Working The Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing

by Michele Elizabeth Lee

Overview

African American traditional medicine is an American classic that emerged out of the necessity of its people to survive. It began with the healing knowledge brought with the African captives on the slave ships and later merged with Native American, European and other healing traditions to become a full-fledged body of medicinal practices that has lasted in various forms down to the present day.

Working the Roots: Over 400 Years Of Traditional African American Healing is the result of first-hand interviews, conversations, and apprenticeships conducted and experienced by author Michele E. Lee over several years of living and studying in the rural South and in the West Coast regions of the United States. She combines a novelist’s keen ear for storytelling and dialogue and a healer’s understanding of folk medicine arts into a book that makes for both pleasant, interesting reading, and serves as a permanent household healing guide.

Divided between sections on interviews of healers and their stories and a comprehensive collection of traditional African American medicines, remedies, and the many common ailments they were called upon to cure, Working The Roots is a valuable addition to African American history and American and African folk healing practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780692857878
Publisher:	Wadastick
Publication date:	12/15/2017
Pages:	396
Sales rank:	81,272
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Michele Elizabeth Lee has worked for over 30 years in the integrated arts field as a visual arist, curator, administrator, educator, and writer. She has a MFA from the University of Southern California and a BA from Antioch College. She is a native of Oakland, California, who was raised in a family of traditional healers from the South. She currently lives and works in her native Oakland, where she teaches art in a public school. She has two adult children, Milon and Nora.

Table of Contents

PART I: HEALING NARRATIVES

Chapter 1 - Reclaiming Our Natural Healing Tradition

Chapter 2 - Strong Medicine

Chapter 3 - Spirit Work

Chapter 4 - Coming Full Circle

PART II - THE AILMENTS AND MEDICINES

Chapter 5 - Preventive Health Care

Chapter 6 – The Ailments And Their Remedies

Chapter 7 – Animal Care

Chapter 8 – The Medicines

Chapter 9 - Working The Powers: Conjurin’ And Hoodoo Remedies

Index of Images

Glossary of Cultural Terms

Glossary of Medicinal Properties

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

“A blessing for generations to come, Michele Lee’s Working the Roots is the result of meticulous research and compelling storytelling. This almost-lost knowledge rekindles the passionate fire of primordial African holistic healing for an audience whose survival just may count on it.”

R. Dafina Kuficha

Practicing acupuncturist, health educator, and spiritual counselor

“I love this book! Working the Roots is an impressively well-written account of African American root medicine that reads like an adventure novel and is hard to put down. The book is an invaluable treasure for anthropologists, ethno-botanists, historians, herbalists, and others wanting a look inside the uncharted terrain of African American root and folk medicine.”

Dr. Gail P. Myers

Cultural Anthropologist and filmmaker

"Working the Roots is an example and testimony of African tradition that permeates the Americas and speaks to the widespread and in-depth knowledge African people possess about health and healing. Luck for us to now have this wealth of invaluable knowledge at our finger-tips.”

Opal Palmer Adisa

Distinguished professor, poet, novelist, and photographer

“This book is fundamental to the deeper understudying of a culture that usually is glossed over and commandeered or down played way too often. Working The Roots is my story as it is in many different degrees, the story of all Afro-Americans.”

Opensanwo Ifakorede Fadario

Traditional health consultant, healer, visual artist, and initiated Ifa practitioner

From the Publisher