Decolonizing Botanical Memory: Reclaiming Brazil’s Plant Stories Through Textile Art

BOTANICAL LETTERS – Issue No. 2
Written by Cleidi Hearn

pau-brasil (Paubrasilia echinata). Photo by Joao Marcos Rosa / Nitro

From Pau-Brasil to Açaí: A Story of Erasure and Survival

When Portuguese ships anchored off Brazil’s Atlantic coast in 1500, they carried not just sailors and weapons, but an appetite for colour. The first tree to fall was pau-brasil (Paubrasilia echinata), a species revered by Indigenous peoples for its strength and presence, and used in ritual practices as much as in essential craft. To the colonizers, however, it was valuable for a single reason: the valuable red dye extracted from the wood.

Within a few decades, vast stretches of the Atlantic Forest were stripped to satisfy Europe’s hunger for luxury textiles. What had been a living relative in Indigenous cosmologies — protector, healer, kin — was reduced to pigment, a name on shipping logs, and eventually, the origin of a country’s name. Brazil itself became synonymous with extraction.

This was only the beginning.

Over the centuries, the logic of exploitation expanded. Sugarcane, coffee, tobacco, cacao: monocultures that reshaped landscapes and lives. Plants once central to ceremony and survival were redefined as cash crops. Indigenous plant knowledge was dismissed as superstition. Afro-Brazilian communities who safeguarded healing practices through plants like arruda (Ruta graveolens) or guinea grass (Petiveria alliacea) were criminalized for witchcraft. Colonial botany catalogued specimens in Latin while silencing the languages and epistemologies that had named them for millennia.

And the pattern continues. Today, açai, copaíba, guaraná, jaborandi — plants sustained and revered by Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian traditions — circulate as global “superfoods” and supplements. Their cultural memory is rarely acknowledged; their spiritual roles erased. Even sacred plants like Psychotria viridis are marketed as wellness products, stripped of ceremony, reduced to chemical curiosity.

From pau-brasil to açai, the story is the same: plants transformed from kin into commodity.

Plants As Expendable Commodities

This legacy is not just about the past. The forgetting of plant memory has real ecological consequences today. When flora are remembered only for their market value, their ecosystems become expendable. The Amazon burns for cattle and soy. The Cerrado — cradle of Brazil’s waters — is carved for monocultures. The Caatinga, home of the Mandacaru cactus (Cereus jamacaru), is cut for firewood and grazing. Erasure of cultural meaning enables destruction of place.

Decolonizing botanical memory, then, is not nostalgia. It is survival — ecological, cultural, and spiritual.

Textile Art as Resistance

Where colonial culture extracted and silenced, art can restore and re-engage. Textiles, in particular, offer a medium of resistance. Fabric has long held memory: embroidered cloths preserving women’s knowledge, ritual garments carrying spiritual power, woven fragments surviving as testimony across millennia.

In the hands of Botanica Brasilis, textile becomes a site of listening. Hand-painted linen is not decorative surface but a vessel for plant presence. The Mandacaru is remembered not as specimen but as guardian; the Ipê tree not as timber but as symbol of resilience; the orchid not as ornament but as teacher of grace that survives without soil.

The choice of linen is deliberate. One of humanity’s oldest fabrics, ecological in its cultivation and enduring in time, linen resists disposability. Painted with durable pigments, each textile becomes a counter-archive: a quiet refusal of colonial forgetting.

Towards a Decolonial Botanical Narrative

To decolonize botanical storytelling means more than changing language. It means shifting relationship. This is what we can do:

• Naming history: acknowledging how colonization extracted and erased Brazil’s plant knowledge.

• Honouring origins: recognizing Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian wisdom as epistemic systems, not folklore.

• Resisting commodification: protecting sacred plants from being emptied into global markets as trends.

• Reimagining kinship: remembering plants as relatives, teachers, and cultural agents.

For artists, this means creating with humility. For collectors, it means engaging with works as testimony, not ornament. For all of us, it means listening again where silence was imposed.

Remembering as Resistance

Brazil’s flora carries centuries of rupture, but also centuries of survival. Knowledge endured in quilombos, in Indigenous prayers, in clandestine gardens, and in the plants themselves, which continue to thrive despite erasure.

Textile art, when rooted in respect, can join this lineage of survival. Each piece is more than pigment and weave: it is a refusal of amnesia, a reminder that plants are not resources, but archives of cultural intelligence and ecological wisdom.

From pau-brasil to açai, the story of Brazil’s flora is one of commodification. But through art, another narrative becomes possible — one in which plants are seen again as kin, and memory itself becomes a form of resistance.