Felicia Cocotzin Ruizm, an indigenous chef, is teaching traditional cooking techniques to help Native American communities restore food sovereignty.
“I come from a place of ancestral wisdom,” says Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz, an indigenous foods activist and curandera—traditional healer—who has been called the “godmother of the movement to decolonize the kitchen.”
FELICIA COCOTZIN RUIZ is a curandera, indigenous foods activist, and natural foods chef whose work is deeply rooted in the healing properties of all earth medicines. Creating remedies in her tiny adobe kitchen, friends lovingly called Felicia “the kitchen curandera”, hence her business name was born.
WHAT IS A CURANDERA? Curanderas are traditional healers, who carry knowledge of foods, herbs, and other cultural remedies working with the body, mind, and spirit. In curanderismo, it is believed that disease can be caused by psychological, physical, and spiritual factors, creating disharmony of the body, mind, or spirit. Curanderas help bring people out of that diseased state and back into harmony with various remedies and little rituals.
Curanderismo has been practiced throughout the Americas for over five hundred years, with each healer offering a unique skillset applying her natural gifts and training. Felicia’s own maternal great-grandmother was a curandera in northern New Mexico, where she caught babies, provided hands-on healing, and created herbal remedies for her community and family.
SO IT IS WITH GREAT HONOR, that with permission from her elders and earning the title of Curandera in ceremony, Felicia carries on the lineage of natural healing ways through private consultations, medicine workshops, and ceremony.
Felicia completed training as a massage practitioner from Bio-Link Therapeutic Massage Institute (1995), holds a certificate in holistic aromatherapy from the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts (1996), is a graduate of the T. Colin Campbell Plant-Based Nutrition Studies Program (2014), is a yoga nidra instructor certified by the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center of Los Angeles (2017), is an instructor for the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine’s Online Immersion Program, and is the board chair for the non-profit N.A.T.I.F.S. Felicia was given the title of Curandera with a ceremony held in her honor by one of her Maestras, Curandera Patricia Federico, in the spring of 2018.
Felicia continues to study the ethnobotany of the Southwest with her favorite teachers, the indigenous grandmothers of the region.
Support the cause and visit her website.
https://www.kitchencurandera.com/
or her facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/FeliciaCocotzinRuiz
