it entailed to be a midwife at a time especially at a time
when there was no hospital. For me the
birth that left me gape mouthed is when she said the woman said, “I feel something down between my legs”,and
she looked and it was the baby’s hand.
Feet first, head first, butt first are all hard,
but if there is only one of the baby’s hands sticking out, that baby is totally
blocking any way to get out to go forward or backwards. It is stuck and if she
does not do something the mother and the baby will die. Fortunately what she
did worked and they both lived.
Pablo Arzu the
Garifuna university graduated doctor said to her once, “You are brave, Aunt”.
She said, “I have to be brave. If I am not brave, I will fail.” She says this
work is God’s work, and while the Mom is pushing she is praying, and in more
than 70 years of delivering babies none of them died and none of them had
asthma, because she treats them so that they won’t have asthma. Her reason of
why babies have asthma and what to do to prevent it is is similar to what Black
English speakers do and what Ladinos in Tegucigalpa say and do. If
you consider sometimes around 200 births a year for over 70 years, that is a
pretty amazing record, but births are definitely not the only type of illness
she treats.
Dr. Paul
House the UNAH ethnobotanist said if I find something across several ethnic
groups that is the same, then it is almost guaranteed to be true. Epazote (worm weed), Zacate te (lemon grass)
and getting rid of the amnionic fluid that that the baby drank when born (botar
el agua sucia de la fuente) to prevent asthma and doing massage of “empacho”
are four things that everyone in Honduras reports and agrees on, except Honduran
University trained doctors and US medical brigades. It is possible that 8
million Hondurans are wrong and 1,000 medical doctors right, but the odds are
not in the doctor’s favor that they really have the corner on all the medical
knowledge about diagnosing and treating common illnesses that have been around
for forever. In 2012 the editor of Negritud
said he was interested in publishing this biography in English and in Spanish
so I improved it and translated it. However, it has not been published, also
though it is in the University of Pittsburgh library and the Burke Museum at
the University of Washington, as well as some libraries in Honduras and at the
Soccorro Sorrel School in the Garifuna neighborhood where Yaya lives in Barrio
Cristales. This school has most of my research on Garifunas.
In 2012 Adalid
Martinez was given a new class in a new major “Food Security and Nutrition” and
the class is called “The Anthropology of Food”.
He published my studies of Miskito and Bay Islander food, the Pech foods
which I had collected and he verified, the Garifuna studies of food of Garifuna
writer Virgilio Lopez, and I began researching the history of Honduran food
crops and the African origins of African food using primarily Wikipedia
information through Wikiproject Africa. Earlier attempts to get information on
African foods had not been successful although I did find people like Dr.
Jeanette Allsopp at the University of the West indies, Cave Hill Barbados that
knew Afro-Caribbean food in 4 languages, and also Dr. Pashington obeng and his
cousin brought me a Ghanan cookbook. Both of these gave some information, but
the Wikiproject Africa on African foods had like over 100 pages on foods and
food plants, and is amazing.
2012 I also
looked at the Wikipedia article on Shamanism and related articles. Suddenly it
turned out that the witchcraft story that Yaya had told me on at least three
occasions and which I had not paid attention to but had included because she
wanted to include it became important, as the trope of the wounded shaman. See
some other things she has said or I have seen her do also turned to be important.
There is nothing that the Wikipedia article on Shamanism says about Shamans
that is not true for Yaya. The south African traditional medicine, the
divination, ancestor ceremony, psychopomp articles in Wikipedia all turned out
to be important. The articles on Witchcraft, which include lots of information
on witchraft in the past in the Europe which informed Catholic church policy
and law in Honduras, but also witchcraft related issues in Africa today.
In 2012 the
new movie Garifuna in peril was released and I was writing about what the
Garifunas are famous for and thinking about Ashanti’s comment the Garifunas are not famous for science. Reanalyze the
issue that Garifunas know plants and while some have doctoral degrees like Dr.
Tulio Mariano Gonzales (Doctorate in Tree Science from the Soviet Union, Dr.
Cirilio Nelson professor at the UNAH who has written the main biology books
which classify 10,000 Honduran plants with their botanical names, 34 Garifuna
doctors, mostly men), or degrees in Agriculture, but many of the people who
most know plants are the illiterate Garifuna women who plant, harvest, use,
preserve, cook, prescribe them, and maintained them year after year in their
gardens or intheir fields or in mountain or lagoon edge reserves. Compare what
Yaya knows to what were the problems identified for health of African American
women by the Coordianted Care network in Pittsburgh. Research
what the Garifunas have been asking for as part of their Human rights struggles
for the last century including issues related to health-The Garifuna Immigrants
Invisible article which is available for free on the Garifuna in Peril website
as a pdf www-garifunainperil.com go to About and Garifunas.
2013—Working
with Pech on bilingual intercultural education and giving intercultural
education seminars with Doña Juana’s son. Speaking at SALALM about overlap of
Indigenous and Afro-descent human right movements. Traditional Honduran goods
distribution network. Work on the issue of traditional crafts as used by other
ethnic groups. Hear about Maya Chorti
medicinal plant issues and issue of changing religion and wanting to promote
being known for traditional medicinal treatments. My Miskito student who helped
me write story books, publishes a book of Miskito medicinal plants. Speaking on
Intercultural Education at the UPN in San Pedro Sula at the Pedagogical
Exchange conference in July 2013 and on the political aspects of creating the Pech
and Garifuna alphabets in August 2013.
Collect materials and stories about crafts for the craft exhibition and
donation of the crafts to the Burke Museum. Nov. 2013 election and how it went
badly for Honduran ethnic groups and their land rights. Forum on the Challenges
of Bilingual Intercultural Education which is attended by the Minister of
Education, Garifunas and the Pech including Doña Juana. Asked about narratives of Indians (or
Afro-Indigenous) people about traditional plant knowledge and how they used
these narratives to fight for rights from the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge
Network based at Penn state.. Write a series of articles about the Alternative
founding of Pittsburgh narratives, the comparison of Pittsburgh Indian
Narratives and Honduran Indian and Afro-Honduran narratives and Counter-narratives,
a book review of Jessica Grace and take out of those my Personal story of Homelessness and Mental
Illness the story of a Female Vet, and submit to the Western Regional
International Health Conference where it was not accepted.. The talk on Yaya
not accepted either, but later they gave me the chance to do a poster session
about my Garifuna Midwife project. I began writing for HondurasWeekly.com in
February 2013. Honduras This Week no longer online after May 2013. Attend SALALM
in Miami 2013 and learn what is new with libraries and e-books, videos, etc.
Also identify needs of Honduran librarians and research about the Global
Library project of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Reicken
Foundation which has 56 libraries in Honduras and 8 in Guatemala. One of their
librarians spoke at SALALM and he is also a colleague of Dr. James Loucky the
Latin American anthropologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham,
WA where I spoke November 2013 about the Honduran craft
donation to the Burke Museum and my work with the Honduran Indians and
Garifunas and their current situation. I also joined the Traditional Indigenous
Knowledge Network based at Penn State University after SALALM. Do research and
making contacts with Honduran librarians, Honduran Indians and Garifunas
and Honduran historians about doing the
Internet for Hondurans project which is part of the Honduran Intercultural
Education and New Technologies project. See the website
2014
Consider combining Yaya’s story with analysis with Doña Juana’s stories as a
traditional healer, and her life and my growing understanding of medicinal
plants “Adventures in Traditional Honduran medicine”. I did not publish doña
Juana’s medicinal plants that she knows partly due to biopiracy concerns and
partly because most of what she learned was from non-Pech. Her children do not
read her list of traditional medicinal plants and medicines even though they
asked for it, nor do they read the stories that their grandfather and father
told and were published by Lazaro Flores and I in 1991. I do not know what the
issues are related to this. Submitted proposal for this book to University
Press of Florida, but not accepted. Investigate issues of
Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights in US and Internationally to be able to
talk to Garifunas and other Honduran Indians on the advisability or not of
including information in Wikipedia and republishing books we have written as
e-books for wider distribution. Make contact with US Indian organizations
working with issues of traditional foods and nutrition and medicine and
environmental healthiness including Northwest Indian College (NWIC) in
Bellingham, Washington, Center for World Indigenous Studies (CWIS )in Olympia,
Washington, the Indigenous Environmental Network(IEN) and
FirstNations.org. (They all have
websites.) Make some contact with US Garifunas in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.
Prepare the website with information in English for US librarians in SALALM and
for people attending the Society for Applied Anthropology conference this year
and next year, and also people attending the Western Regional International
health conference at the UW in Seattle in April 2014. The meeting of SfAA will
be in Pittsburgh, PA, my hometown in 2015 and where I worked with the Council of Three
Rivers American Indian Center in 1991. Several of the articles on the blog
below were inspired by call for articles of the Traditional Indigenous
Knowledge Network and were put up on the blog to inform the people attending
Sfaa in Pittsburgh next year. While I was working for the Council of three
Rivers American Indian Cnenter I took at Community College of Allegheny County
course on the Modern American Indians taught by a lawyer who worked on issues
like getting sweat lodges in the prisons and the issue of how do you deal with
young Indians who get into trouble with the law related to addiction issues (over
90% of all arrests of US native Americans had something to do with addiction
todrugs or alcohol).
www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com
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