How Colonization Changed the Way We View Healing
Colonization did not simply introduce new medical systems, it restructured power around who is allowed to define health, whose knowledge is considered legitimate, and which communities are trusted to care for themselves. Across Indigenous, African, Asian, and other traditional cultures, healing was historically embedded within community life through midwifery, plant medicine, food systems, spiritual practices, land stewardship, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. These systems were not informal or accidental. They were organized frameworks of care developed over centuries of observation, environmental relationship, and collective responsibility.
Many of these practices were deliberately suppressed through forced assimilation, religious conversion, land theft, racialized science, and the institutionalization of Western medicine as the dominant authority. Traditional healers were criminalized, cultural birth workers were displaced, and communities were taught to distrust their own inherited knowledge while simultaneously being denied equitable access to the very systems replacing it. The result was not only a medical shift, but a psychological one. Entire populations were conditioned to associate professionalism with Western institutions and primitiveness with their own cultural healing traditions.
The consequences of that shift are still visible in modern public health disparities. Communities that were disconnected from traditional foodways, communal caregiving structures, ecological relationships, and preventative healing practices now experience disproportionately high rates of chronic stress related illness, food insecurity, maternal health inequities, environmental exposure, and limited healthcare access. Yet many policy conversations continue to focus almost exclusively on treatment infrastructure while ignoring the historical dismantling of the cultural systems that once supported collective wellness long before crisis intervention became necessary.
At the same time, many of the same healing practices once dismissed as unscientific, backwards, or dangerous are now repackaged into billion dollar wellness industries that often exclude the very communities that preserved them through survival. Herbal medicine, meditation, fermentation, plant-based nutrition, doula work, holistic nutrition, and other traditional practices are frequently commercialized without meaningful acknowledgment of the cultural knowledge systems from which they emerged or the structural inequities that once targeted them.
If lawmakers, educators, public health leaders, and community advocates are serious about addressing health inequities, the conversation cannot stop at healthcare access alone. It must also include cultural preservation, environmental justice, food sovereignty, maternal care, community based wellness education, and the protection of traditional knowledge systems. Healing has never been solely biomedical. It has always been social, cultural, environmental, economic, and political.
Supporting Articles
Lavallee, L. F., & Poole, J. M. (2010). Beyond recovery: Colonization, health and healing for Indigenous people in Canada. International journal of mental health and addiction, 8(2), 271-281. https://uwo.scholaris.ca/bitstreams/25c46e77-578f-493a-92d6-f3e97a318f98/download
Terefe, E. M. (2026). African traditional medicine: historical legacy, colonial disruption, and pathways for integration into modern healthcare. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 17, 1842857. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13265479/
