| Paztin: Curandera from the womb |
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Editor’s Note: First person by Patrisia Gonzales
From the womb of her mother, Doña Predicanda ya tenia el don, the healing gift. When she was born, her family concluded that her father’s divining powers transferred to her. She was sent to live with her grandmother, an indigenous curandera from Chihuahua, Mexico. She grew up learning by her side, and unaware that the woman she called mother was actually her grandmother. Con sus manos calientes and spirit words and, as she notes, by God’s grace, she has helped heal people of confounding illnesses.
After more than 60 years of healing, Doña Predicanda doesn’t have a business card nor a website that pronounces her a curandera. She still does not charge, as is the traditional way. Doña Predi was friends with the elder Emma, who was like an aunt to my family while we lived in Albuquerque. Emma would bring us homemade tortillas and her green chile and share remedies with me. She was like many of our mothers and aunts, the curandera of her family. She used to say that a curandera never pronounces herself as such or her powers may diminish. Decades agp, she and “Canda” helped to establish a free community clinic with Doña Predi as the resident curandera that medical doctors referred patients to.
Eventually Doña Predicanda became an elder to Kalpulli Izkalli, a community of families organized on Mexican indigenous principles, where we preserved our traditional knowledge and medicine by learning from each other and elders such as Doña Predi. Eventually, some of us trained there as “promotoras tradicionales,” or community health workers who promote traditional medicinal knowledge. We established certain guiding principles in accord with “the traditional and natural ways in which people participate in their own healing and wellness…. By recognizing that our bodies heal themselves, and that we only facilitate the process, we honor the ways of our foremothers and bring that knowledge to the present world.”
Izkalli’s projects include the Topahkal Health Collaborative, which offers a wide array of services and teachings. Today, it has a doctor and nurse practitioner on premise, who offer health care for a nominal fee, and the promotoras provide services of traditional medicine. Various circles of traditional and natural healers are associated with the kalpulli, offering services on a donation basis. The promotoras have been nationally recognized for their efforts to preserve and strengthen traditional medicine. Sylvia Ledesma, one of the kalpulli’s caretakers of traditional knowledge and medicine, notes that traditional medicine remains a site of self governance within our communities: “Our healing methods are our community power.”
For several years, Izkalli and the health cooperative have sponsored a gathering on traditional medicine, featuring practitioners of traditional medicine from Mexico and New Mexico, providing treatments in the hundreds. This year the gathering was named in honor of Doña Predicanda. “She has been an inspiration to continue the work of healing our community,” said Sylvia. The collaborative has also modeled their clinic on that earlier community clinic.
I once asked Doña Predicanda what was important for our self healing, and for our community healing. She said we must overcome envidia. Jealousy is a cultural diagnosis that in Mexican traditional medicine is recognized as causing imbalances that lead to sickness. “It is like a poison that makes you sick from the inside,” she said.
In keeping with the upcoming ceremonial cycle that for many indigenous people honors the Mother Earth, I offer this legacy of Doña Predicanda. Dec. 12 is typically the time when many indigenous people of Mexico offer ceremonies. For others, it may fall on the winter solstice. Recalling the teachings of the late ceremonial leader Andres Segura, Sylvia said, “Our Earth Day is el dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe, our Mother Earth, because she’s the one who provides us with all our nourishment.”
“She’s the main feminine manifestation of nourishment.”
During this time, Sylvia offers this remedio: This is a time of spiritual cleansing, or the practices of limpias, particularly with romero. Doña Predicanda also suggests for the winter season that we drink more té de canela, made from cinnamon sticks, to warm our bodies that tend to get in “cold” states, leading to ailments of a cold nature, such as respiratory illnesses and menstrual pains.
Sylvia Ledesma can be contacted at: Izkalli@comcast.net
Once sworn into office, all statements that a president and vice president make are under oath. This is not optional, but rather, part of the job description.
Everything they say in public is also part of the public record (That’s why this administration has an unusual penchant for secrecy). Yet, recently, both president Bush and vice president Cheney have been acting as though the run-up to the Iraq war was conducted behind closed doors and that there is no public record.
This is from a president who promised to restore honor and integrity to the presidency by not simply doing what’s legal, but moral and right. Yet today, the entire Bush administration faces a massive credibility problem.
It should be recognized that the administration deftly outmaneuvered its domestic opponents in its campaign to wage war against Iraq. The veracity of the administration’s campaign was irrelevant. The only issue was: could anyone stop them? The answer of course was, no. Not Congress, not the UN, not the media.
That the administration got its way did not make his war rationale true. It simply made him politically astute, especially considering that he kept his critics at bay until after the 2004 election. There’s little doubt that the administration was fully aware that a systematic investigation of its WMD claims against Iraq - before the war — would have undermined its war plans. Knowing this, the administration had to feverishly speed up its plans, while vilifying and questioning the patriotism of its critics. Abroad, the “Coalition of the willing” — with military assistance as the carrot & stick - was assembled and bribed or extorted into supporting the president’s war, including, exempting U.S. soldiers from the International War Crimes Tribunal.
Who has forgotten how the French (“Old Europe”) were treated for not accepting the president’s incredulous war rationale and especially his sense of urgency? (Through the use of verbal gymnastics, the president’s minions now argue that he never claimed that the Iraqi threat was “imminent.”)
The point is, the administration now accuses his critics of rewriting history, pretending that there is no public record. Yet, the record is as crystal clear today as it was before the war. (That Congress looked the other way or that much of mainstream media assisted the war effort is another story). The problem for the Bush administration, is that every time they continue to repeat their falsehoods - as if there were no public record - they seemingly forget that they’ve been under oath since assuming office.
In a sense, the only issue that has ever mattered was: Did Iraq ever constitute a credible threat to the United States — as the administration has consistently maintained?
The notion that a fourth-rate power could somehow materially threaten the United States - even if it had an arsenal of WMDs and actual delivery systems — was always ludicrous. That’s why the UN strongly resisted the president’s advances. Regardless, the administration still had to fabricate the case that Iraq had WMDs and had to scare the U.S. populace into believing that such weapons posed a threat. That’s why the UN inspectors could not be given time to finish their jobs.
Did the Bush administration lie or “fix the intelligence” to get us into the war? The real question is, is the War Cabinet aware that they are still under oath?
One thing is certain; what many Democrats or liberals expect is never going to happen. The president will never admit to his fudging of the truth. If guilty, this is beyond an impeachable offense as it would expose him and his War Cabinet to charges (and make the U.S. liable) of intentionally fomenting a war under false pretenses, resulting in the needless deaths of thousands. If someone other than the president purportedly fixed the intelligence, that does not exonerate him as it was he who foolishly rushed the nation into war.
In this society, the only thing seemingly worse than lying, is being a failure or being consistently wrong on virtually everything — especially while leading a disastrous and extremely costly military campaign.
Indeed, lying may not be the administration’s biggest sin… Its gross incompetence and its claim to have the authority to wage permanent war — without the consent of Congress — and its claim to have the authority to indefinitely imprison and torture anyone - without an independent judicial review — smacks of an authoritarianism more closely associated with societies this nation has purportedly been opposed to.
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