My Indigeneity

Making the Invisible Visible

This page is an attempt to make the invisible visible. People name it all the time. They tell me what they see, what they feel. Rarely do they assume I know where it comes from. Rarely do they show interest in asking. They name it before I can tell them myself.

I come from Guinaudée, in the Northwest of Haiti. I was born at the health center right next to the church, in a small countryside community where the sun rose from behind the mountains every morning and breathed us while we stood on top of them. My grandmother's yard held fruit trees in every direction. There were soursop trees and tamarind, cacao and oranges, grapefruit and custard apples, guava and pomegranate. Corn grew in the ground alongside pigeon peas, lima beans, and beans of every color: black, white, and red. Tobacco grew there too, and chickens walked freely through it all. Above us, flocks of parrots would fly over in formation; their colors moving across the sky filled me with joy as a child. I have loved birds my whole life, so deeply that I could never own one. I could never cage a bird.

Underneath all of it was a normalized peace that I did not have a name for because it did not need one. It was simply life. The smell of strong, freshly brewed Haitian coffee moved through everything.

My grandparents lived within a restoration of African indigeneity that had taken root on Haitian soil. After the Revolution, my ancestors rebuilt lives on that land that were not unlike the lives of the Taíno, the indigenous people of Haiti who had inhabited those mountains and valleys long before colonization. The corn, the cacao, the yuca, the ways of being in relation with the earth and with one another were not relics. They were a living civilization that required no outside validation to know its own worth.

I am the first in my lineage to be fully immersed in modernity. And I feel every day what that immersion costs.

My mother was pregnant with me when my parents returned to the countryside from Port-de-Paix, the biggest city in the Northwest. They had lost a child before me, and something moved them back toward the land. I was born into that return. On the day I arrived, my father held me up and prayed. He asked God that the world would know this child, and that this child would know the world. God answered. I have traveled, spoken on radio and television, connected with people from every corner of the earth. But the foundation under all of that movement was laid in Guinaudée, in the quiet, in the mountains, in my grandmother's yard.

My parents applied to come to America when I was three years old. They were denied. I did not arrive until I was twelve. I used to wonder what kind of person I would have been had I come earlier. Now I know that denial was a gift. It gave me nine more years on that mountain; nine more years of that life living itself into my body before modernity could reach me.

These parts of me get erased every day. Veiled by stereotypes, flattened by a culture that has decided what Haiti means before I open my mouth. A culture that has no room for Guinaudée, no room for a way of life that does not center self-improvement and consumption as its organizing principles. A culture that mistakes kindness for naivety and ease in the body for ignorance.

I feel that erasure in my body. In the bracing across my upper back and shoulders. In the weight I carry around my belly. In the shrinking of my natural curiosity and wonder when I move through a world that is not always safe for me or for my people. My nervous system feels it. Even with all of my training, my body responds to threat the way any body does. Sometimes I freeze. And then I gather myself, and I go; because this work matters and the people I serve deserve my full presence.

When I need to return to myself, I go to nature. The trees have never discriminated against me. Neither has the sky, the earth, or the birds. I have complete belonging there. That belonging is not metaphorical. It is the same belonging I felt in my grandmother's yard. It is the same belonging I felt both times I traveled to Africa.

I went to Africa in 2016 and again in 2019. Both times, after we settled in, I slept and slept and slept, going deeper and deeper into a profound slumber I did not even know I needed. I was sleeping just fine before those trips. I had no idea my body was carrying that kind of weight until it finally set it down. Now I have language for what happened. My nervous system switched automatically into parasympathetic state. My body recognized the land. It was like a bird flying back home. For those days, the United States was completely decentered. I left the US field and entered a different field, a different collective. My body said: right land, right time zone, everything right. I had that same experience in Haiti in 2008. A reset so complete I did not know I was carrying the weight until it lifted.

I am an acupuncture physician. I work along the meridians, which I perceive as rivers and highways moving through the body. I perceive the acupuncture points as multidimensional portals that can be stimulated to bring about healing. Every human body carries the same points, the same channels, the same organs, regardless of where that person comes from. My work keeps returning me to our fundamental likeness. I work along our sameness. That is both my clinical method and my spiritual practice.

My spirituality is simple. It is about connecting to my essence and to the divine, and understanding divinity as frequency. Love has a frequency. Grace has a frequency. Mercy has a frequency. I have learned to speak whatever language a person uses to name these things because the name has never been what interests me. Soleil in Haitian Creole, sol in Spanish, sun in English: all pointing to the same light. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. I live in that understanding naturally. My natural inclination has always been to connect to the language before words. That is the indigeneity I never lost.

My mother raised me in a Catholic home. She gave me the church, the education, the doctrine. But she never deprogrammed my nature. She added nurture without erasing what was already there. My nature remained intact. That has been my saving grace. Reindigenating has been more of a reveal for me than a road I had to walk back to; because I never left.

I am ancient and I am futuristic simultaneously. I carry my grandmother and our neighbors into every room I enter: into the private practice, into the healing space, into every one on one encounter with a patient. I have always brought that world with me. It has simply been too invisible. The stereotypes and projections have gotten too heavy. This page is my correction of that.

The tree does not choose between roots and branches. It grows both simultaneously. The deeper the root system, the higher the branches can reach. I am rooted in Guinaudée, in Northwest Haiti, in a lineage that survived everything and restored itself anyway. And I continue to grow forward, into modernity, into the future, carrying my ancestors with me into new territory.

That is reindigenating. That is who I am. And I never left.