In December 2023 I made my first sustained research journey to re-establish connection with long-time colleagues and interlocutors working in Boriken on healing justice and rematriation. For now, pending conversations with interlocutors that will determine what happens with this research, I will call this organization Lo Semillere.
Lo Semillere’s core mission focuses on healing justice and rematriation of knowledge and people, in the context of ongoing injustice created by U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico. I traveled as a Solidarity Guest to Lo Semillere’s workshop space, a community of practice, for a 2-week visit. While there, I lived alongside founders and key coordinadores of Lo Semillere, and offered support as requested. One key request from staff and members was that I offer a workshop series on community care and basic first aid (akin to trainings I offer in Vermont and the northeast frequently). I offered this as part of a solidarity exchange model to support my presence as a researcher there.
As a collective, we also determined that it would be useful to the 7 core members of Lo Semillere for me to facilitate a series of smaller conversations around how the members envision, understand, practice, and teach their core mission. We aimed to open a space for LS members to reflect on their own practices around rematriation–of plants, medicinal knowledge, and people in diaspora–to examine what kinds of broader implications that work has. I approached this from my usual dual role of scholar-activist who has been following their work – scholarly and activist – via one of their founders for years.
Lo Semillere is an ideal site to incubate questions about practices for and of rematriation and healing justice. The organization situates itself deliberately athwart ongoing crises of U.S. settler occupation, militarization of the island, debt calamities, high energy costs, and disaster & hurricane recovery (Rosario 2013; McGranahan and Collins 2018; Rosario and Arroyo 2022; Harrison et al. 2016). Lo Semillere’s community consists of people with different relationships to Boriken diaspora–some with Taino ancestry whose families never left the island, some who left and came back, or who returned decades after their parents or grandparents moved to the US mainland, and yet others who are only able to be in remote relation to the island.
In the Boriken context, Lo Semillere’s work brings together these diverse kinds of diasporic relations to place and knowledge in a particular kind of post-disaster space. They bring radical attention to the ways diverse capabilities and needs manifest. Their practices can instruct herbalists and scholars alike on what is possible in terms of justice, ethics, and healing, in the context of global climate crisis in its many manifestations—including the dynamics of empire.
We haven’t yet assembled formal publications on these research engagements. When we do, you can look for them here!