Helen A. Gibson is a visiting assistant professor at Freie Universität Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute researching the history of grand midwifery as spiritual practice. She defended her dissertation on the history of early-twentieth-century Black motorists’ automotivity in 2021 and worked for the past three years as a research fellow at the University of Erfurt. They are currently the European Journal of American Studies (EJAS) editor for history, political science, and international relations. Her research focuses on the significance of mattering beyond the scope of empiricism, and is an invitation to commune otherwise.

Dogwoods as Sacred Boundaries in the Practice of Grand Midwifery

Abstract: Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants of the significance of how strawberries come into your hands—as a gift or as a commodity (Kimmerer 2013). Plants such as wild strawberries, or, in the case of numerous WPA interviews with formerly enslaved people about their families’ practices of rootwork, dogwood, are sacred because they teach us that they are sacred. It is through the direct revelation of sacredness in the context of mutual care and respect that this lesson is transmitted. Via these practices of sacred reciprocity, kinship is formed. The sacredness of plants as a gift is part of the boundary between the lived experience of total violence during slavery and the lived experience of kinship in its afterlives.

References to dogwood trees (both their bark and their buds) as medicine in WPA interviews from the 1930s are interesting for many reasons. Dogwoods are elders in Europe, parts of Asia, and North America. Flowering dogwoods are unique to Turtle Island—to eastern North America and Mexico. Phil Towns, born in 1824 in Richmond, Virginia, convinces his interviewer that “The health problem was not an acute one as these people were provided with everything for a contented mind and a robust body,” including, for example, dogwood and redwood bark tea to treat worms (WPA Vol. 4, Part 4, 41). Phil Towns’ grandmother, Hannah, like many grand midwives, knew how to incorporate the epistemologies and cosmologies she had inherited into a practice of sacred reciprocity in Virginia, living to be a reported 129 years old and teaching her kin in a context of entangled mattering (Carter 2023). How did dogwood come into grand midwives’ hands, as a gift, and how did they reciprocate knowledge of its sacredness?