Knowledge Share Description

Sugar gets a bad rap, and with good reason: its history is cloaked in blood and bondage. The sugar plantation system helped create racial capitalism; today, companies lace their products with sweeteners to increase our chances of becoming hooked, disproportionately impacting poor, Black, indigenous communities of color.

From an herbal perspective however, sugar can be used as a medium for herbs that are otherwise unpalatable, help us create shelf-stable, alcohol-free preparations and bring joy in and of itself. So what is Saccharum officinarum? How might those descended from people for whom coercion dominated modern encounters with Sugarcane re-imagine their relationship with sugar and sweetness?

In this knowledge share, we will talk about raw Sugarcane’s healing properties, creating space for our stories about this plant. We’ll explore the role sugar played in the transatlantic slave trade and the significance of sugar worker strikes in the labor uprisings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Uplifting ancestral sweeteners, we will make an effort to reclaim our connection to Sugarcane and sweet medicine. Finally, we will make three sweet herbal preparations: bitter pastilles for digestion, an herbal simple syrup that can be added to sparkling water and a healing soft “candy” sweetened only with dried fruit.

Knowledge Share Includes

• Traditional uses of Sugarcane

• Unearthing the impact and violent history of sugar

• How did this plant become a commodity?

• Afro-diasporic ancestral sweeteners

• Understanding the role that rebellion by those enslaved on sugar plantations had in the abolition movement and that striking sugar plantation workers in Hawaii and the Southern US played in the US labor movement

• Unpacking the stories Sugarcane carries

• Physiological impact of sugar in the body and pancreas

• Build a harm reduction framework to help us navigate our relationship with the sweet flavor

• Sugar as a medium for medicine

• Herbal recipes

• Open dialogue around strategies to healing our relationship with sugar

Resource Package

• 1 ounce Ceylon cinnamon* (grown and harvested by friends in Hawai’i; powdered fresh by Jess Turner)

• 1 ounce Yarrow* (grown and harvested by friends in North Carolina; powdered fresh by Jess)

• 1 ounce Horehound* (grown and harvested by a small farm in Vermont; powdered fresh by Jess)

• 7 grams Mountain Mint* (grown and harvested in New York state; powdered fresh by Jess)

• “Herbalists choice” of another pungent herb like Elecampane in a small quantity

• 2 ounces New York state honey

Exchange

• $35

• $60 Knowledge share + Resource Package

• $70 reparations ( If you have financial abundance, this is our pay-it-forward option to fund our scholarships and work redistributing resources to Black and Indigenous Land Projects)

  For scholarships please email herbancura@gmail.com with subject HERBAL CONFECTION

Access

*ASR Captioning provided 

*Spanish interpretation available (Si requiere interpretacion por favor mande un email a herbancura@gmail.com)

Virtual Gathering

Zoom link will be sent out via email 1-2 days before knowledge share

1-4pm EST

Knowledge share will be recorded and available for 30 days

Facilitator

Jess Turner (she/her) is a Black clinical herbalist whose practice is centered on helping frontline communities—low-income, working-class and BIPOC communities who experience the first and worst impacts of climate change—repair through connection to the land and plants growing around them. In cities, these plants are often discarded as mere weeds. She is interested in exploring the liberatory struggles of the plants and people whom capitalism alienates and building bridges between human and more-than-human worlds.