Sacred Plant, Sentient Earth: A Vegetal Geography of Healing in a More-Than-Human World

Plants and humans are deeply entangled, having shared intimate relationships since the beginning of time. In particular, humans have had a long history of relating with plants-as-medicines, developing emplaced healing traditions centred upon culturally-embedded ecological praxes that blur species boundaries and take seriously vegetal sentience and human-plant kinship. However, such healing traditions and practices have been increasingly marginalised in the contemporary era. This is because in its current form, ‘medicine’ is largely viewed through a singularly biomedical lens and stripped of its relational lifeforce, rendering it a series of material symptoms and ‘cures’ rather than a process of relationship-tending between human and non-human others. To this end, I posit that the widespread denial of plant agency, as leveraged and upheld by anthropocentric onto-epistemologies, is increasingly linked to the declining health of not only human bodies and minds, but the planetary body and mind of Earth as a whole. This thesis puts forward the simple yet radical idea that our collective healing at a planetary scale first and foremost necessitates a renewal of emplaced relationships with an animate, sentient Earth. The process of renewing our relationship with Earth relies upon a deep process of ‘re-membering’; a liberatory praxis of decolonising dominant western worldviews and recovering healing knowledge through an embodiment of ancestrally-relevant practices that re-stitch and re-centre human stories of belonging within cosmologically-intact Indigenous worldviews in place. As a practising folk herbalist and geographer, I see and treat plants as promising portals within which deep ecological wisdom and healing may be realised, cultivated and tended. As such, I engage in a process of ‘plant dieting’ in this work – an emergent multispecies and ceremonial research method with plants – to take seriously‘morethan-human’ research and healing praxis that a priori engages with a sentient earth ethic. As a woman of mixed Indigenous Asian (Naxi) and European ancestry, born and living in settler-colonial Aotearoa New Zealand, I occupy an unconventional ‘postcolonial positioning’ in the world. From this view, I offer my own praxis of decoloniality through a ‘decolonial autoethnography’ with plants to critically engage in an exploration of Indigenous worlding(s), decolonising multispecies research, and emplaced healing. This thesis thus represents a creative, experimental and embodied journey into the recovery of ancestral wisdom and a re-story-ation of vegetal ontologies that seek to (re)member, (re)envision and (re)embolden healing practices that centre Indigenous and planetary futurity in contemporary times.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Geography

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• McSherry, Alice Grace

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Kearns, Robin
• Gaillard, JC

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/69320

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/69320