At a retreat center in northern Minnesota in July, a dozen women gathered around Ecuadorian plant medicine practitioner Stacey Constante during a 12-hour healing ceremony.
By administering plant medicines including sage and a sacred cactus, Constante said she wanted women to see themselves as goddesses, cleansing their minds of patriarchal narratives.
“I focus on dismantling everything that we think a woman is,” Constante said. “How gifted we are to be women, and to be women who bring life to this Earth.”
The retreat, organized by Phumulani, which works with African domestic abuse survivors, is part of a traditional practice meant to help women heal from trauma.
Comfort Dondo, a native of Zimbabwe, said she founded Phumulani because she noticed women in her community who were survivors of domestic violence felt isolated.
As she reached for other healing models, she found that Indigenous practices and traditional African healing circles — models that took a community, rather than an individual approach — were more successful with Phumulani’s clients.
The goal of the three-day retreat was cultivating trust, Constante said, within oneself and between women.
Mainstream crisis services
Almost 50% of immigrant women experience abuse by an intimate partner, which is almost three times the national average, according to the National Organization for Women. About half of Native American women in the U.S. experience sexual violence, according to the Indian Law Resource Center.
But Dondo said mainstream crisis services can be harmful to women of color.
In 2015, Dondo checked herself into a domestic violence shelter to flee an abusive marriage. The treatment Dondo received at the shelter retraumatized her because some providers made insensitive comments, and as a survivor of child abuse, she was afraid to sleep in a room with a stranger along with her children.
“I ended up going back to my abuser, because, at least for me, my abuser was predictable,” Dondo said. “But at the shelter, I didn’t know what else was coming at me. Was it being judged for my parenting style that doesn’t look Western? Was it some of the rules that made me feel like I wasn’t being given my choice?”
When Dondo returned to her husband, he almost killed her, and she left him again and was homeless for eight years, which led her to lose her kids to the system for five years.
Chloe Vraney, associate director of the University of Minnesota’s Aurora Center, who previously worked at a domestic violence shelter, said shelters have a purpose to provide women with basic needs but are difficult environments for survivors.
“If potentially there’s primarily white staff with primarily survivors of color that are residents in the shelter, that dynamic is going to feel very present,” Vraney said.
Atum Azzahir, founder of the Cultural Wellness Center, said women in crisis face “service-seeking exhaustion” because they often move from center to center seeking help, and constantly looking for help can make women feel alone.
Vraney said minorities and women of color who have experienced sexual violence face many barriers to getting help.
For example, talking about sex is considered shameful in certain communities, Vraney said. Some women are also afraid to report sexual violence and seek legal support because of their immigration status or race.
Constante said mainstream services can be harmful because, although they were founded with good intentions to help others, they are underfunded and staff are overworked. The staff who are serving the women in crisis are not doing self-care work, and are thus projecting their trauma onto clients, Constante said.
“You could only help someone as far as you have walked in the darkness or you’ll get lost yourself,” Constante said, quoting a mentor.
A model grounded in culture and community
Dondo first learned about Indigenous healing practices during her fellowship at the Bush Foundation, when she studied healing practices from around the world to inform Phumulani.
Both African and Native communities believe in healing ancestral wounds, according to Dondo.
“We believe that if you don’t heal the wounds of your grandmother, seven generations as a woman, you cannot start to heal your daughters,” she said.
The seven generations principle is an Iroquois and Anishinaabe belief that an individual should make decisions that will promote the well-being of future generations. Several Indigenous and African communities also believe that a sick individual has the solution to cure themselves within themselves, Dondo said.
Constante, who is also a nutritionist and registered nurse, founded The Nourished Goddess, a women’s health practice focused on removing shame about the menstrual cycle and understanding how each phase of the cycle impacts a woman’s mental and physical health.
Dondo and Constante said healing practices in Native communities, including Indigenous Ecuadorian practices, are closely related to those of African communities.
“When I’m working with Indigenous women, I feel at home,” Dondo said.
Dondo said colonists all around the world have demonized cultural healing practices, but understanding how one’s ancestors healed is essential to growth.
“Let’s decolonize healing work,” Dondo said. “Let’s decolonize how we heal mental health. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The healing circles Dondo uses are modeled after tea and coffee ceremonies in Zimbabwe.
Azzahir said 30 years ago, when she founded the Cultural Wellness Center (CWC), where Dondo works part time, the health care system did not recognize cultural healing practices as true medicine, and alternative medicine businesses would be shut down, but now holistic medicine is more widely accepted.
Azzahir, who has participated in many healing circles with Dondo, called healing circles “kinship networks” where no participant is considered more expert or knowledgeable than another, and each woman teaches one another.
“What we think of as a sickness and disease is a family sickness and disease,” Azzahir said.
The future of Phumulani
Dondo recently received a $500,000 grant from Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office, which she hopes to use to build Phumulani’s first permanent site, which would include emergency housing and a wellness center. Dondo currently rents an office and spaces for healing circles.
Dondo said she hopes Phumulani can begin sharing women’s stories with the broader community.
“It is really my goal to spread this practice throughout Minnesota and throughout as many spaces where the culture is Western in its isolation and individualism,” Dondo said.
