About me
Healing History: Traiteurs and the Shared Healing Practices Amongst Cajuns, Creoles, and Native Americans in Ascension Parish Louisiana
Abstract:
Existing scholarship draws connections between modern medical knowledge and the cultures of care created amongst enslaved peoples on plantations in the U.S. South. While it is understood that enslaved peoples, specifically Africans and Native Americans, had opportunities to blend their botanical traditions and knowledge, related instances of blended healing traditions based on spiritual beliefs and practices, have undergone less study. In Cajun, Creole, and Native American cultures, the existence and shared beliefs, practices, and gradual disappearance, of traiteurs, or “local faith healers,” suggest that spiritual beliefs and traditions were exchanged alongside botanical knowledge in the development of shared healing practices amongst various peoples in Louisiana. Using oral history interviews with traiteurs in Ascension Parish Louisiana, local believers, and my family members, as well as interviews with local Indigenous peoples and communities, I put these traditions and belief systems of both traiteur communities in conversation with one another to tell my family’s history. Participants will be able to listen and watch these oral histories online through a developing website connected to the project. This site is built to give a broad overview of the project and the research. Using a QR code, participants will be taken to a site where digital storytelling and oral history will combine to create an interactive, educational experience. This oral history project bridges the past, present, and future of traiteur traditions and cultures on both sides of my family to explore more broadly the spaces where these shared practices were exchanged. In doing so, this project also aims to discuss the role Indigenous enslavement played in the development of shared healing and medicinal traditions. Audiences will see how local, people-centered oral histories can be connected to broader, developing scholarship, particularly with the support of accessible, user-focused digital platforms.