Contact us at xochicalli.indigequeermedicine@gmail.com or wakanwiyadrum@gmail.com

Xochicalli- House of Flowers: IndigeQueer Medicine & Healing 

Our Xochicalli organization was initiated and activated as a cultural programming series exploring the subject of IndigeQueer Medicina in 2024:

What does it mean to seek traditional medicine in our IndigeQueer communities?

How does the passing on of ancestral knowledge change and transmute with the medicine carrier, while still remaining fundamentally grounded in tradition?

When our teachers/elders/maestros, maestras, maestrxs are IndigeQueer people, does this change our learning/ hearing/ receiving from our culture bearers for generations of IndigeQueer Two Spirit and Native TG/GNC LGBQIA+ GenderQueer peoples who have held these teachings many times in translation (!) because of the limits of patriarchy, colonization, language, and expression? 

What happens to Indigenous ancestral knowledge / concocimiento and our conversations around those knowledge forms when IndigeQueer folk learn from IndigeQueer elders and teachers?

Xochicalli was first developed as a programming initiative by Casa Tia Luna in 2024 as an important offering to the multi-generational community of IndigeQueer folx that began to form after CTL began holding in-person programming after the Covid pandemic. The Wakan Wiya Two Spirit Drum community opened up opportunities for collaborative work. Casa Tia Luna events, since it's founding in 2020, have held space for ancestral healing with Indigenous healing practitioners and medicine carriers, culture bearers, and artists for BIPOC communities in the Bay Area. The circles and workshops helped our communities experience traditional wellness practices from which our urban Indigenous communities in diaspora are too often separated, including their traditional art and healing forms. It has been a great honor to co-create with a multigenerational IndigeQueer community this focused programming curriculum that continues to envisions a future for Oakland’s Indigenous communities where we can address our histories, and invest in our next generations.

For the important discussions ahead for our Two Spirit and IndigeQueer community, Xochicalli is offering a collaborative road of collective learning and healing paths together. Launching Xochicalli was only possible with the help of our beautiful IndigeQueer CTL community who brought it to life:

The vision behind the initiative, the curricular design for our first set of offerings, so much editing, the logo design, fly flyers and registration pages, and the final boost for launching 🚀were all collective works by many, including but not limited to: zamora, susana, nenu, vreni, lorena, saguaro, yoyo, cielo, yoli, carmen, joanna, and luz. Our sweet logo was offered up by Chamuco @amor_eterno_arte. We are truly grateful for the blessing of a wonderful community! 

In 2024, Xochicalli first year was partially funded by the Replanting Seeds Grant from the Queer Cultural Center! Thanks to QCC and BAAITS for their support for us and IndigeQueer programming and community!

As we move ahead, we look forward to the ways in which our growing IndigeQueer familia will come together to vision the next iterations of this same work: the wellness and growth of our Two Spirit and IndigeQueer people. We are walking together with this amazing lineage of IndigeQueer medicina.