Beyond Wellness Tourism: Why Black and Brown Communities Are Reclaiming the Plant Altar

Walk into any high-end wellness boutique in a gentrifying neighborhood, and you will find the altar. Dried herbs in apothecary glass. Tincture bottles with handwritten labels. A diffuser releasing smoke that someone, somewhere, called sacred. The signage will say things like ancient wisdom and plant-based healing and rooted in tradition“—without ever naming which tradition. Without ever naming which people.

Meanwhile, three blocks over — or three thousand miles away in Lagos, or Kingston, or East Harlem on 116th Street — a grandmother is steeping bitter leaf in hot water and handing the cup to a grandchild who doesn’t need a label to know what it is. She learned it from her mother. Her mother learned it from hers. The knowledge moved through bodies and kitchens and ship holds and memory, arriving here, still intact, still alive.

This is the story the wellness industry will not tell you. Because the story requires accountability. And accountability requires names.

The global wellness industry is now valued at over five trillion dollars. A meaningful portion of that number is built on plant knowledge — adaptogens, ceremonial cacao, herbal tinctures, smoke cleansing, sacred mushrooms — most of it sourced from traditions that were, within living memory, criminalized when practiced by the people who originated them.

Ayahuasca retreats charge thousands of dollars per ceremony in Peru, where Indigenous communities face rising barriers to their own medicine. “Smudging” kits sell out on Etsy while Native nations continue to fight for the legal right to practice their ceremonies. Adaptogen powders bearing Sanskrit names line the shelves of boutiques run by people who have never set foot in the communities that developed them.

This is not an accident. It is a pattern with a name: extraction. The same logic that removed people from land, removed knowledge from people. The same economy that profited from enslaved Black bodies now profits from the healing systems those bodies carried. Wellness tourism is not a new industry. It is an old industry wearing linen.

What changes the equation is not better labeling. It is ownership. It is communities holding their own knowledge, in their own hands, on their own terms.

The history we were taught says African healing traditions were disrupted — or erased — by the violence of enslavement and colonization. The more accurate history is more complicated, and more defiant.

Enslaved Africans did not come empty-handed. They came with seed knowledge. Botanical knowledge. The understanding that certain roots reduced fever, that certain leaves closed wounds, that certain smoke cleared a room of more than dust. They came knowing the relationship between plant and body was also a relationship between body and cosmos — that healing was never only physical.

Some Southern states made it a capital offense for enslaved people to teach or practice herbalism. The suppression was that deliberate. That afraid. Because a community that can heal itself is harder to control.

And yet the knowledge moved. Through the kitchens of the enslaved. Through the hands of root workers and conjure women and granny midwives. Through Harriet Tubman, who used the plant knowledge of the Eastern Shore to keep herself and hundreds of others alive on a journey that had no margin for error. Through every grandmother who pressed bitter herbs into a child’s palm and said, “This is medicine; remember it.”

That intergenerational thread did not break. It bent. It was forced underground. But it did not break. The reclamation happening now in Black and Brown communities is not a revival. It is a return to what was always there.

In Yoruba cosmology, there is an orisha whose domain is the forest and everything that grows in it. His name is Ọsanyìn, and he holds what no other Orisha holds: omniscient knowledge of ewe — leaves, herbs, roots, and their healing properties. Every plant. Every preparation. Every incantation that unlocks a plant’s medicine. All of it belongs to him.

Ọsanyìn is depicted with an iron staff adorned with birds — a symbol of the sixteen principal odu of Ifá, the divination system that encodes Yoruba philosophy and medicine. In practice, healing rites draw directly on his knowledge: practitioners prepare agbo (herbal infusions) and agunmu (pounded herb mixtures), administered as baths, ointments, or oral remedies, always accompanied by incantations that activate the plants’ curative power. In this cosmology, the plants are not passive ingredients. They are persons, with will and intelligence, who must be properly approached.

Ọsanyìn crossed the Atlantic inside the bodies and memories of Yoruba people taken into slavery. In Cuba, he became Osain — still the supreme herbalist, still guardian of the forest’s mystical properties, invoked by santeros in the tradition of La Regla de Ocha. In Brazil, he is Ossaím, honored in Candomblé ceremonies. In East Harlem and across the diaspora, his presence lives in every botanica, every curandera’s kitchen, and every community apothecary where a healer knows that plants do not work alone.

The plant altar, in this tradition, is not decoration. It is a living pharmacopeia. A map of the relationship between the human body and the earth’s intelligence. When a community tends that altar, it is practicing something older and more sophisticated than anything that can be packaged and sold.

In East Harlem and across the diaspora, the reclamation is not a movement with a launch date. It does not have a founding document or a grant announcement. It looks like a woman who learned her grandmother’s bitter leaf tea and decided to teach it to the women on her block. It looks like a community herb share in a church basement. It looks like a Black-owned apothecary where the healer behind the counter knows your name, your family history, and exactly which root your body is asking for.

Black herbalists across the country are leading this work — not as trend-chasers or wellness entrepreneurs, but as people answering a call that was always in their lineage. Educators who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color are building curricula that center ancestral knowledge. Community herbalism programs are training a new generation of healers who understand that medicine is political, even though access to it has always been political.

This is what the history of African American herbalism makes clear: plant knowledge was not peripheral to Black survival. It was central to it. The reclamation happening now is not a rejection of modern medicine. It is a refusal to accept that communities must choose between their own knowledge and the systems that consistently underserve them. The answer is both. It has always been both.

And the ritual cleansing practices of the African diaspora — the steam baths, the herbal washes, the smoke, the prayer—were never wellness routines. They were, and remain, systems of community care so thorough they look, to outside eyes, like ceremony. Because they are.

Ubuntu Village did not arrive in East Harlem, Kenya, Uganda, or Nigeria to teach communities about healing. We arrived because the healers were already there. The knowledge was already there. What was needed—what is always needed—were conditions. Resources. Recognition. The infrastructure that allows what communities already know to flourish rather than survive in spite of everything.

That is the difference between charity and solidarity. Charity brings medicine to communities that, in the charity model, cannot produce their own. Solidarity asks, “What do you already know, and what do you need to practice it freely?” The answer to that second question has never been “nothing.” The answer is always: land, time, safety, resources, and the right to be recognized as the authors of your own healing.

Plant medicine is public health when it belongs to the people who need it. The co-regulation that happens in community — the nervous system settling, the body relaxing into belonging — is not separate from herbalism. It is the same medicine. The plant works differently in the hands of someone who knows your name than it does in a capsule purchased from a stranger’s website.

This is the thing the wellness industry cannot sell you, because it cannot commodify it: the relationship. The grandmother who knows which leaf. The healer who asks about your family before she asks about your symptoms. The community that grows the medicine together and takes it together and heals together.

That is not a trend. It is the territory. And it has always belonged to us.

What plant, herb, or remedy did your grandmother reach for first? We’d love to know what lives in your memory. Reach out.

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