How the first published Indigenous ethnobotanist & elders recorded their people’s medicinal knowledge

CARAMURU/PARAGUASSU INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil — Looking at the landscape of dry and cleared mountains around her house, Marta Xavier de Oliveira remembered when it was a forest. “When we got sick, that’s where we got our medicine from,” Oliveira, known as Dona Marta, 87, told Mongabay.

An Indigenous elder of the Kariri-Sapuyá people, she stands […]