Lori arviso alvord wikipedia

1958 –

Lori Alvord

Surgeon

Indigenous Healing

Navajo

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Navajo kids in Crownpoint, New Mexico, didn’t usually dream of becoming doctors.

The doctors at the hospitals were typically male bilagáanas — White men. They often worked in the Indian Health Service only temporarily until getting a promotion elsewhere, so they weren’t there for long.

Lori arviso alvord wikipedia biography

Yet in Dinétah — the land of the People, the Diné, the Navajo, surrounded at four corners by four sacred mountains — a strong current flowed against Eurocentric White male authority. Diné cultural traditions are matriarchal: women maintain cultural and social bonds, keep property, and hold the lineage to clans.

These matriarchal traditions combined with the rise of American civil, Indigenous, and women’s rights, energized new possibilities to enhance medical practices by combining the wisdom of two cultures.

In this context, one of a long line of Tsi’naajinii women, a black-streaked-wo