MAMA MUGWORT

SEPTEMBER 2026 BY ALICE MCSHERRY

We held a pop-up gathering for Something Awkward – our experimental public lecture series toward Matike Mai. In the nights near Whiro, we collaborate with darkness to create experiential, multisensory spaces for welcoming otherworldly wisdoms into our decolonial activism. This month, our wisdom was ‘invasive plants’ – our guest lecturers were sunflowers (with Mikaere Berryman-Kamp, no Te Puku o Te Ika), gorse (with Rachel Jane Liebert – Gaelic Irish/Ulster Scot/English/German Tangata Tiriti) and mugwort (with Alice McSherry – Naxi/Han Chinese, Irish-descended Tangata Tiriti).

Below are the kupu from mugwort/Alice to create a sound- and smoke-scape in response to the following pātai: How does settler colonialism co-opt this otherworldly wisdom, and what might its awkward stance and dance suggest for our decolonial movements in Aotearoa and beyond?

[Light Mugwort bundle from candle in the room – blow – one round of smoke from Mugwort bundle, walk and distribute smoke in room – have water handy to put out embers if needed]

This is Mugwort. Mugwort tended over many moons, shapeshifting from season through her many states.

Always present, always there.

For those of you who may not have met our Mugwort ancestor before, here she is. Historically, we have used Mugwort as a birthing aid, as an emmenagogue.

A midwife of life AND death.

Travelling and holding us in the in-between.

She is a guardian of the crossroads between realms.

A wise being of the dreaming, beckoning us into worlds that don’t quite make sense... at least in the way that we’re used to at this moment in time.

:::INhale . . . . . EXhale. . . .:::

[Blow anō] Feel your bodies melt into her scent as it envelopes you.

We’re not quite sure when Mugwort arrived on the shores of Aotearoa. She has been sly though. Probably brought as a handful of seeds with the first Chinese migrants, given her status of import in Traditional Chinese Medicine – still used frequently as moxibustion (just as she is being used now for our collective body in this silo – clearing our meridian channels with every smudge.

And like her original human vectors, Mugwort thrives in the margins.

Surrendering to the state of UNbelonging.

Sending taproots into the dark of the soil.

Knowing when to show herself and when to hide. Slyly harbouring her strength in the shadows.

Don’t mind me, she says. I’m here. And I ain’t going anywhere anytime soon. Your dreams ARE valid. They belong. Reclaim them as you walk this life into being.

[Blow anō]

Plug Mugwort into Google though. And the first invocation from the tech gods::: amplified by a tentacle of Empire... the Department of Conservation... the very entity who continues to enact settler violence, explicitly and implicitly::: is that MUGWORT. AN UNWANTED WEED. Kill at all cost.

Kill the mother.

Kill the dream.

Just as our Anglo-Saxon ancestors once did to those accused as WITCHES.

Yesterday, AI prompted me in Google. Wanna know all the ways we can kill Mugwort?

Pull her from the roots. Suffocate her. Starve her. Drown her.

But when I see this... I see “Kill the dream. Kill our Mother. Kill all that gives life...” 

How does that sit within you? All of this violence. Feel it coursing through your veins.

The violence of our settler ancestors.

The violence enacted over and over, over generations...

Calicifying in our very bones.

Making Aotearoa... NEW ZEALAND.

The shame.

The denial.

The complicity.

As Tangata Tiriti, we know we are more than this.

In our Hearts. Minds. Bodies. Dreams.

But we need to show it.

Hearts. Minds. Bodies. Dreams.

All directed at the project of healing.

All directed at the North Star of Matike Mai.

[blow anō]

Mugwort is in solidarity with all things MOTHER. And the dreams that we keep as mothers. For our babies, past and present. Whether they are incarnate or not.

Ah...maybe that’s why Empire is so intent on killing her.

[whisper] ...the dreams of our babies... where are we going... where have we come from?

Spreading... spawning... Sending taproots beneath the soil.

Conspiring with the worms to break through and beyond the confines of the empire.

Thriving in the ruins.

[Blow anō]

Mugwort is teaching us to agitate.

But not agitate just for agitation sake.

Agitate with purpose. AWAKEN. DISRUPT. CLEANSE. Restore FLOW.

Come back into RIGHT RELATION. 

With the ego of the individual, left at the door.

Weaponizing the ego is a technology of THE EMPIRE, after all...

[Blow anō] Instead... Inhale. Feel the strength of your Grandmothers.

Mugwort is our primordial mother. Can you hear her?

[whisper] she sometimes whispers [shout] and sometimes she SHOUTS

RESPECT YOUR MOTHER::: and the gesture of LIFE itself [Blow anō]

This is Mugwort.

Every time you smell her, feel her presence, we ask if you might join her. Bring her into your world, as you did with our thorny kin gorse. Learn to conspire with her as we dwell in the ruins of the colonial settler state.

Invite the Great Mother in through your senses::: LIVE the dreams of liberation into being.   

For those of you able to, take another deep inhale. Allowing yourself to melt into place.

Mugwort is one of our oldest herbal medicines. For those of us descended from European ancestors. For those of us descended from Asian ancestors... Mugwort has woven her lore and guidance all over this living Earth. With her stretching taproots, she too stretches into our imaginations.

Protecting.

Guiding.

She appears as the first plant invoked in the Lacnunga, a 10th Century Anglo-Saxon incantation of the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’.

"Remember, Mugwort, what you revealed,
what you established at the mighty proclamation.
‘Una’ you are called, oldest of herbs.
You may avail against three and against thirty,
you may avail against poison and against contagion,
you may avail against the loathsome one who travels through the land."

[Blow anō] Avail us... avail us from the wretched of the Earth... no matter how powerful or numerous they might be.

[Blow anō] I hear my Grandmothers. Singing their songs of resistance. Of renewal. Of healing.

[Blow anō] And yet, keep listening, do you hear anything else? Any whispers of something other-wise, something awkward?

Can we digest the awkward... TOGETHER?

What portals might Mugwort open for us?

Mugwort... she’s not particularly soft. She’s harsh. She’s bitter. And in doing so, she clears the space so we may wayfind our way to clarity amidst the ruins.

She brings on flow.

Because of this, she is also a digestive aid.

Promoting bile secretion in our guts.

DIGEST

COMPOST

Make way for the DREAMING

She reminds us.

“Come on, come away with me to the land of imagination and dreams.”

Flex your intuitive knowing. Develop your psychic skills.

This is the time for psychic militancy.

ReSOURCE.

Resist.

Redirect.

Regenerate.

The state of ‘New Zealand’ now sports the scars of 200+ years of Empire. What if Mugwort wasn’t simply an actor of settler colonial violence as a hardy weed, but rather, a being – a whole lineage of beings - beckoning us into an-other world?

What if our job as non-Māori isn’t to kill Mugwort so much as listen to it?

What can we learn from Mugwort – one of our oldest planty ancestors – about being Tāngata Tiriti? About seeding other-wise inconceivable dreams

For the co-liberation of all life.

[blow anō]

So here we are.

Sitting with Grandmother Mugwort in this space with us.

Travelling between the conscious and the imaginal... into the realms of the unknown.

Wayfinding together.

Imperfectly perfect.

For our futures ARE unknown.

And like that, Mugwort summons a human comrade... our ancestor... the formidable Octavia E. Butler... to remind me of the infamous line from Parable of the Sower that transformed me as a teen.

“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”

Shapeshifting, changing.

Enduring in the flow of change. Every action we take affects the world around us, and in turn, those worlds continue to reshape us.

Stay with the trouble, Mugwort instructs.

Empires rise, empires fall. Yet the land remains.

The land. Whenua. She is our ultimate authority.

Enduring the mess. Enduring the trouble.

[blow anō]

I’m not really sure when I first met Mugwort. But what I do know is that my Chinese name, gifted to me by my Naxi Grandmother, translates as ‘Beautiful Mugwort’. Consciously, unconsciously, I have followed Mugwort throughout my life.

She first appeared in physical form in my life as a small child. Burnt at the altar in my childhood home. Harvested on the summer solstice by my Naxi Grandmother every year, to chase the evil spirits away.

I used to laugh at this.

What evil spirits, Granny?

Our life is wonderful here in New Zealand.

The sun is shining.

Naïve to the violence of the land I was standing on.

A naivety amplified by the privilege, afforded to me as Pākehā in this country.

[Blow anō] But Granny, always armed with Mugwort, would remind me.

Oh, my sweet child. One day. You will learn. That is why I called you ‘Beautiful Mugwort’.

[Blow anō] ...and holy hika, did I learn.

My Grandmother was an Indigenous woman herself, forced to escape our ancestral homelands during the Chinese Civil War. Once planted firmly at the foot of our ancestral maunga. Jade Dragon Mountain. Yu long Xue San. With the grand Himalayan range just to the West of us.

Packed a bag and escaped with a friend in the middle of the night.

Hid with the army.

Running.

Running with terror.

Running with a dream.

Only to end up here. In Aotearoa. Many, many years later. As an illiterate peasant migrant. During the height of what Winnie termed “the Asian Invasion”

I sit with my Granny’s story. Fear, love, endurance coursing through my veins.

Mugwort burning.

And I am held by the endurance of my ancestors.

We contain multitudes.

We ENDURE multitudes.

And equally::: we DREAM in multitudes.

[Blow anō]

My Granny is now reunited with her loved ones. In the realm of ancestors.

And it was shortly before she left her incarnate life when she reminded me of Mugwort’s magic.

I, as a un-disciplined/emerging academic and community herbalist, began seeing Mugwort in a new light.

By now, I knew she was there.

But for the first time, I started to intentionally be in ritual with her.

And then one night, I dreamt.

Dreamt I was in a forest of Mugwort. And it was there in the forest that I heard chanting.

[Blow anō] Shu. Shu. Shu. Shu.

The chanting resonated all around me.

And in that forest, I saw a circle of Elders in our ancestral garments. Long silvery plaits hanging down their back.

Chanting. Shu. Shu Shu.

[Blow anō]

I woke up.

No idea what Shu meant at the time, it stayed with me.

[Blow anō]

Weeks later. The word Shu still audible in my ears and heart.

I came across an ethnography of nature worship amongst my people.

MY Naxi ancestors.

Tibeto-Burmese Daoist Shamans.

And there it was.

SHU.

“The primordial diety of Nature herself”

The shapeshifting goddess who transformed from serpent to frog to turtle to goddess.

Shuuuuuu.

Granny was right.

I DID learn.

And it was Mugwort who taught me. Gifting me our ancestral wisdom and names via a dream.

Mugwort, reminding me. We, your ancestors, are still here. We are always here.

Ko au te whenua. Te whenua ko au.

Long after we have gone, the land still speaks. Through each and every one of her verdant children. Of which Mugwort is just one.

[Blow anō] Shu. Shu. Shu. Shu.

And so dreaming with Mugwort,

I ask: How may I become a good ancestor to my babies... my babies babies?

How may I honour the dreams of my Grandmothers past?

Transplanted now, in this beating heart land we dwell in... Aotearoa?

[echo Gorse and RJL] Matike Mai – our Indigenous led movement for constitutional transformation, for finally realising the promise of TToW – not from the top-down (a colonial approach of sovereignty), but from the ground up, literally: a constitution that respects Māori and therefore the land as the ultimate authority.

Matike Mai is asking of us, Pākehā – Tauiwi of Colour, to do the same.

Reclaim our dreams of co-liberation.

Transform.

Become something else.

[echo RJL from Gorse teaching] Something that does not take from the land, or take it; that gives back to the land, that gives it back.

To the land, we gift our dreaming. And turn this dreaming into action.

Aerating the spaces in between.

Making way for just futures. Together.

Guided by Mugwort, and digesting the trauma of our ancestors... whether that be trauma done to us, or trauma we have done to others.

Digesting and dreaming so we may arrive elsewhere. Other-wise.

[Blow anō] Can you feel it? The whispers of our Grandmothers? ...and their enduring presence in/with us and land.