A Medical Archaeopedagogy of the Human Body as a Trauma-Informed Teaching Strategy for Indigenous Mexican-American Students

Abstract

In this article, three co-authors share their narratives and clay figurines sculpted during the Mesoamerican Figurine Project of Rio Hondo College (Garcia, in press-a). Through reflective writing exercises and the sculpting of small-scale clay figurines, Los Angeles-based MexicanAmerican students unearthed parts of their Mesoamerican ancestry and materialized their stories of displacement and violence to assist in meeting student learning outcomes (SLOs). After interpreting these data alongside the medical tools observed on the four Tezcatlipocas of Mesoamerica (Acosta, 2007), the supposition is that Indigenous Mesoamerican students benefit when engaged through the following topics: 1) land and cosmology, 2) trauma and medicine, 3) resiliency and self-determination, and 4) community and family. To support all students' educational and mental health goals, and to prevent further trauma accumulation, the Mesoamerican figurine is modeled as a pedagogical tool with a wide range of therapeutic values.By employing a critical autoethnographic approach (Ohito, 2017), Instructor Garcia's ancestral knowledge-combined with his students' insights-enabled his conceptualization of a medical archaeopedagogy of the human body as a trauma-informed teaching strategy (Cole, Eisner, Gregory, & Ristuccia, 2013) to begin to address the mental health challenges prevalent in the MexicanAmerican community related to the cultural genocide of Native Americans.

Cultivating Positive Health, Learning, and Community: The Return of Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl and the Venus Star

“…(2) walks with his or her own mirror for constant self-reflection (Acosta 2007); (3) is a cultivator of Panche Be (profound knowledge) (Rodríguez 2017); and (4) serves the Hispanic-Latino community through an Indigenous lens (Cuauhtin 2016;Garcia 2019;Garcia et al 2018), all while being mindful of the Native peoples whose traditional lands they live in and work on. Most importantly, we engage with the reclaiming and sustainment of the good health stripped from Indigenous peoples through generations of violence.…”

“…In the process of cultivating their relationship to both the land and cosmology, Indigenous Xicana/o/x educators (IXEs) have wrestled with how to effectively engage the fast-growing and heterogeneous Latina/o population (Flores 2017) while considering the group's high prevalence for mental health disparities (Diaz and Fenning 2017;Lisotto 2017;Lopez et al 2012), as well as their own health and well-being challenges while working in spaces of learning (see Caballero 2019;Toscano 2016;Urrieta 2017Urrieta , 2019Zepeda 2020). To offer novel solutions for both IXEs and their learners, we add to an ongoing body of work (Garcia , 2019Garcia et al 2018;Márquez and Garcia Forthcoming) on a more ancestral teaching tradition that will better serve the diverse Native American identities that cross paths in schools, homes, and communities. We draw inspiration from the work of IXEs (e.g., Arce 2016;Cuauhtin 2016;Luna and Galeana 2016;Rodríguez 2017;Toscano 2016;Zepeda 2020), from the insights of the late healthcare practitioner Elena Avila (see Avila and Parker 1999), and most recently, the authors in Medina and Gonzales (2019), who, through various practices, address the mind, body, and spiritual challenges of the day.…”

Indigenous Reflections on Identity, Trauma, and Healing: Navigating Belonging and Power

“…Part of the uneasiness in the book is rooted in the discomfort over writing about conflict in which there are at least two competing sides within layers of complexities. The mothers' movement I write about was violent in many ways and engaging the violence in a book brings out what some scholars have referred to as historical and intergenerational traumas (Duran and Duran 1995;Yellow Horse Brave Heart et al 2011;Beltrán and Begun 2014;Garcia et al 2018).…”

Contesting Trauma and Violence through Indigeneity and a Decolonizing Pedagogy at Rio Hondo Community College

“…Contesting trauma and violence simply implies Indigeneity as a measure to mediate and possibly prevent the accumulation of harmful feelings and experiences. In Garcia et al (2018), I model the most likely therapeutic benefits of clay-work (next section) and reflective writing as pedagogy in the classroom; this literature should be consulted. Elsewhere, Silvia Toscano (2016) has argued that such teaching strategies are needed to begin the recovery from various forms of intergenerational trauma preserved by cycles of oppression.…”

“…Jack D. Forbes (1973) worked steadily to teach and engage Mestizas/os of mixed blood as Indigenous; yet, likeminded approaches still have little support from the academy (Miner, 2014). Current works (Alberto, 2017;Arce, 2016;Avila & Parker, 1999;Cuauhtin, 2016;Garcia, Arciga, Sanchez, & Arredondo, 2018;Gómez-Quiñones, 2012;Gonzales, 2012;Miner, 2014;Rodríguez, 2014), however, now allow us to interpret and live out the Xicana/o experience in the context of ceremony, maíz culture, and interregional interaction as Native Americans. A more self-determined way of teaching and learning must arise, I argue, as Indigenous people remain marginalizedand criminalizeddespite their openness toward assimilating into White-American culture.…”