Conversation

Healers: Decolonizing Knowledge within Afro/Indigenous Traditions

Wed, Mar 30, 2022

3:00 PM–4:30 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below. This event will be interpreted in Spanish, English and ASL.

Watch the video recording of this event here:

Join Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos and Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara who will present the recently re-named “The Healers Project: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions” website. Through storytelling, they discuss how the website came to exist, how it honors and serves as an education tool about Afro/Indigenous approaches to health, plants, the body, land, and spirit in the Caribbean and its diasporas. We are honored to be in conversation with Las Brujas de Brooklyn who will comment and open a conversation about the project and their own connections to these traditions.

Free and open to the public, but please Register here to access the Zoom link and attend.

Speaker Bios

Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos is an independent scholar and consultant who teaches as a Professor of Practice at U of Oregon’s School of Law; and is the Associate Director of the PNW Just Futures Institute for Climate and Racial Justice. Visit Dr. Alaí Reyes-Santos’s website here.

Dr. Ana-MaurineLara is a multiple award winning creative and academic author, and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon. In 2021 she received the Randall Kenan Prize by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Visit Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara’s website here.

Brujas of Brooklyn are identical twin sisters, Doctora Griselda Rodriguez-Solomon and Doctora Miguelina Rodriguez. These Brujas, or witches, merge the magic of ancestral medicine with sharp intellect. Their platform provides the balm to help People of Color, particularly Womyn of color, heal from internalized oppression. As certified Kundalini and Hatha yogis, these Black Dominican sisters design multi-sensory workshops that provide sacred space for Womyn of color to heal from womb imbalances. Both are professors of the Social Sciences within the City College of New York (CUNY). They’ve both authored academic pieces on the effects of racialized oppression on communities of color, Dominicans in particular. Their work has granted them access to platforms such as ABC, NPR, Univision, Google, Buzz Feed’s Pero Like, and Facebook to name a few. Joy is their ultimate form of resistance. Visit their website here.

This event is co-sponsored by the Women’s Center at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY and by the Environment Community Humanities Oasis (ECHO) project led by Ryan Mann-Hamilton as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center CUNY.