Sacred Plant Medicines of the Muysca of Suba

This project focuses on the use of sacred plant medicines by the Muysca community of Suba, an urban Indigenous community in Bogotá, Colombia. Like other Indigenous communities, the Muysca are caught in the crosshairs of colonial patterns of domination. These include urbanization, territorial property regimes, and cultural erasure, all of which have systematically dispossessed them from their ancestral lands and traditional ways of living.

However, in the mid-twentieth century, the Muysca community of Suba began a process of Indigenous revitalization to maintain their traditional identities and sacred practices. Such revitalization projects, which have challenged the state’s spatialization of difference, urban planning regimes, and the hegemonic production of identity, prominently feature practices with sacred plant medicines. These plant medicines reveal the complex network of interrelations between the Muysca and their territory.  

Guided by decolonial and feminist literature from the Global South, this study aims to explore how the Muysca community of Suba is engaging in entheogenic rituals in their sacred places as a central part of their indigenous revitalization process. The project will employ ethnographic methods informed by participatory action research with Muysca research collaborators. Using audiovisual methodologies such as photovoice, photography, and textile art, and by incorporating oral tradition, this project will create an Indigenous storytelling virtual catalog of sacred Muysca plant medicine. Co-produced with the community, this project aims to impact policy and raise awareness and responsiveness to Indigenous efforts to safeguard endangered sacred plants and the traditions associated with their healing practices. 

Project point person: Paola Andrea Sánchez-Castañeda