Join us for a conversation with two herbalists and authors!
Dara Saville is the founder of Albuquerque Herbalism and the executive director of the Yerba Mansa Project, a nonprofit organization. Her work involves teaching herbalists, organizing the community to undertake native medicinal plant restoration on public lands, writing on medicinal plants and landscapes of the Southwest, and fostering a renewed land connection through public events and field trips. Dara is the author of the University of New Mexico Press book, The Ecology of Herbal Medicine: A Guide to Plants and Living Landscapes of the American Southwest and a contributing author to several herbal compendium books. She is currently a Geography and Environmental Studies PhD student in a joint program at the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University.
Atava Garcia Swiecicki is the author of The Curanderx Toolkit: Reclaiming Ancestral Latinx Plant Medicine and Rituals for Healing. She is “guided by her dreams and her Mexican, Polish, and Hungarian ancestors.” She received a BA in feminist studies from Stanford University and a master’s degree from the Indigenous Mind Program at Naropa University in Oakalnd. Atava has studied healing arts extensively for over thirty years and has been mentored by herbalists, curanderas, and traditional knowledge keepers. She works as a clinical herbalist and teacher. She is the founder of the Ancestral Apothecary School of Herbal, Folk, and Indigenous Medicine on Ohlone territory in Oakland, and she currently lives in unceded Tewa Pueblo territory in the Southwest.