CODE 122
2/19/2024
Kyra Williams
Dr. Hildebrandt
Source analysis #3
The article that I will be looking at today is called “Slavery and Botany”. How do these things correlate? That is exactly what this article is taking a deep dive into this topic. These violent colonial voyages forced “Indians”-the indigenous people to quit practicing their religious rituals and forced them into their catholic, white, religion. And not only affected them spiritually but also physically in the plants they used in their religion as well. These voyages weren’t only violent in the sense of physicality but also in the way they extracted plants from their culture. The colonizers barbarically erased their culture and heritage that those people had with no mercy. “Missionaries found it necessary to be informed about native medicine in order to discredit it” This specific line really stood out to me because the way the writer said that the missionaries found it “important” to know the medicine to discredit. They used their natural resources of plants to make that medicine and these colonizers overtook it and disregarded the native people. This was not the only case of these violent extractions of people and their native plants, but just a small segment of the many stories that still need to be told today. And with the work that we are doing at the Missouri Botanical Gardens I hope we can have an impact on people and tell the story of the untold past that the garden has.
I think this piece is very informative and interesting. The audience would be historians and students who would like to know more about this specific topic.
Sited sources:
“SLAVERY AND BOTANY.” Center for Plants & Culture, https://www.plantsandculture.org/slaveryandbotany. Accessed 19 Feb. 2024.
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