Heritage Healing Practices: Patrisia Gonzales, Ph.D.
About the Series: This new series is focused on sharing the healing practices from each culture to bring awareness to other health practitioners, patients and families with hopes of education, awareness about how these heritage healing practices compliment western medicine with positive health outcomes for patients, ultimately, creating health equity.
About the Topic: This presentation will provide a cross-cultural overview of how Indigenous plant knowledge systems endure and adapt. Participants will gain an understanding of the multidimensional levels of Indigenous Plant knowledge(s) as part of environmental healing systems. Plant knowledge is part of he original medicines of this continent. Such knowledge derives its strength through relational networks within the family and relatives, or as part of lineages within Indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples make relations with the plants as elders and teachers.
About the Speaker: As the granddaughter of Kickapoo, Comanche and Macehual peoples who migrated throughout the present-day United States and Mexico, Patrisia Gonzales specializes in Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous medicine. She obtained her Ph.D. in Mass Communications from the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She received various human rights awards for the nationally syndicated Column of the Americas, her early journalistic reportage and for her book The Mud People (Chusma 2003). . As a Kellogg Fellow (1997-1999), she explored community healing and helped to establish a promotora project on traditional medicine in New Mexico. She is a promotora of Indigenous Medicine, an herbalist and an apprenticing Traditional Birth Attendant. Patrisia Gonzales, courses and research combine applied Indigenous medicinal knowledge with explorations into under-girding philosophies and world views. Her scholarship examines Indigeneity from a hemispheric perspective; Indigenous communication practices; Mesoamerican symbols and codices as medicinal texts; and Indigenous medicine as parallel system(s) of knowledge that challenge and expand the paradigms of Western Science. She collaborates with Indigenous birth workers and Nahua traditional doctors. She is author of Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (University of Arizona Press 2012) . She has written the first textbook on American Indian medicine, which includes a curriculum with links to Native-produced videos and websites: Traditional Indian Medicine: American Indian Wellness (Kendall Hunt 2016).
Virtual Event