Good evening. My name is Ginny Pannabecker and
I met all of my science and scholarly communication librarian
here at Virginia Tech. And I would like to
thank all our Panelists who have come today. Oh
. Oh, Okay. Okay. So I apologize
. We were attempting. You're not to, um
you're attempting to connect this Panelist with a Panelist that
was grown up so that we could have a joint
panel today, but unfortunately, it looks like,
Yeah, it's just not in the cards. So
we want them to be able to go ahead and
go with their event there. What we have today
is, um, videos from our exhibit, uh
, native peoples, concepts of health and illness.
And we are very fortunate to have several of our
Panelists here. Victoria Ferguson is who we are missing
from Romano. And so she will be discussing the
videos with the participants there. Um, that's okay
. So I would like to introduce our moderator for
today. Uh, Dr Sam Cooke, director of
American Indian studies here at Virginia Tech. Dr.
Pick is a cultural anthropologist by training. His current
research focuses on indigenous ecologies and knowledge systems and the
relationship between native and Western science. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much
for having me. Thank you. Jenny and Antonio
and, uh, Sam win to help really,
uh, pull the funding together to make this happen
and bring this exhibit here. Um, and this
is really important, I think, because it opens
a dialog. Okay, I think pretty loud.
Yeah. So this is the reason to me this
is really important, because this at least we began
opening the cab because we're at a university that is
dominated by Western knowledge. It's the product of Western
knowledge. And uh huh, a very linear type
of knowledge. That privilege is a worldview that places
humans at the top. And it also advances a
colonial system that tries to squelch other knowledge systems.
Um, and that's why we have programs like mine
American Indian in numerous studies. And that's why we
have, uh we're fortunate to have this panel of
scholars and collaborators like Victoria Ferguson is a good friend
of mine. A wish that you could meet and
you will have the opportunity on October 10th if you
come to our events at the turfgrass Center where we
have an indigenous garden. You'll see her first hand
telling some incredible storms. But, um, this
begins to open that dialogue. I preface that by
saying that it is the product of the National Institute
of Health, which is a product of Western society
. So it's our job to challenge the perspectives that
might come forward. But I think this is This
is an incredible opportunity to, um, to give
these dialogues, take indigenous knowledge every bit as seriously
as anything that comes out of Western science and understand
that these ways of knowing are vital to our future
, providing sustainability. So I'll introduce our Panelists briefly
. Um, I could go probably speak volumes since
I hand selected them right, but they're incredible people
who get to see. And then somebody will have
to tell me the format from here because I know
we will pose a series of videos to which each
will respond. Our first Panelist is made high who
, uh, comes to us from the owner should
not be people who are far north of Canada and
May is a PhD student in science education, but
her focus is on the intersection of indigenous knowledge and
Western science and She's very much about punching that hole
in the Canada, Um, to her. Right
. Okay. Right. My other right. Okay
. Is, uh, Professor Mike Bowers, an
assistant professor in the School of Neuroscience, coming to
us from the West and here's of dead people would
from hickory a might not mistaken northern New Mexico and
also great to have him here. Because our our
school of neuroscience is a very innovative Carl's disciplinary field
. That I think is one of the few things
that we've done recently. The truly begins to challenge
the way people think to his right. Dr.
Nick Copeland, assistant professor. It happens to be
housed in the department sociology buddies with me, an
American Indian studies and also cultural anthropologist. So I
doubly and triply thrilled to have him with us.
Um, research has been largely rooted in Guatemala,
but he's done a spectacular job of retooling when he
came here. And he has volumes to say that
is worth listening to. And finally, but not
least, Doctor. Excuse me. Rebecca Hester,
assistant professor to our system from the Department of Science
, Technology and society. And, um you know
, I I first became acquainted with her work on
health issues and in Mexico and borderlands. And when
when Jenny first, uh, asked for people who
would be good on this and talking about these intersections
with the medical profession. In fact, I think
I think Rebecca is the first person that came to
mind. So because you have a very extensive,
uh, resume of collaborator at least engaging in espionage
and medical schools don't That's good. That's good.
So, um, as I understand it, we're
going to present a series of videos and we're gonna
follow three tracks, and our first segment is on
health and environment. Okay, Good. Will come
back and ask. Our Panelists respond. So,
um okay, it is so important that everyone in
this this land division that we are the highest quality
can help intellectually superior, physically superior academically. Well
off. Because without those three, if your would
be nothing, nothing healthy in many ways, so
healthy with regards to harvest it. You take what
you need. Pull from here, you cut a
slipping and put it back into the ground. That's
, uh, that's going green is what Elko is
doing that we've been doing for hundreds of years.
So that's the first of five videos in this section
. And if it's okay, I'll play the others
. They're all from interviews with people who contributed to
the exhibit. That's up on Level two through my
grandparents and my generation. How they would always talk
about that. We would always talk about what he
wills and tell us stories you know about the trees
and the water, everything they have, they had
some problems for, um today, you know,
you don't hear that too much amongst the people,
and a lot of them, a lot of them
. They know that there's things going on our own
community. The water is taking over. But as
far as nature, as far as what the kids
talk about this is there's not too many awareness of
it. And basically, because we're in the community
in in an area where there is very much nature
, it means that we have the housing areas and
, uh, the flooding and things like that.
So it's hard to think positive about the nature,
and we don't have very much to look at.
Yeah, okay. When the Indian reservations were created
, especially under the United States government authority, they
found almost four grand within the state territories and so
forth. And that's where they placed the Indians.
And they don't have the natural resources to exploit.
Except for a few trials. They don't have cold
. They don't have to ask oil. Uh,
so they just out there living on the land base
that doesn't have any kind of resources that it's going
. So they continue to go back to Washington to
request additional appropriations for this or that and so forth
. But primarily it's for education, for health reasons
, for housing and things of that nature. Yeah
, why is it? Yeah, we had good
water, but now a lot of water is contaminated
because of housing. The situation it's up to things
were put in contaminant, creeks and rivers. Let's
now we have a I don't know situation. How
we're I'm learning is taking place near our recipe,
and it's affecting our water resources. And I'm on
a pancreatic. Cancer is turning them. You know
, there's a lot of about other types of cancer
to a lot of people are saying that it's coming
under water. Yeah, the water that the nurses
, actually the taro fields are being aggravated elsewhere,
so you know. So it's just, you know
, trying to make sure that other diet is protein
a lot more expensive than sugar, maybe 400 expenses
for anyone to undertake an action side. Better have
some money behind them. And now the traditional corn
the Indians is going to fuel. And that was
a good glass of sugar cane, which is having
a good but we kind of like no longer have
China. You know, when you work these plantations
, you just exposed to pesticides and insecticides that we
may see a crossing increase in the counselors. So
you know, it's not only dealing with your own
health, is dealing with the environment, would do
a party so mhm and as moderator, I don't
think it's my job to respond to much. But
I do want to point out a couple of things
here. One of this concept of natural resources,
which is, I think, kind of a novel
and dangerous idea for some indigenous peoples because it essentially
allows everything to become commodified, Um, and then
the it's it separates the subject from the land that
separates the spiritual entity from the land, and that's
you know, the other point that I listen to
these and I compelled to point out in Western society
, especially in the world we live in now,
it's very transient. Very few people have a true
rudeness, and you compare that to the world views
of people who've lived somewhere over thousands of years,
and and that that is that place. Well,
it is a place. It's not just a space
, it's a place. It's place imbued with memory
and spirits and relationships. So much so that just
just just the name of place to bring up the
name of a place evokes entire volumes of stories.
And that situate people, too. The point that
a given place, a given rock given tree,
our intimate relatives and that's a that's a worldview that
is hard to construe, but it's an important it's
very important. So I'll ask our Panelists, uh
, to economize on comments to certain degrees that everybody
gets a word in and that we I don't know
how long we here so 10 o'clock. Yeah,
okay, so yeah, so we don't have to
go to 10 o'clock. So let's let's begin with
a high drawing stick figures I sat in the hot
seat here. You introduce first top. I'll shake
it up. Can we, like, bounce back
and forth as well? Uh, you have a
question? Yeah. Actually, I do have a
prompt, so I'll pose this to all of you
. What? Just based on your experience, your
research, your work, Um, on the interfaces
with health and environment. Do you have anything that
you can shared? It doesn't even have to relate
to the videos necessary. Specific videos is anything you
would like to address here. Especially with relevance to
health and environment. I can say a little bit
about the world view. Okay, What I'm thinking
on that is that, um I think a lot
like, sort of in pictures and words are sort
of challenging for me at times. But I think
of like my day and I have, like,
the hope in this world, and I know what
I do every day, and I know it pretty
good, but I don't know what anybody else does
in here. And I take I work in education
and I take teachers and I'm taking them out on
Friday to work with May flies and things like that
. Each may fly has a hoop. Every rock
has a hoop. We have different ideas about animate
and inanimate. If something acts or does, it's
a bean. And it's really hard for me to
think of something that does not act or do like
. If you think Iraq doesn't actor, do you've
ever seen our assignments? Is caution falling rocks?
It does something, um, so I do something
. Everything I interact with does something, and I
think of the world almost like a world organism.
So there's people that have co evolved almost with certain
organs of the world. If you can imagine that
like, uh, you know, I may be
from a place that's like alone, somebody else might
be from a place that's like an arm or something
. So I know that how my place works because
we've co evolved with that place. Um, so
in terms of health, if that part of the
organ gets sick, we get sick. It makes
other parts sick. It damages these all of these
groups that are intertwined. And when I say the
sacred, I think of something that is too much
for one human brain to think about, all at
one time, So even in this model that I'm
sort of presenting of, the world is like,
almost like an organism. Maybe I understand one little
bit of it, but I need to talk with
other people who have co evolved with these other spaces
to get knowledge about those. Nothing works independently in
Western thinking sort of alienates us from each other,
so we don't understand how the whole thing works.
Uh, Mike Bowers, do you have something to
contribute here? Well, one of the things I
noticed in that video of those sets of videos with
when they talked about the resources and obviously the reason
why, uh, water problems. There's a common
theme there. It's not shocking if you've ever been
, if really my experience of growing up in,
you know, areas like Arizona, New Mexico and
seeing where the reservations are at their poor. And
as you saw, um, and it's easy to
exploit poor people. So when you have these resources
being tainted and commodities, if you will like water
, um, I think it's just a small microcosm
of what's going to happen in the larger societies.
So extrapolate from that, um, many of you
probably read the news about the fracking that's going on
? Um, that's going to permeate out, and
I'm gonna hit larger society right now. The indigenous
people are really affected by that, and they it's
just not recently, it's been going on for quite
some time. But low voices, low power,
Uh, not enough able ability to voice their,
um, struggles. You get dampened. Nobody listens
when it starts to permeate out and hits places like
Oklahoma that doesn't have earthquakes. And now you've got
5.3 earthquake, 5.8 earthquakes, coincidentally enough, within
the last decade or change again living there. I
grew up there. I would play sports there,
never experienced the earthquake. Only time I did is
when I went to California, visited friends and family
. Now my buddies are telling me we have earthquakes
in Oklahoma. I just shocked at how the frequency
Well, whether it is or isn't we can debate
the relationship, too, the fracking. But that's
I think it's just a small snippet of what's going
to happen to the larger group, and that is
non indigenous people. So I think that it's kind
of reflective of the trials and tribulations that they're talking
about their difficulties they face. It's going to permeate
out and taking off of what just may have mentioned
. It's a It's a it's a sickness. Sickness
is just like a virus. It's going to replicate
its going to get further and worse and worse.
So that's one of the things that kind of jumped
out at me. Is that, um, there's
your There's your frog that's gonna be damaged by the
chemicals. There's your first litmus test for something not
going right, and it's ignored. So you've got
a bigger problem if you if you cease to listen
to what's going on and we're like the virus,
you know, like the world. It's not like
because you hear sometimes that the world is, you
know, it won't exist anymore. It will,
but it will. If we don't fix making it
sick, we will perish. We don't learn how
to it's ways. Absolutely. Dr. Copeland,
a lot of things in those videos resonated with,
uh, things I have studied and written about in
Guatemala. Things I've seen there, you know there
aren't reservations in Guatemala, you have our indigenous people
, the majority of the population who primarily live in
mountainous areas. Um, and they've been driven to
the mountainous areas because people wanted to go coffee on
land that they have been living on. And so
they ran away from the coffee plantations. They ran
away from colonial society. They went to hard to
find locations, and it's difficult to grow food there
. Um, sometimes water is hard to come by
. Uh, the soil can be really rocky,
and poor people are farming. They're growing corn on
the sides of mountains that really steep. There's a
lot of erosion and, uh, you know,
very little, uh, surface soil in many cases
, no irrigation sometimes. And a lot of miles
talk about times before when people were really strong and
they can lift£300 and carry it up the mountain
when they used to eat herbs and eat a different
kind of food. But I think that you know
what you were talking about as well was I think
that the way I talk about their living now in
the environment they're living in, there's a lot of
pollution in the water supply. Uh, there's little
access to water. Uh, people live amidst environmental
runoff, and people are I mean, I think
of it as a form of environmental racism where you
have a population that's abandoned. They have very little
infrastructure per sewage. They have very little infrastructure for
water treatment facilities they don't have. I mean,
in many cases people are throwing away all the toilet
paper and a plastic bag into the river because there's
nowhere else to put it. And, of course
, flies develop out of that. This is actually
the norm in most rural communities in Guatemala, where
there's no sanitation whatsoever. This is a combination of
of a lot of things that have brought us to
this point. But these are populations that are primarily
abandoned by the government, and they get sick as
a result of this very frequently. Um, and
there are new problems. You know, One thing
I did study was the United States Department of Agriculture
has a program called Moscow Med, and it's designed
. It's been operating since the late 19 seventies,
and it wanted to trap the fruit fly in Guatemala
so it wouldn't come up to the United States and
affect the Citrus production in Florida and in the southern
part of Texas as well and some other places.
California Well, in order to stop the fruit fly
, they try to create a chemical barrier, and
they spread Malloth ion over all of these communities for
30 years without taking any precautions. Water supplies,
homes. People will get sick. Children, we
get sick. And of course, indigenous people have
been trying to get rid of this program. They
have different theories about what it's actually doing, but
they've seen their subsistence ability to produce subsistence crops decline
massively over the same period of time. And they
say this program has a lot to do with it
. It also has a lot to do with the
failure of agricultural chemicals, which also have other effects
in the environment and and so on and so forth
. One thing I'm seeing now is in relationship to
mining operations, which are now focusing on these same
communities hydro electric dams that are stopping up the rivers
that they you know so they don't even have any
water at all. There's a new awakening in Guatemala
and relationship to new free market economic policies. The
major social movement in Guatemala now is the defense of
territory against extractive is, um And it's precisely this
kind of mentality of extracting from the earth, taking
resources and putting humans on top of putting, you
know, money. Basically on top of the ecosystem
that has caused a real awakening, a real ecological
politics. It's one, and this isn't just Guatemala
. If you look across Latin America and if you
look at what's happening in the Dakota Access Pipeline and
the resistance to Keystone, this indigenous ecological politics is
it's growing, and it's tapping into the same kind
of world views, uh, that May is talking
about. It's about, you know, these are
abandoned populations. You're absolutely right. You know,
they're they're the ones that are getting the worst of
it. But these are things that are happening to
broader society as well. So, Jim Yeah,
no, thanks. So that that those videos are
very generative for me. The first thing I want
to say is that within the Western world view,
health is the absence of disease within an indigenous worldview
. What you have is what the first video really
connected us to Is the idea of an interconnectedness broader
understanding of health a balance between nature, other communities
, other living things. What uh, you know
, Jane Bennet calls a political ecology of things.
Things vibrant matter, things coming together. And so
it's much more copious and robust than just the simple
absence of disease. So starting from that premise,
what we then understand is that when we are operating
from this idea of health, there is a broad
definition than of what is causing sickness, right?
And so this gets back to the question of what
is the relationship between environment and health. And,
as has already been talked about here, um,
I'll pull out sort of the health aspects of it
. Um, for anyone that's interested. There's a
great PBS series called Unnatural Causes, and there's one
video and they're called Bad Sugar. And it talks
precisely about this relationship between water and the rise of
diabetes in in the Autumn Tribes right on the Mexico
Arizona border and also the Pima who live in southern
Arizona, have diabetes rates out the roof, and
this is related to access not just to clean water
but to good food, because obviously, putting clean
water and this is the first gentleman talked about is
the relationship to the harvest. So when you don't
have access to good water, then you can't grow
good food. And when you can't grow good food
, then you have to rely on all kinds of
either cheap food or donated food, which or prepackaged
foods. And all of that increases rates of diabetes
. We know that right? And so it's no
surprise that diabetes is one of the number one killers
of Native Americans in the United States. But it's
not the number one. The number one is hard
issues and why our heart issues the number one issue
that we know and in public health, there is
a concept called Alice Static Load. It is related
to compound in distress on the body over time,
and that Allah static load is informed by such things
as racism in society as entrenched and longstanding poverty,
social stigma, all of the kinds of things,
Um, and particularly if you read in Native Americans
, sort of in there in concepts, particularly the
second condition, concepts of self, they really suffer
and I mean suffer in a sense of the health
, suffering from a sense of hopelessness and future lawlessness
. Right? And it's no, and it's no
surprise, given these larger issues that, for example
, in Canada, suicide is very high among indigenous
and native youth, right average. And so the
relationship to the to the Earth and to the environment
is fundamental. But, as I'm trying to point
out, is also cross cut by social relations by
longer standing histories and politics which have devalued not just
indigenous knowledge systems but also indigenous lives. And so
the consequences of that are not only epistemological, but
they are embodied, and they manifest themselves as very
important health outcomes, health outcomes that lead to shorter
lives for native peoples and more suffering throughout their lifetime
for them. So that's one thing I wanna point
out, and you know this. I think about
a conversation I have really tall. There is an
anthropologist. She and I were at a conference one
time. She's working at Berkeley, and I think
she's in Canada now. She's talking about formative landscapes
and the idea that she really didn't like work because
she missed the big Sky. But we can also
think about formative landscapes and much broader weights, right
? The ways that these landscapes actually form, not
just our psychological and community understands and self understanding but
also the ways that they corn and inform our bodies
. So also up there are a lot more statement
. I just want to put that out there.
It's a much more copious understanding that just the simple
absence of disease. Mm. Right. So I
believe our next series has to do with food diets
and healing planners. Correct? Uh huh. Drunk
. Okay. Uh huh. You're wrong. Okay
. Mhm. Okay. Morning incorporated. Nutritional healing
and prayer. And then our work here is the
diet. Uh, it's really, uh, diet
19. He flied. Unless we're able to get
together. Cohort of three, 100 A of riots
. We lived in hostile land to do an inter
salt study. Wh in assault study. At the
same time, we gathered all the information, did
cholesterol a one C kind of like studies, did
all the measurements and were able to publish a paper
as to the so called cardiovascular risk factors and native
points. And from there we moved on to looking
at traditional night. You know, we called it
the pre cooked pre captain cook died. Okay.
Okay. Oh, okay. The ability to access
nutritious food and the high cost of living is a
huge barrier to health in the villages. And we're
seeing that in obesity. We're seeing that in diabetes
, and all of those rates are increasing in the
rural areas. So what to do about that?
I would have thought there's no exercise needed the rural
area than this study. Well, I think that
we're finding that more people are relying on store bought
foods, and, um, they don't live the
traditional lifestyle that they used to. Okay, Yeah
, back. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. How
do we deal with the problem That so many people
in the world probably over half, actually live in
cities where there is very little contact with the soil
and era. Country thinks that we're speaking creative garden
for yourself. You can use your, uh,
plants can bring plants. You can have drawings.
You can live through your gardens. Who are you
can live in the garden to music? Yeah.
Powered by a comma, Connie. And the wind
blows. That's bringing. It's bringing the environment into
the building. Yeah. Yeah. And package.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yes.
Mhm. Yes. Okay. Right. Oh,
yeah. Uh, And say that has a rash
and comes to see me um, you know the
Western side. Allow me to introduce the traditional side
, and I see the rash. I know what
herb that person needs. I will take that person
. We will walk into the gardens and I will
begin the process of healing. And the procedure works
this way. I will go up to the plan
and in my own traditional language, I will say
plant. This is Dr Lindbergh. He has a
rash. You have the ability to help us heal
his rash. May I please ask you to sacrifice
whether your leaf or your stem or your flower sacrifice
it and allow me to take it. And he'll
, Doctor Lindbergh, when I take it from that
ranch flower stem or even kill the plant so that
we can help heal you, I will say to
the plant commitment. That confident we're going to I
have to you is that we will always make sure
that your race will never leave the earth. And
we commit ourselves to you and your ancestry, as
you have just committed yourself to healing him and his
ancestry. And that way we will both live on
this Earth forever. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Okay, Um, just just a couple of things
came to mind that I wanted to share. What
part of it is that? That these folks are
really responding to the objectification of what Western society pitches
is resources. But I was initially reminded of one
of my first mentors and oldest mentors grad school.
Um, it was one of the most brilliant human
beings Avenue. Uh, Robert Thomas is a Cherokee
anthropologist, and and he blew people away because you
would not think this guy had ph. D.
Uh, you know, he was about his back
country, Northeast Oklahoma as they could get. You
met him. He was brilliant, and he had
a way of just pulling out these singers and marvel
at the amount of energy and effort and abstraction and
money that Western social scientists and medical sciences pumped into
trying to explain the problems of indigenous communities. And
I remember him once just blurting out in a conference
, people wonder why ended so fat because he's a
damn much, you know. But in that statement
, he was saying, You know, let's look
at the deeper issue here. Indians have always eaten
because that's the life cycle. But let's think to
about what happens when your traditional diet gets get circumvented
. And how did the United States government bringing into
the so called Indian wars on the Great Plains?
Now it wasn't by sending Custer and the seventh Cavalry
out. It was by systematically paying people to slaughter
the bison's kill the bison herds, you know,
just to And that did it. I mean,
that did it. A lifestyle that focuses around following
those herds and just as you know, to the
last second, knowing where they're going to be,
because your year is going to depend on that once
that's gone, that lifestyle of moving that energy devoted
to that and then pinned into a reservation and given
you know, bleached flour is your main commodity,
we're gonna bloom out. And, you know,
nowadays indigenous peoples joke about that. That's how you
deal with the pressure. Is the joke about it
because, you know, what's the number one thing
that comes out of that fried? Okay, anybody
here ever had fried bread? Oh, it's incredible
. Just the most delicious thing in the world.
It is an excellent source of Type two diabetes to
, um, but and and just, you know
, uh, spring boarding off something that Rebecca said
, You know, it also, these people are
articulating relationships. Um, you know, and with
these beings, you know, we look at food
, we look at whatever pharma pharma Copia is out
. There is something we can objectify in Western society
willow bark and make aspirin. You're not saying I'm
going to ask my relative to help me. And
if you look almost uniformly in the sacred history's most
indigenous peoples, beginning with their creation stories somewhere,
pretty soon they're almost uniformly. There's a story about
a compact, sacred covenant, you know, in
the Western tradition, that sacred covenant between God and
the Israelites, the 10 Commandments, but in indigenous
traditions that sacred covenants between the people and all the
rest of life. Because human beings very early on
started running and market says everything else came together and
said, What are we going to do about these
people were going to have to make a covenant so
that they don't kill us all out, and we
agree to get our lives so they can live.
They agree to the Stewarts, treat us as the
relatives we are, um, so with that in
mind, who made that? I didn't take win
from what you're probably about to say. But you
know, what are your perceptions from these videos?
Especially on issues of of food, security, diet
and the healing plants? Also, from your what
you were saying about world view and creation stories.
All of the characters in the creation and the constant
co creation of the Earth all have limitations. There's
no one perfect thing. Nobody can do it themselves
. So there has to be a compact. And
that's where I probably get my ideas about segments is
that not one kind of thing can do everything has
to do what it's supposed to do and live in
its niche, and people have. Our idea is
walking now. We don't live well within our space
or a routine or who were always like trying to
do everybody else's food, and you can. You
got to figure out how to do your as well
. And then that's it, like master it,
but also back to the other videos, too,
and you guys might disagree or agree, but I'm
from the most beautiful place in the world. When
he said that the reservations are the poorest land Poor
is this, um you know, kind of relative
idea, or there is, like, a hierarchy
. And I'm not from people that believe in hierarchies
. And also, there's this temporal view of what
makes us not poor people. I work. Uh
, there's something that's called contested places where somebody occupies
a space, and then somebody thinks they can use
it better, so they occupy the space, and
they they there's always this, like, fighting or
something. And I in my experience and my research
Right now I see people coming together and sort of
trying to work through what's called layered history. Now
, I think maybe not officially called that, but
I think of that like there's a name for this
. And then there's a name for this. And
then there's the name of this. And so there's
this, like, sort of nested situation, and
people are looking to How do we make sense of
that? And so, instead of like colonization,
bringing about decolonization will bring about the content of this
. Okay, all this is part of this place
. Now, how do we move forward? Um
uh, So, gosh, I think there's a
whole bunch of other problems that go with that,
too. Like there there may be, is a
space, and it is rich with natural resources.
And you think, Why are those people not doing
anything? What's that? Their fault there. I
think because I work in education that they're educated for
exodus. Like if you're you're educated, you leave
that place, then who protects it? Well,
the people, the other people, they go in
and they move in and then they start doing stuff
you think? Well, why? Why are the
people that are from that place doing that? Look
, maybe because they wouldn't do that to that place
for someone else comes in and does it. Or
maybe they have been educated to move away from that
place. So it's sort of unprotected, Um,
and going with what the videos were talking about in
terms of food also, Uh huh. There is
this weird process, and I'm not sure exactly how
it came about, but there is this dissociation of
food. What I was saying before about how we
co evolved with landscapes. Our bodies co evolved with
certain foods, and I still crave them now.
But there's this process of like they used to be
something that we did with. We had these cycles
where we and by, uh, you know,
people that I'm related to. They still participate in
these cycles. They still get to eat these foods
that I wish I could have. But there was
something funky that went on in the middle where that
was taken away, or we were made to think
that that's like what primitive people eat here, try
this, or somehow we became associated from it,
and in the process the price went up or it
became rarer or something. And so it's harder to
get or we can't afford to get it anymore.
These foods that we need and I believe, just
like I was describing before, is that different people
that grew up with different parts of the world as
embedded beings have different needs. It's not that all
the people need this. There's certain native people to
hang out with that can digest milk. I can't
I didn't come from people that grew up with animals
. Uh, I think there's differences between us,
um, something also that my students talk about,
and I think it's related to this topic is.
They say that the nature around us, it's where
we're from, like its surrounding them all the time
. They sometimes use that word surrounding them, and
I have to remind them that it's not always surrounding
you, just like you were saying about the commodification
of things. Like we're somehow separated from our environment
often, and you take in there. You let
air out, you drink water, it comes out
like it's not around you. It's around you and
it's flowing through you all the time. So you're
not separated from, um, also when they were
talking about, um, reciprocity? Uh huh.
There's like, I'm from what could be called a
contestant place and we weren't seem to be using it
because we don't scar our landscape so you don't go
. Oh, there's somebody hanging out here and there
. Look, there's a building and there's a that
we we're embedded pieces of it. So you don't
see that just like they were talking about in the
video, like his, uh, sort of treaty
with the plant that would heal the rash like it
does. It's thing we do our thing, it
supports us. We support it and there's this constant
. We're not competing with nature ever and competition.
This is something that I've read recently in the head
table. But I was reading about communities Is that
when you find competition in nature, it means something's
wonky because everything should should have enough. And then
everything should be recycled in this perfect system. And
when you see something out of whack, that's like
a red flag that something is not being reciprocal,
something is is not not going well, fuck of
ours. That was an interesting set of videos.
And I think this is, uh my comment would
be, uh, somewhat of a springboard off of
what I think Rebecca mentioned, Uh, and and
this is like diet. Um, we know that
you take poor diets in It affects as she mentioned
, uh, heart disease. But I think what
my comment would be is, uh, appreciation and
again falling off, made by an education. So
what we've learned, what we're learning now is that
what we take into our body actually impacts our brain
. And we know now that the gut bio there's
an interrelationship of what goes in our gut and how
the good bacteria they're not gut how they actually help
us, and when you have imbalances in that because
of improper nutrition, it affects your brain development.
We also know from animal studies, which you know
again, we didn't know this before. But we
have reason to believe that bad diets lead to diseases
not only in the periphery and the organs, but
also in the brain. Autism, for example.
There are some studies that are suggesting that diet can
impact and or change autistic brain because it's basically a
brain that has not developed normally extrapolate further. We
know that they're exchanging these things. We know that
there's genes that are in the brain that are also
in the body, and these genes behave similarly.
So if you impact the jeans and the guts,
for example, there that gene is in the gut
, it's also in the brain, so it's going
to impact differently. But we know those few genes
that are seen in the periphery and the brain are
major major contributors to brain development. There's very few
that coexist in both periphery and central nervous system,
but when they do, they really impact differently.
So it takes. It takes a little bit to
move them off or what moves them off center diet
. So this is a really interesting aspect to think
about when you moved off native or traditional diets,
and you've impacted the way that Canadians get fat.
Like we mentioned, Or just people in general aren't
healthy. That's actually impact in their brain. What
we're also learning from animal studies is that this just
goes beyond you, the individual. It can be
transmitted epigenetic so epigenetic on top of jeans. What
that means is that your environment and or what you
or your parents have taken in can affect you.
And so we know through animal studies that you could
have epigenetic modifications in the brain that transmit to your
young. So you the In this case, mice
and rats give them poor diets. Their young are
already super susceptible to poor diets. They can eat
1/10 or 100th of what the bad diet that their
parents ate. And they have these symptomology that would
categorize this type two diabetes and or mountain development brain
. They're hypersensitive to that, so you're actually transmitted
to further generations, and we know that there's previous
vision predispositions, the genome that makes certain people more
susceptible to that we don't understand. Good case in
point is alcohol metabolism and Native Americans. There's Tay
Sachs. There's other individuals that come up with diseases
because their genome back, their markers and their genome
making more susceptible to certain diseases. We know that
these epigenetic modifications transmit mother and father to the offspring
, and it just exacerbates the further generation you go
down. So it's a really interesting topic to think
about diet in its own sense and kind of encapsulates
what you're talking about, what the videos and mentioned
. And I think a lot of the Panelists mentioned
is that it's just a snippet of what goes on
in the bigger picture. Okay, cool. And
it seems that it seems, based on some of
these observations, that a lot of new scientific research
is confirming things that connectedness that native traditions have been
talking about for quite a long time about these inter
relationships. Whereas before science couldn't see them, they
just denied that they existed. But now that's coming
. Uh, so I actually have a little bit
more of a positive note than than than and I
think, you know, maybe you're speaking to the
diversity of experience with like, you know, it
sounds like this is a really beautiful kind of harmonious
psychological relationship that exists. Um, you know where
you're from, and I think that's amazing. And
I also think that it's something that a lot of
native people talk about, and, uh, that
either, you know, have some aspects of their
lives they do resemble that have a lot of a
worldview and maybe kind of a way of being that
is really focused on that human environment relationship, that
non distinction that you're talking about, but also to
at the same time, having had having lived through
experiences, of having that pushed out of a harmonious
relationship in a really drastic way because of colonialism and
because of settlers because of removal from, you know
, places where they had deep connections to the land
and with the Mayan people. So mine's are known
as people of corn, you know their words and
miss and the purple boots from those of your familiar
is that they were. They were shaped out of
clay that that that that person wasn't that that person
didn't hold together, but then somebody was made out
of corn. And that person actually operated and worked
as a human, Um, and that they are
subsistence, primarily subsistence. Farmers are growing their own
food. But subsistence has been in decline for a
variety of business because their ominous bad land Because the
green revolution which was supposed to solve the land problem
, they have very little land. All the land
is in big plantations, so they're trying to make
a living on these little pieces of land. For
a little while. Agrochemicals came in and solve the
problem a little bit. But now, 15 or
20 years later, there are new pests. Those
fertilizers don't work the way that they were that they
were supposed to work before. Now they are addicted
to fertilizers. They're addicted to pesticides. The price
of those things has gone up because they're linked to
the price of petroleum and the international market. And
so subsistence farmers who used to just grow corn And
have we encountered a lot of the major problems that
they had before from just lack of land. So
indigenous farmers in Guatemala have had an experience just hunger
, not having enough calories to eat in a day
period and the amount of work that they're doing to
produce their food has been more than the calories.
In many cases, they were taken in, so
they had malnutrition. Well, then, you know
. Then they went through the green Revolution, and
that changed their diets because a lot of pesticides and
herbicides that were new kill plants that used to be
really important parts of diet, like herbs that grew
around the corn plant. Different kinds of beans that
grew naturally are different kinds of medicinal herbs. Those
things are no longer as much part of the diet
, so you have just a few things that are
growing in corn fields. So you still have hunger
, and now you have a new kind of malnutrition
where people aren't getting the kinds of nutrition that they're
getting in it, because the soil itself isn't getting
the kind of nutrition right. It used to be
getting 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 years ago
. And of course, we don't wanna romanticize what
agriculture was like before chemicals because they were on bad
land. They didn't have enough food. They have
been pushed away from their native subsistence, so that's
something to think about. Now you have, uh
, free trade since 2000 and five in Guatemala have
free trade agreements. So corn comes in subsidized from
the United States. A lot of packaged goods,
a lot of sodas, a lot of sugar based
things, a lot of corn syrup. So now
you have hunger or people are hungry. But they're
malnourished, right? They're not getting nutrients, and
then they maybe in some cases very few, actually
in certain communities. But in some cases you are
starting to see obesity related to new kinds of food
. What's happening? Um, in many communities,
and also they're really worried about genetically modified corn coming
in and affecting them. And they're really worried about
the effects of disease and health that are coming from
all these contaminations. They see this as contaminations,
things that have affected something natural, things that have
changed the way we used to eat herbs. And
now we can't get you know, these kind of
things are really common here among among my people.
But what's happening now in reaction to these changes of
subsistence diets and also the onslaught of mining operations and
hydro electric dams and other kinds of evolution, you
know in the environment is that people have also been
displaced so that people can grow African poem, which
is like a commodity crop or cane sugar, which
is also a big commodity. Crops. These are
displacing subsistence agriculture in Guatemala, so people have a
lot of peasants have decided that they want to go
back to aggro ecology. It's a model for subsistence
agriculture sustainable model that's based in native organic local production
as opposed to market production as opposed to using agrochemicals
. It's supposed to be kind of native fertilizers,
organic fertilizers, organic production, and they're doing it
, Um, and they're trying to get to something
that they called food Sovereignty. And there was the
one video that said, Oh, you know,
you have a lack of access to available food.
There was one of the video people that talk about
lack of access. That's a food security model when
food security is defined as access to a certain number
of calories of food. And this is a very
stripped down, you know, kind of absence of
health kind of model of our absence of disease,
model of health, food security is about access to
it doesn't matter. What kind doesn't matter where you
get it doesn't matter. Anything else. But indigenous
people are increasingly moving towards agro ecology to rebuild subsistence
, and they're talking not about food security. They're
talking more about food, sovereignty and food. Sovereignty
is a broad concept, but it's not just access
to this number of calories. It's the control over
the resources necessary to produce your own food, the
kind of food that you want to grow, the
kind of food that you need to survive and not
having to be dependent on fertilizers, not having to
be dependent on other people in order to produce it
. So this defense of territory movement that's really important
and it is really growing, and it is trans
continental. This defensive territory is tapping into agro ecology
as a prime alternative for poor farmers who are experiencing
these kind of environmental and dietary dislocations. So this
is something positive that I've been studying lately. One
of my big questions is how can that become realistically
possible for small farmers who are in fact addicted to
chemical fertilizers who are dependent on chemical pesticides who don't
have good land like how can these alternatives really work
, and how can they really be scaled up so
that people can recuperate? Um, some version of
food sovereignty? Or how could it be done without
kind? Because I don't really think there's Badlands.
It's just there was time to co evolved with it
, like there's places that are that I would think
are really challenging to live in. But people have
done it because they had this time to figure it
out. And now we're sort of almost and I
don't know if it's our own framing of it.
Like if that mentality of crisis well, sort of
prevent us from making steps necessary. No, I
mean, I think, too, that, you
know, when you have soil that hasn't has been
eroded, and that doesn't have a lot of topsoil
. It's mostly clay and rock. Some people,
some indigenous farmers, will talk about their soil being
terrible, and maybe they haven't been using that.
Maybe they've used pesticides over the herbicides, and they
haven't been telling weeds into their soil. And so
these soiled soils in many places are sterilized. They
dig out like a little like pot size hole,
put fertilizer in it and then that's what Rosen then
nothing will be produced without fertilizer. So that's I
mean, like in terms of a time like it
is renewable, but maybe not within a human lifetime
or within the farmers. Opal, that's what.
Yeah, and that's exactly what they're trying to do
with that grow. Ecology is Take these sterile soils
and, you know, put fertilizer back into them
, develop their own kind of local forms of replenishing
these things. But it is true, like there's
that there's a relationship to these lands and there's beautiful
places. But there's also the reality that there was
a process where they were forcibly removed from the most
fertile soils in the country and forced to, and
they did it. But they farmed in some places
where it was really difficult to even using, you
know, organic methods. It just wasn't enough food
for a lot of people. So that's something where
there is that historical process of dislocating and turning people
off into into mountainous areas. Sometimes where how are
they supposed to grow their own food? People didn't
care about them. State didn't care about them at
all. So sure, so, uh, in
the prior segment of video of section of videos.
We talked about health, and this particular section of
videos for me really brings up the question of what
medicine? Right? And so plants are food,
relationships, connections, harmonies, balances, right,
even temporal concepts. All of these things have,
essentially, to this question of what is medicine,
rituals? Prayer, which is a much more again
different and much more copious understanding. Right? And
many of the medicines, as Dr Cook mentioned that
we now have bottled and commodified actually come from the
earth, right? He mentioned Boulevard, which is
the base of aspirin, But there are many.
So I want us to think about this. And
you know, I want to talk a little bit
about the research I've done, and we're putting the
stucco and tricky and sympatico indigenous migrants from the state
of Oaxaca living in California. And I've done a
lot of focus groups and hung out with them a
lot, and at one point I was talking to
them about food and asking them what they knew about
diet, what they knew about food. And I
was really naively saying to them, You know what
? To eat right, thinking invoking their traditional diet
, and they shook their heads and one person stood
up and said, No, we no longer know
what to eat, right? We live here in
the United States. We don't know what the tortillas
having them. We don't know what the food has
in it, so we don't know what actually,
right. So So this is a whole other thing
about the sort of alienation from the Earth. But
the alienation from their own knowledge is and you know
, ways of living and being right. So that's
one thing. Um, the other thing that we
heard here was this idea of asking permission of the
Earth. I was talking to Mexico man who was
the local leader in Greenfield in California, which is
kind of by Salinas, which is where the big
California breadbasket is. And I was talking to him
again about food, and he was saying, You
know, the United States is so different because at
home I could just go pick an apple off the
tree or a piece of fruit off a tree,
and I could eat it, and the person who
whose property would be on whose houses right next so
I wouldn't say anything to me. He would say
, Enjoy the apple. And here in the United
States, you'd probably get sued, right? They
call the police on you. He was exaggerating of
making the point about this relationship with private property,
which is also very much part and parcel of the
Western environmental or ALIPAY Catholic tradition, which is the
idea of ownership of the body ownership of the land
, commodification of all things that are meant to heal
. And so, you know, we have this
kind of deeper philosophical tradition that infuses biomedicine, which
we think is a science that is actually very much
a Western epistemology set of knowledge systems. Um,
another thing that I heard a lot when I was
working with indigenous farmworkers, which many of them are
is that they were exposed to pesticides regularly. Right
, which feeds into the number two killer of native
and indigenous populations in the United States was just tumors
right, which is cancer and unsurprising, given all
the discussion of mining and other kinds of things in
these communities. Right. Um, but also related
to, uh, low birth weight. Babies,
right. Problems with childbearing, other kinds of things
at the same time that they're out there building vegetables
. And this is a very common, uh,
think common refrain that we here but bear saying again
at the same time that they are out there picking
the vegetables that quote unquote make us all healthy,
right? They can't afford the same vegetables and they
can't go to the supermarket by the broccoli they just
picked. And they're being showered pesticides, right?
Or the strawberries or whatever. So that's something to
think about with regard to these three things. And
then the final thing I want to say. And
this gets back to the question of research. Um
, they indigenous group that I worked with in California
. They applied for funding to a humongous foundation in
California that had a ton of tobacco tax money and
was loaded with dough. Their board of directors was
stacked with bio medical doctors, and this small organization
applied for funding to create a community garden to grow
herbs for medicine. Right? And this group of
doctors rejected their proposal. And so that is not
medicine. That is not health. And we will
not fund that. That is just, you know
, fake science. Whatever right. And so it's
these kinds of ways that they're struggling to try to
figure out how to make a living and make a
life and be healthy and and practice their medical histories
alongside allied health medicines that they rejected, but that
the systems around them are rejecting them, making extremely
difficult for them. So there's a lot of things
in here that I think are worth thinking about with
regard to our own, not just indigenous or native
medicine and health, but also about our own medical
system. We should reflect upon. Okay, you
know, that's an interesting story about the rejection of
that grant. 20 years ago, the monarchy nation
in Virginia got a grant from R. J.
Reynolds some of their tobacco flake Asian money for specifically
for health purposes. But what they got with it
was a band to take their elders to the doctors
. But they still drive that thing around some,
but anyway, so our next segment, I think
it's gonna be really exciting because it's all about the
, uh, meetings of Western health practices and indigenous
healing practices. I'll be really interested to see what
our panels have to say about this So this is
our third series. So following this one, if
any of you have the questions, is also following
the Panelists. Mhm. Yes. Okay. Yeah
. True. Uh huh. Mhm. Mhm.
Yeah. Mm. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah,
Yeah. Okay. Awesome. I had a great
experience with both tribal medicine with modern medicine. You
think that never the torrential meter can be used.
I know in any a lot of medicine, I
think, is in the interpretation of the patient.
The primary objective is for an individual was ill.
I e. The patient, um usually determines for
themselves where they're going to go higher. Do they
want to arcade in Chinese acupuncture medicine that's been around
for 10,000 years, Plus or chiropractic care, Or
do they want to try hypnotism? Do they want
to try Western medicine such as myself? Do they
want to the Indian doctor? And there are many
choices. Or do they want to try their own
self home remedies that have been passed down from traditions
of Scandinavian families or German families or other families?
And it's very challenging to care for Americans. Alaska
natives who come from different cultures and traditions and even
within a particular tribe. There's a great variety in
terms of level of culture. Traditionalism, the individual
we have. And so some American Indian patients are
very traditional. They don't want to come to the
Indian Health service clinic unless they absolutely have to.
And then they'll see their own traditional healers. And
we support that. We believe in the choice of
a patient to receive health care. Anyway, they
want to. So if they want to go to
the traditional healer, that's fine with us. If
they want to come see us, that's great.
We do like to partner with traditional healers and respect
what they do and to encourage the patients to let
us know that they're stealing, seeing there traditional healers
so that we can make sure we don't do anything
that will interfere with that sort of treatment, right
? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yes, Yes
. Mhm. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah
, yes. Mhm. You come up. Oh
, yeah. Morning. Okay. Yes. Yeah
. Had a Muslim in this family. Yeah,
Okay. Okay. Way. In my research project
, we had a developmental project to, um to
fully develop and pilot or pretest drumming. Intervention for
American Indian Alaska native substance abuse problems. Somebody must
say, Well, I don't know that I'm thinking
about Yes, we would expect that American Indians and
Alaska natives, especially right now we actually have a
grant development program developed where you make your problem and
learn from the our cultural leaders on what the materials
represent, what the purpose of the problem is and
kind of introduce him that way. That is the
strongest effect from hearing grounds from doing that. They
can give a bit of both part of it's cultural
benefits, meaning their ability to engage and feel good
about being American analysts. And they have a charity
is your self esteem. And then there's some science
showing that brainwave activity is positively impacted. So alpha
and beta wave brain activity is enhanced, which is
what you will see, uh, in meditation and
, uh, some healthier, uh, states of
mind. So there is some science, although somewhat
limited. But there is science showing that this can
be helpful for anyone. So we know what makes
use and off throughout the world open indigenous communities and
mainstream population. So there appears to be benefits for
the human brain in general. Okay. Uh huh
. Yeah. Okay. It was very common for
traditional healers to be known in a certain community or
certain region of land of coca. And those land
divisions were traditional land divisions. And the traditional healers
, um, knew how to use the plants in
that region. And if a person from that area
, um, lived their cultural practices even today,
they would see their land, that community and their
immediate family as a source of healing. Yeah,
all right, I'm gonna refrain from comments because we're
late on time here, but I am going to
shake things up a little bit and start with Dr
Hester this time and ask us from your experience.
Uh, you know what? Do these videos about
getting any thoughts on the that zone between Western and
indigenous medicine? Yeah, First, thanks for saying
indigenous medicine. People I work with have a really
hard time with the idea of traditional and modern first
person talked about modern medicine or modern biomedicine. And
you know the extent that we do that we continue
to inscribe activism to indigenous traditions. So they really
reject the idea of traditional more for indigenous medicine.
Um, I think that there, uh, anthropologist
Bonny baby who works in California. She talks about
this notion of trans medicalization, which is the use
basically indigenous healing methods alongside Allah, pathetic or Western
medicine methods. And indeed, what we find is
that many indigenous people are very pragmatic, at least
with folks that I've spoken with, right one Mexico
, Mexico, remote or a community health worker told
me that with her daughter, she looks when her
daughter has diarrhea, diarrhea, screening she'll take the
She'll take the baby to go to a traditional and
indigenous healer. If the diarrhea is yellow, they
go to the clinic, right? So she does
use both systems, and she makes her own decisions
about which system she'll use based on what she understands
the symptoms to be. Um, one of the
second video talked about these different models that she chooses
from right differently than the idea of sort of biomedicine
or Chinese medicine or indigenous medicine. And and I
think I would like for us to have a more
critical view of that because that kind of relativism,
the idea that they all kind of are equal but
separate, that kind of, you know, milk
, toast, multiculturalism, what I would call it
um does not attend to the very different philosophical and
epistemological underpinnings of these different models as well as we
heard the different histories that they have behind them.
And so I think that that is worth thinking about
. These models are not all the same, right
? Like a Disney World. It's a small world
, right? They all have different backgrounds and heritages
and things that they ascribe to right. And one
of the things within that is that I think that
at least many critical scholars of biomedicine will tell you
is that Allah public medicine causes a lot of suffering
, right. We talk about scoring the land,
but we also talk about scoring the body and you
know, all of the pharmaceuticals and all of the
ways that we treat people. We cut them open
, right, and we do this in a very
naturalized way, is ritualized, but not in the
sacred way. It's, you know, it's normalized
. And so, um, you know, to
think about the different models and the ways that they
think about the safer and all of those things I
think are worth thinking about, not in a relativist
way, in terms of how we treat diseases and
this idea of trans medicalization. Um, I had
a recent conversation with Indigenous Leader in California, and
he was talking to me about the importance about medicine
to them because one of the things that they're finding
indeed unsurprisingly, is that diabetes is on the rise
. Diabetes? They didn't even have a mistake or
three keywords for diabetes 10 years ago, and now
HIV, a diabetes. All of these sort of
quote unquote diseases of modernity have infused the populations.
Indigenous population, especially. Not only do they are
they trying to figure out their ideology where they come
from, what's causing them, but how to treat
them so they are increasingly turning to biomedicine. So
they do see this is as important for them.
Um, and finally, I just want to say
again on this notion of medicine and healing and treatment
, what we get in the drumming scenario, I
think it's really important because, as opposed to a
biomedical model where something is done to the body,
what we get in that model is medicine as an
embodied practice, right? It is a doing.
It is a being. It is a way of
being right so drumming, singing, dancing, praying
all of these kinds of things which are not just
laying flat and some, you know, fake like
plastic or paper sheet while someone probes and palpate to
. It's actually out there doing and being, and
we see that there's good research that shows that kind
of doing and being is actually generative for health.
So I think those models which we have dismissed,
as you know so much like cultural backwater, actually
have medicinal purposes. Doctor, Uh, yeah,
I think this idea of transit medicalization is interesting.
Uh, and the way I thought about that is
hybrid itty, where you have a very different ecological
systems being at the same time to the same to
the point of talking about earlier to where you can
say, this is bad land for farming. But
it's still sacred. Land like those things can coexist
in, uh, or they're bad ways to farm
it, or there are different. There are these
very seemingly contradictory ways of looking at the world where
you know, the kind of knowledge that additional people
have had over millennia have been marginalized. They've been
called backwards primitive, and they've been said that they
had no value to where a lot of times people
have really strong beliefs about things that do work in
terms of medicine and healing. But they won't admit
necessarily that they use them like one thing that's really
common in the communities that worked, and it takes
a long time to hear about. It is witchcraft
, you know, Western medicine. We'll tell you
what juror made you sick, but it won't tell
you why it happened to you, right? It
doesn't tell you that doesn't give those kind of answers
where a lot of native traditions that are more that
our holistic in the sense that it's related to some
kind of imbalance, right. But it's related to
something and that it's a social reality that's causing it
so that in many cases people will go to the
doctor to get an injection or they'll or they'll get
a uh like they'll take some tea. They usually
start with traditional medicine because it's familiar because it often
works really well because it is really inexpensive. You
and you know you can go. Go grab me
this urban, this urban, this urban this herb
and it's shocking the level of knowledge that people have
about all the variety of herbs in their in their
village, and they'll make cheese for different kinds of
things, and it's free right in effect. So
that's one reason. But people. Then we'll go
to the doctor and get a treatment. But then
there are certain cases. Well, okay, well
, this isn't like a regular sickness. This is
witchcraft, like things well, or this is something
is going on. And I need to find a
different kind of healer if people don't want to talk
about that to a lot of outsiders because they're going
to be told that there's, you know, that
there's being superstitious, that they themselves are participating in
witchcraft. And these are people that are, you
know, many Catholics or Protestants. But they participate
in kinds of healing that that and it approaches to
medicine that are, and it's very contradictory. It
seems like, Well, if you believe that,
why would you do this? But if you believe
that diarrhea is caused by you know one thing where
germs or viruses or bacteria, then why wouldn't you
always see that these are really complicated implicated knowledge systems
that people inhabit? multiple ones at the same time
. And I think that's something that, you know
, indigenous people and colonized people have had to deal
with and in position of forms of knowledge on top
of them that have value of different forms. You
know, Uh and I think that's yeah, I'll
stop at that point. But, uh huh,
$100. Um, it's really interesting looking at the
biomedicine industry. If you will driven a lot by
a big farm, what kind of drugs can they
patent and sell? Um, it's difficult for them
to use herbs and patent those and make money at
them because everybody can grow them. A good case
in point is marijuana, for example. Um,
you can grow that, and they have trouble synthesizing
it. They have some synthesized chemicals, but they
don't work like the native plant. Um, why
isn't it being researched more? We can debate that
until the cows come home, but the problem is
, is that you can't make money off of it
. Therefore, you're not going to do a big
farm is not gonna posture that type of research.
It's also the kind of think spring boarding off of
what the comment was made. I think Rebecca had
mentioned this about Grant. Um, you might have
a good idea, and it's a very plausible idea
, but if it goes against convention, it's not
gonna get funded. It's just not gonna get funded
. Therefore, they're going to follow along like all
of us do. We take the drugs that are
being on the market, and that's what we use
in our animal models, because that's what we're going
to get funded with. If we have this idea
of wow, some natural remedy may be beneficial.
That's not going to get funny, or it's gonna
be really super challenging to get funded. So you
have this stifling of changing the society or the medical
profession to even want to do those type of things
. And then you've got the research and so on
and so forth that shows, you know, sometimes
positively that you have benefits. But it's just the
idea of shifting that mentality. Everybody is stuck in
that mentality, and it's really, really a challenge
to move people from that mentality of what they've known
has been funded and or will get funded and what
drives your labs. And it's just really ashamed that
the openness for alternative approaches is really kind of quote
unquote poo pooed on because they just don't understand it
. And that's the most difficult thing that these researchers
face is trying to do something to institute positive outcomes
, and you're just not gonna be able to make
those. So what a lot of us do is
those are side projects. And then you find the
problem is where you're going to publish that at the
journals, the scientific journals. If I go to
the top tier journal Nature, science or any of
those. And I have this herb that I give
to this rat and it cures them of some ailment
that may or may not be like a disorder like
depression or anxiety or diabetes or anything like that,
and I go to publish that no one is going
to accept that they just aren't going to do that
. They're going to tell me what our target affects
, what kind of compounds that they're going to make
me go and just slew of stuff, money,
money, money to show what this substance is,
and then it's more of like they're still not gonna
accept they just don't accept those things. So what
do we do? Those are people like me.
They want to get tenure. We want to publish
. So are we gonna be gutsy and move that
direction? Heck, no. We're gonna stay with
what we're gonna do to get published, and then
we can get tenure, and then you see these
other types of things Come on. But it's still
it's still debatable, and no one's going to reference
it. And it just won't get those journals so
it won't get on TV. And if it doesn't
get on TV and it's gonna be squashed away and
you and that's what's gonna be perpetuated because I give
this SS ri and it helps depression and boom.
There you go. Oh, this new compound that
has a serotonin selective re uptake inhibitor works for depression
, and that gets in there and you'll be on
TV. Something else just won't get on it.
So it's just the yin and yang push back about
openness and receptiveness versus the status quo. They hide
. Uh, gosh, there's a lot to talk
about. I'm not sure it'll come out clear,
but colonization to me, uh, start this like
like it's it's done for the purpose of exploitation.
It's not just about resources, it's about people.
The oppressor or the colonizer colonized all the everything around
there. And it's on this trajectory that causes trauma
, the environment. All the people involved, every
piece of everything that's involved. And I believe that
trauma is a normal part of life, right.
But from what I understand, our is that there
is a trauma and you grow from that. Whereas
a lot of this linear trajectory and colonization is,
there's a trauma which leads to not unification and support
, but this alienation. So if you're a person
, you end up very alone and having to like
, mind your own soul until there's nothing left,
whereas the trauma, uh, from from my perspective
should be. And this is where you're talking about
different kinds of medicine is people come around you.
They they they empower you again and then you move
forward and you grow from that. And so within
what I we have a word for something that because
if we become alienated through some sort of damage to
that, So even in the school that I work
with in New Mexico, um the kids are taught
, like how to wake up in the morning and
put on like a protective layer. And it's like
So I'm going to go out into the world and
I'm I'm doing my best to protect me from any
sort of injuries. Anything could be words from another
person. It could be contamination. It could be
. And I'm going into the world to protect me
and my wellness so that my wellness can exude out
of me and protect those around. So it's It's
this community orientation towards wellness rather than this alienation.
And so that's where it came in with the drumming
I thought is and you were talking about earlier about
how there's so many ways people are eroded or even
in the research track, like how you like,
How long are we dissociated from all these systematic things
until we're just putting band aids on stuff? And
where we need to go is from from like not
stay in this quadrant reductionist, hierarchical thinking. But
we might have to move that from two a reductionist
non hierarchical where we are putting on band AIDS for
a minute, up to a systematic, non hierarchical
system where we're and that's where it's How much time
do we have? Do we have enough time to
do that? Are we so stuck in our ways
that we can't do that anymore? How do we
abandon this track of like like, uh, like
, whittling down ourselves until we feel like we like
, I believe that, uh, meritocracy independence.
Those things are toxic to us. So when he
was talking about drumming and coming together and sources of
medicine and how we I think, Well, this
is a source of energy. People ask me all
the time like, you know, I'm so glad
you called me. You know, that's my whole
day is new and improved. And so, like
, they were like, Where does that energy come
from? I was like, I like I'm like
a hamster. And well, I went for a
run. I ate good food. I did that
stuff. Now I'm ready to like My wellness is
protected. I'm ready to radiate all that energy out
. So I'm my own power source and people get
powered off me. And and I'm not trying to
, like, put myself in a hierarchy. I
just can only speak from my own experience. So
, you know, whatever it is that helps people
. My brother got sick. Uh, like,
I come from the most beautiful place, but they
put it down, wind from down. So our
water got dirty, our air got dirty, and
it was a genocide IQ. If that's a Genesis
Civic Act. Yeah, like, um, like
it affected boys. Wow. Disproportionately. So very
few kids were born. Then it was less males
. And then they put in these other clauses that
prevented, uh, like maintaining status if you couldn't
marry someone from within your tribe or so but there's
no males. So then there's no more treaties that
need to be honored. There's no more anything.
You know, It's, um and so, like
, we look too well. How did my brother's
protection become weakened? Like, how how did we
need to build it up? And also, my
brother became sterilized through the experimental treatments that he was
subjected to, you know, So even though he
could grow up, Um, so and my mother
is very much about the preventative medicine like we're talking
about. Like if I say that I don't feel
good, she feels to be good. Did you
exercise? Did you sweat it out? Did you
? What have you done? Like How have you
How How have you let down your protection to allow
something into you? And it's not always a sickness
like a germ sometimes, and we call it a
windy go. It's like when there's when there's a
parasitic spirit that comes in. Sometimes it's alcoholism or
something like that, like your guard has been let
let down. Something comes into you and it starts
to take over your wellness, your whole action and
doing. You can't radio your radio your energy out
into the world. Okay? And again, it's
about a whole system. It's not you. It's
it's whole system of hoops that keep that support everything
all the time, and none of it can be
dropped. Well, this has been an excellent,
excellent panel, and we're way over time. But
there's so few of us in the room. I
I just want to invite you to come and converse
with our Panelists afterwards. Um, because I'm sure
they would be happy to. They like to talk
. There are good people, and this has been
great. So thank thank you so much. Thank
you, uh, big role? Uh huh.
Oh, Uh huh. Thank you. One more
time on that. The library. And, um
also our partner in Roanoke, Virginia, type school
of medicine. I hope that in the future,
we might be able to plan something. Perhaps some
technology, but thank you so much. Okay.