Deep resilience: healing through herbal medicine, farming, and ancestral memory
Jovan Sage is a farmer, chef, community organizer, entrepreneur, herbalist, doula, and wellness coach. Drawing on the knowledge of her West African and Indigenous ancestors, she is deeply engaged in healing on many levels–the soil, the body, communities caught up in the global pandemic, race relations–through deeply reciprocal relationships with the land and one another.
Find out more about her work at Alchemist Jovan and Sage’s Larder.
Show Notes:
2’50 Jovan’s path to agriculture and regeneration
4’25 connection between people and soil, reciprocal relationships
6’03 facing history, healing our land and ourselves
7’05 finding shared narratives is key to healing
7’40 defensiveness about racial history
8’44 enslaved Africans provided not just free labor but vast agricultural knowledge
9’07 West Africans were great rice cultivators
9’51 Africans were healers, midwives, cooks and many other contributors to US society
11’40 connecting with slave ancestors and their roles in their communities
13’24 deepening her relationship to food in New York City
18’17 how she found herself in Georgia
18’50 getting the farm through hurricanes in Georgia
23’00 loss of animals, loss of business
27’32 parallels between dealing with hurricanes and pandemics
28’35 positive changes coming from catastrophe
30’24 food system crumbled so quickly, so much food was wasted, distribution system failed
32’09 disrupting the schedules of ranchers and cattle growth cycles
33’50 regeneration and listening
36’24 using ag to heal race relations
More Episodes
Episode 88 – Lipan Apache: Bringing back the buffalo in Texas
Lucille Contreras calls buffalo her relatives. She’s a Lipan Apache and founder of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, which brings together food, culture, and language around this animal to reestablish its homeland.
Episode 87 – Regenerative production of…seaweed
Kristina Long is a ship captain and an artisanal kelp farmer in British Columbia. We talk about kelp ecosystems, food, and keeping sustainable practices in a growing market.
Episode 86 – Living and farming inside a closed system—for two years
Mark Nelson and Starrlight Augustine talk about the lessons learned from the ambitious experiment of 30 years ago, in which eight people lived in a sealed space and grew all their own food–recycling water, air, and waste.