Enslaved Cherokee-descended women practiced root-based medicine

Evidence

The book includes the details, also learned from my mother, that Shonrael’s great-grandmother Ophelia Murdock Thompson was of Cherokee heritage and made medicine from roots. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 62

Categorization

• SHARE: The Cherokee-heritage enslaved woman who made medicine from roots is exactly the sort of detail a friend who writes on Black-Indigenous kinship and folk medicine would love.
• QUESTION: Medicine from roots — how does this African-Indigenous healing practice connect to the later legal question of who owns the image of these ancestors?