Bontanica Sagrada
with M’anawa Kuya Ni & Koriuma
Monday, June 22nd
6:30-8pm
Are you feeling disconnected from your ancestral roots, your body, or the natural world around you?
This workshop invites participants into a guided, experiential circle with native wild Caribbean medicinal plants, offering a space of reconnection, remembrance, and embodied learning.
Facilitated through an Indigenous Taíno worldview and grounded in the rural folk traditions of Kiskeya (Dominican Republic), this gathering explores the spiritual, cultural, and medicinal dimensions of ancestral plant knowledge. Participants are invited into relationship with the plants of their lineage, understanding them not only as remedies, but as living teachers carrying generations of wisdom shaped through resilience and survival.
Throughout the workshop, participants will move through a grounding opening circle, an introduction to ancestral cultural and spiritual frameworks, an offering to the spirit of the plants, and hands-on teachings on their uses, including infusions, herbal baths, smudging, and mother tinctures.
This workshop is for those seeking deeper connection to Indigenous plant wisdom, decolonial approaches to wellness, and practices that support healing of body, mind, and spirit through relationship with the natural world.
The takeaway is a renewed sense of connection to land, lineage, and plant allies as well as practical and spiritual tools for integrating medicinal plant knowledge into everyday life. Participants leave with a deeper understanding of ancestral Caribbean plant traditions and an invitation to continue cultivating relationship with the living world.
Bontanica Sagrada
Monday, June 22nd
6:30-8pm
Maha Rose
200 Columbia street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
cancellation policy: account credit or refunds are available if requested 72 hours prior to the event, less a 10% service fee.
M’anawa Kuya Ni
M’anawa Kuya Ni’s life is rooted in Kiskeya (Dominican Republic), where she walks as an Indigenous leader, mother, activist, doula, and farmer, guided by a deep relationship with land, lineage, and ancestral memory. From an early age, she was introduced to the language of plants through her maternal family, where knowledge was lived through daily relationship with the natural world. Over time, this early teaching grew into a lifelong path of study and devotion. For more than fifteen years, she has worked with native Caribbean wild botany, learning through her territory in Kiskeya and in dialogue with healers, wise women, and grandmothers across Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago. Her work today reflects this embodied knowledge. She facilitates medicinal plant circles and supports mothers and families through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, holding these transitions with care, presence, and ancestral grounding. She is a co-founder of @okanibohio, where she helps protect endangered seeds and supports the safeguarding of water and ancestral well-being. As a member of the United Confederation of Taíno People (UCTP), she also contributes to international advocacy spaces, including the United Nations, uplifting Indigenous rights and the freedom to practice ancestral spiritual and cultural traditions. Her path is one of protection, remembrance, and care for the living relationships between people, land, and spirit.
Koriuma
Rooted in the ancestral lands of Lenapehoking in Turtle Island, Koriuma walks a path guided by remembrance, one woven from ancestral memory, relationship, and healing. As an Afro-Taíno/Arawak cultural practitioner, their journey has been shaped through the wisdom of Elders, lineage-based teachings, lived initiations, ceremonial practice, Earth-based medicine, and studies in sound healing and yoga. Through the interconnected languages of ceremony, sound, movement, and story, Koriuma invites others into deeper relationship with themselves, their ancestors, and the living world around them. As a multidisciplinary artist, wisdom keeper, and cultural storyteller, they draw upon ancestral technologies and traditional ways of knowing to create spaces for reconnection, healing, and reclamation. As the founder of Intuitive Nature, Koriuma nurtures spaces where ancestral wisdom, ecological stewardship, and healing justice meet. Their work is devoted to preserving cultural traditions, uplifting Indigenous lifeways, and restoring meaningful connections to spirit, land, lineage, and intuitive knowing. Through community-centered offerings, they support pathways of remembrance and collective healing, particularly within BIPOC communities, helping to carry ancestral teachings forward for future generations.