This month, we sat down with Melissa Meyer to talk about what it means to affirm and fortify Two Spirit and Indigiqueer relatives through plant medicine. Melissa is matrilineally Eagle clan from the Gis’paxloats tribe of the Tsimshian Nation in northern British Columbia. She is Scandinavian and German by her father. She operates Rose Island Farm, LLC, which offers herbal consultations and community workshops—“sometimes it’s harvesting together, sometimes we tend and mulch garden beds, and it could even be communal canning.” Here’s what she shared with us:
I want to start by uplifting the fact that a queer Two Spirit person even making it in the door of our program means we’ve had some success. Because there’s so much systemic harm. There’s whole piles of grievances that folks need to get through just to be able to make it through the door: I’ve had this horrible experience, I’ve had that horrible experience. Sometimes half my work is just receiving and holding that space for folks to detox. We have to hold all these traumas, all these micro aggressions, all this harm. And if you aren’t planning for that when you’re providing services to Two Spirit folks, if you aren’t holding space for that, if you’ve only scheduled an hour—well, we might need an hour and a half. Let’s not rush. Because this is important. To hear someone, to see and witness them, to celebrate the fact that they made it through the door. Thank goodness, you found your way. Thank goodness, you found a space to restore your spirit and your body. Because that’s what traditional medicine is.
After the detox, we fortify. Those are the two steps. All the things come out, and we’ve got to put the good things back in. We love them real good, protect them, reassure their spirit, so they have capacity to head back into this crazy world. Trauma robs us of our vitamins and minerals and the nutrients in our blood. So I’m always thinking, How do we protect them? How do we fortify them? What’s their lineage? What plantcestors come from those lineages that can help fortify them? If they’re Navajo, I get them their Navajo Indian tea. Of course, if there’s been some interruption or they don’t have access to that lineage, if they weren’t raised in it, then we might pray together. We might ask what plant here could nurture and support them in the meantime, until something becomes more obvious and available and accessible?
There isn’t any single blanket approach, but to give an example—coming from the West Coast I often think of Grandmother Cedar, such a big evergreen, ever present medicine. She holds the community once she’s established. When she’s a young one, the community has to hold and protect her, but when she’s established, she does that for everybody. She guides and protects and plans and fortifies the forest, and all the plant relatives there. So we might start with a cleanse, washing some stuff off, or we might talk about putting some of her medicine up in their own homes to create that safe container, because we all need a safety nest.
The other piece of this is that Two Spirit people hold their own medicine. I think about my teacher, Karen Sanders, how she teaches about animal medicine, too. Turtle medicine, for example. Turtles live in two worlds—on the land and in the water. For us Tsimshian people, that’s the otter—they live in the water, they live on the land. Same with frogs, frog medicine. Land and Water. Part of that’s also Raven. They can see between the veil. They can see the living and the nonliving. So, you know, when I think of the medicine of Two Spirit people, sometimes that’s how it’ll be shown to me. It’s that protection, and that expansiveness. It’s pushing the boundaries, saying, We can’t just live in this little box, we’re going to live outside of this box. There needs to be creativity and acceptance and liberation. Much of it, too, is energetic. Tuning in, listening to understand if they’re feeling constricted or fearful or whatever it might be, and then to tune into their medicine, something inside of them. And then to find the plant usually matches up.
Your life path gives you so many clues of the type of light and medicine you’ve come to share. And Two Spirit people—what happens when you’re that bright, and you’re that gorgeous, and you’re that liberated, is that things come to attack, because they want that brilliance but they’re terrified of it. So we say, Okay. Let’s fortify you some more, so you can be your bold, beautiful self. Don’t shrink, don’t hide. Your light, your love, your medicine is the antidote here.
Photo of Melissa by IG:@seika.kono
