Indigenous healing traditions — Americas and Pacific

Indigenous healing traditions across the Americas, Australia, the Pacific, and elsewhere are complete health systems — not fragments or folk remedies — built on intimate, generational knowledge of local plants, ecosystems, and the human body in relationship to place. Colonization systematically suppressed these traditions and the languages and cultures that carried them, making their survival and revitalization both a health issue and a justice issue. Where indigenous health knowledge has been studied, it consistently reveals sophisticated empirical understanding of plant medicine, the role of community, and the inseparability of mental, physical, and spiritual health.