The medical industrial complex.
It is such a trip as I engage in this process of healing. It is a return to all the knowledge systems that are actually Indigenous to me as someone with South Asian, African and Indigineous heritages. And to watch the way that the White Able Bodied Capitalist Machine first decried all of our knowledge as 'voodoo' as 'pagan nonsense' as 'primitive' and now the most 'progressive of people rename and appropriate our sciences while simaltaneously othering and alienating us.
All the while, we are meant to practice this thing called western science, that from everything that we know has literally been founded on the destruction of the bodies of womyn and trans folks, Indigineous People and People Of Colour. From the founding of western science's modern gynecology with the forcible sterilization and removal of the uterus' of enslaved African Womyn to simply using a standard for treatment that is based on conceptions of what a 'normal body is'. Namely, euro-western, hearing, cisgender, heterosexual....
And we are shamed when we do engage our own practices. The yoga I practiced with my grandfather becomes 'new age' and the way we eat back home in Venezuala gets called 'macrobiotic'. And we stop being who we are, and they call us 'urban' as though we were grown from the concrete.
And they buy all our homelands and they call it 'cottage country' or 'private beaches' and we can't go home and we can't even drink the water because it's flooded with all these chemicals that your science said would be good for us and our sciences said all along - that no they would not.
And you call it 'organic' when all that really means is that it is without your 'superior chemicals' and then we are judged for eating white bread, when it was your science that told us that we should do it in the first place.
Powerful reminders are all around us that we know more about our own individual bodies than anyone else and that is a valid type of science, based on our own lived and embodied inquiry. Our communities also practice significant and varied types of sciences, there isn't one type of science that is better than all the rest, there are just different kinds suited for different experiences and purpose.
And if there was, it would not be funded by Monsanto, trust and believe.
#trustyourstruggle #trustyourbody#trustthosethatloveandrespectyou