Healing Justice Grant: Health Clinic, Mexico

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April, 2025

This is our second year of distributing Healing Justice Grants. These grants have two main objectives. The first is to resource communities that are creating primary healing pathways. The second is to create a library of healing methods for public use, so we can build communal knowledge pools from which to imagine more healing pathways that are era resilient. 

BACKGROUND AND RELEVANCE

Indigenous health in Turtle Island has very unique needs due to planetary dysregulation, land grabs, and forced banishment from Ancestral Lands. Additionally, it is very underfunded, leaving many communities without basic healthcare infrastructure. This in turn adds to our slow but violent genocide we have been experiencing for over 500 years. 

Whilst our work is concentrated in the United Kingdom, it is important that we learn from those already in practice. We intend to create infrastructure for Solidarity Healing Hubs in the UK for communities facing deep health challenges. This work from Mexico can provide us with methods and learnings for our work in the UK. It can also help create mental infrastructure for healing imaginations not currently available. 

ABOUT THE CLINIC

They cater to Indigenous health needs and work towards reviving Land Kinship. As of 2014 the women of the area have organised various gatherings and workshops to build and exchange knowledges. This has built up their confidence towards creating more structural forms of local healthcare. Specifically, they have exchanged information regarding local Ancentral medicinal plants, they have walked with healing grandmothers to learn long-standing healing practices of their Peoples. This work and learnings led them to train various groups of women as health promoters, “they decided to name their journey Barefoot Medicine.” 

After 2020, instigated by Covid-19, where the health clinic became a structural lifeline for the community, they put their accumulated health knowledges into the creation of a communal health clinic. During the pandemic they created methods for going house-to-house with questionnaires to help create diagnostics. The women were able to identify who would be treated with local medicinal plants and those who would be taken to the hospitals (those identified as having comorbidities that put them at high risk of complications). This methodology proved to be effective and saved a very marginalised community from complete health collapse. With the tools they learned during this period, the women decided they needed to establish a permanent health centre. Their vision was a physical space “where we can have our plants, our office, our waiting room, and our massage space”. 

They now have a physical space and the questionnaires developed during the pandemic have been developed into comprehensive medical records for the community. The clinic has three objectives, the first is to share what they have learned over the years. The second, is to become known as women who can heal using Ancestral medicines. The third objective is to “invite more women and men to the training workshops they promote for community organizing and to transform painful subjectivities into active and emancipatory ones.”

THE USE OF THE GRANT

We gave the women £2,000.00 to use over 2024. Given that the clinic has been around for over 10 years, we gave the grant with no guidance or Centric infrastructure. These women are experienced and knew exactly how to use the grant. The purpose of this reporting is not one of supervision, it is one of sharing. We hope that others looking to start similar initiatives can nourish their imagination through this work. 

This grant is one of three grants we will be issuing to this cohort with the aim of preparing them for further structural funding. To date at the receipt of the first grant, the women were able to do the following with the funding;

1. The clinic is now able to open once per week, whereas before it was once per month. This is providing consistency within the community. 

2. They can plan and host more health based activities.

3. They have money for transportation and food, which allows the women to access the clinic at a more frequent basis (once per week). 

4. They have purchased more medicinal plants. 

5. They have also grown their garden in general, which has given the women a space that elevates their mood, gives them wellbeing, and peace of mind. 

6. The clinic has now been to have a full set of supplies to create Ancestral plant medicines and they are now working towards creating a small natural pharmacy. 

7. There is also more motivation and a boost in morale as the women can meet more often.

8. The consistency has also led women to restart their interactions with the clinic.

9. With the increased use of the clinic, the women are now able to also include young women in the activities. Creating space for a new generation of community health workers. 

LEARNINGS

The following are set of learnings directly from the this health clinic

1. Community shaped and stewarded health infrastructure saves lives across various modalities.

1. Reviving Ancestral medicinal practices that can tackle simple illnesses

2. Identifying complex diseases that require a systemic approach 

3. Be a place where people can fortify and nourish mind/body/spirit. This has a direct impact on complex diseases such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and cardiovascular diseases. If community clinics are able to contribute to the treatment of these types of complex diseases, it can help prevent further escalation of the diseases as well as prevent comorbidities. This could have massive impacts in their overall health. 

2. Being able to heal one’s community provides people with confidence, morale boost, and a sense of purpose. All mental factors that contribute to an overall sense of autonomy and liberation. 

3. This type of healthcare takes time, in this case it has taken over 15 years. This makes sense as it takes people time to trust, identify methods, build infrastructure, and acquire funds. Taking one’s time also provides space for reflection and ensuring that what is set up is truly bottom up. From an Indigenous/Turtle Island perspective, it also allows healthcare practices to be rooted in the Land and Ancestral wisdoms, essential for spiritual and physical survival. 

4. Based on their reporting and conversations we have had with them along the way, we have identified three crucial steps in setting a community health clinic

1. A sustained time for gatherings and workshops

1. This helps build knowledge infrastructure

2. It helps create Kinship and trust amongst the community

3. Provides time to acknowledge traditional/local medicinal and health infrastructures. 

2. Method Building

1. This clinic has craft and deep methodology; 

1. How they create the questionnaires

2. How they conduct the questionnaires 

3. How they use the data collected

4. How they are acquiring and building Ancestral knowledges 

5. They speak of “fortifying the heart”, which is the root of their healing practices. This mental and spiritual framing is woven across all of their health practices.

6. How they are creating structural methods of healing 

7. How they are building a library of knowledges and medicines

3. Bottom-up and Slow Implementation

1. Part of their methodology is to “walk” their work. Which means questioning, observing and taking their time for the implementation to emerge. 

2. Being able to have space to work deeper on what works and getting rid of what doesn’t. 

5. For those of us of an Indigenous/Land-Kinned, we spend so much of our time reacting to the systems of oppression. Whether we are opposing it, moving away from it, advocating against, negotiating with it, and so on. These clinics made it feel like there is another way, one where we can exist without being in this state of response. These women, specifically during the pandemic turned to each other and created healing pathways, rather than relinquishing themselves to the potential loss. They also didn’t negotiate, plead, or react to the oppressive system that chose to ignore them during this time of need. We are identifying this phenomenon as Health Reparations, which are for us and by us - it feels like Liberation. 

REFLECTIONS AND CONTEMPLATIONS

The following are reflections and contemplation based on their reporting.

1. Healthcare systems like the NHS have an opportunity to learn from bottom-up healthcare practices. It can help shape treatment and diagnostics. 

2. Part of healing is feeling like we are in community, supported, and in Kinship. This has long been studied as a treatment for depression, anxiety, and even cardiovascular diseases. This mainly happens through the regulation of the stress response, which in turn helps regulate the endocrine system. 

1. Could we create a body of work that helps create more deliberate strategies related to communal healing?

2. Could we understand further the physiological workings of heart fortification, in order to craft more healing methodologies ?

3. How do we speak of science not as a “western” tool, but as a universal tool for deeper understanding of phenomena? A tool for building deep craft and methods of healing?

4. How do we use science to deepen our connection with Ancestral wisdoms and medicines?

3. How do we create pathways of Kinship with systems like the NHS to create more robust and holistic healing? 

4. What does post NHS treatment look like at the community level? What infrastructure could be created at the community level to care for people that are post treatment or even in treatment? 

5. How could a Kinship with the NHS reduce recovery time, not from a capitalist perspective but one deep healing? For a person to be able to return to their life more nourished and fortified.

6. Can starting healing hubs in the UK help reduce harm for socially vulnerable communities? Help restore trust in structural healthcare systems?

7. What does it mean to heal? What does it mean at a time when we will continually need healing?

8. What does it mean to have our hearts, bodies, minds, spirits fortified?

9. What does it mean to feel dignity? What is the relationship between dignity and healing?

The Living Indigenous Encyclopaedias For Health Justice

Principles for Engaging with Traditional Ecological Knowledges in Urban Systems

Envisioning a Healthier Urban Way of Living: Indigenous Sovereignty in Los Angeles and Beyond

Pathways to Health Injustices for Indigenous Peoples

Two Essays on Non-Western Approaches to Healing

The Mental Distress of Environmental Injustice

Planetary Dysregulation & Indigenous Communities

The History of Disease

Health as Ecological

Symbiotic Living with Nature