This morning, I attended a Women’s Leadership and Policy Summit 2024 at San Jose State university. One of my very dearest & amazing friends hosted a panel discussion on ‘Building Networks Across Cultures and Generations’. This featured a very diverse panel of leaders including one who was an Ohlone elder who is also in the legal team of Wikipedia, fighting for First Amendment rights.
She spoke about how rights to land, water, and speech are often tied to each other. That was validation because I had read ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’, again one of the finest books of wisdom I’ve read in years.
However, I was struck by how she introduced herself when she began. She said her name aloud, but then added that she was a daughter of X and granddaughter of Y and great granddaughter of Z. All women.
We’re all products of our ancestors. Hindus know this instinctively because very year we pay homage to the departed multiple times during ceremonies honoring our ancestors. (One such major ceremony is called पितृ पक्ष (Pitru Paksha). Every micro-decision made by our ancestors have affected us deeply. My maternal great-grandfather was one of the first Indians to graduate from the Forestry school in Dehradun My paternal grandfather decided to focus on mathematics and made his son a mathematics teacher.
The Indian Forester Journal of the previous century carries a post of my maternal great-grandfather’s (Narasimha Murti Rao) appointment.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about him. How he, as a ranger, used to ride his white horse, in various forests and villages in what is now Bangalore. How his family was worried about tigers & leopards attacking him, while he didn’t give a damn. His bravery is supposed to rub off some of his descendants. My mother believed that some of it had rubbed off on me, after I ran marathons, swam, biked, and generally stretched my limits. Oh, dear. I wish I was half as brave as him.
Do we really have free will? Or is it turtles all the way down?
Later that morning, I remembered this introduction since it reminded me so much of one of the finest books I’ve read in the last three years.
Dr. Alvord graduated from Dartmouth and later from the Stanford school of medicine, both achievements which were beyond the realm of comprehension for her as a product of the “Indian reservation” system.
After graduating from Stanford, she could have chosen a privileged life anywhere on the planet. Yet, she decided to go back to the reservation to practice medicine amongst the underprivileged. She had underestimated how much her western ideas of medicine would hinder her ability to cure people.
In the beginning, she went all western, saying “hi” and asking her patients to describe their symptoms. She got nowhere.
She realized very soon that she had to immerse herself into native American tradition and understand, as well as be empathetic to her patients instead of being transactional.
So she started to introduce herself in the Dine way; Lori Alviso Alvord, daughter of …, granddaughter of…. etc. Soon her patients began to make connections, threads that only a link of blood could establish. This gave them permission, often quite a long time into their appointment (say 20-30 mins) to share why they were at the doctor’s office.
In the culture prevalent at that time in the reservation, a diagnosis of cancer meant that the person would be an outcaste in the tribe. People would consider the patient as cursed and ignore them.
Dr. Alvord’s patients talking about that lump on their bodies or about other complications meant that she got an insight into their lives way before anyone else. She made inroads in the scientific world while acknowledging the complexities of the modern patient.
Which reminded me of what the word ‘intelligence’ really means, especially now that Chat GPT-4 is being used. Jared Diamond’s phenomenal work, ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies’, offers an interesting hypothesis.
I will keep watching and learning. After all, I am a conservative of doubt.
Thoughts?
I love reading your posts especially your book recommendations.