[00:00:00] Emily Race-Newmark: Welcome to This is How We Care, a podcast where we look at what it means to embody care, not as an individual practice, but a collective one, and to see what kind of world emerges from this place.

[00:00:12] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you for being here. I am your host, Emily Race.

[00:00:15] Emily Race-Newmark: Today, we are joined by Dr. Rupa Marya, a physician, activist, writer, mother, and composer. She's also a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. 

[00:00:31] Emily Race-Newmark: Dr. Marya founded the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, and learning.

[00:00:40] Dr. Rupa Marya: I am the daughter of Punjabi immigrants. I was born and raised here and occupied unceded Ohlone territories in what is now called Mountain View, California. My parents left India because of the violences of colonialism that were enacted upon our peoples that extracted trillions of dollars of wealth from India, taking that to what is now Europe. 

[00:01:04] Dr. Rupa Marya: That understanding when I was a child, going to India and being with my grandparents and seeing the abject poverty and the way children there were on the streets... It seemed like some sort of historical accident that I was in this very safe and well-resourced environment while these children were starving on the streets.

[00:01:25] Dr. Rupa Marya: Starting to think about what are the things that led me to being here and them to being there? What are the things that led me to being here in a place where I don't see evidence of Ohlone culture or the way that things have been here for thousands and thousands of years—it's been erased.

[00:01:43] Dr. Rupa Marya: Learning how to listen to the things that are unspoken and learning how to see the things that are invisible, these have been the things that I have been really drawn to in my life and in my work as a storyteller, as a musician, as a mother, as a person, a settler here on land that must be unsettled.

[00:02:03] Dr. Rupa Marya: The Deep Medicine Circle is a non profit that was formed as COVID was raging and in the wake of George Floyd when there was a mobilization of people wanting to repair historical harms. 

[00:02:16] Dr. Rupa Marya: There was land that was coming up that was available for people to farm and some of our Ohlone friends asked us to help them get that land back.

[00:02:24] Dr. Rupa Marya: So it brought forward this work that myself, my husband and our friend Charlene Eigen-Vasquez who is an Ohlone tribal lawyer, had been talking about for about 10 years before. What if we could imagine a way of being together on this land where we partnered, where we took care of land, where we took care of people in a way that hasn't been possible with the architectures of power that have been laid out through colonization and the harms that have been done?

[00:02:50] Dr. Rupa Marya: The Deep Medicine Circle is our attempt to bring together indigenous and diasporic peoples together to advance a vision for the way things could be better— and our relationships to land, to each other, and to the web of life.

[00:03:07] Dr. Rupa Marya: If colonization has fractured our relationships to each other through division and conquering, if colonization has— as Aimé Césaire says, "It's a process of thingification." So taking beings—such as the land, and the water, and the plants, and the animals that are part of our worlds—and turn them into "things" that can be exploited and sold and commodified and traded.

[00:03:31] Dr. Rupa Marya: What happens when you do the opposite? Re awaken our understanding of all of these beings as who they are and how they are in relationship to us and to one another. 

[00:03:43] Dr. Rupa Marya: That is deeply at the core of the Deep Medicine Circle. We work in food, in medicine, in storytelling, in restoration, and in learning.

[00:03:52] Dr. Rupa Marya: We are in our third year now and it's been quite a journey of the people who are actually working on the land with us, and then this huge web of beloved community who are attached to this work and helping to breathe in the meaning and the significance of this work, which has been truly profound. 

[00:04:11] Emily Race-Newmark: first discovered Dr. Marya's work in 2021. When she was speaking about her recently published best selling book co-authored with Raj Patel, "Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice". I highly recommend you check out this book if you enjoy what you hear today and want to learn more.

[00:04:30] Emily Race-Newmark: While my understanding of inflammation is very rudimentary, I've heard more and more discourse about the effects that long term, or chronic, inflammation can have on our bodies: damaging healthy cells, tissues, and organs, and over time, linking to the development of several diseases, including cancer, heart disease, type two diabetes, dementia, to name a few.

[00:04:51] Emily Race-Newmark: And what is causing this inflammation? 

[00:04:54] Emily Race-Newmark: Dr. Marya's coauthored book brings to light, " the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Inflammation is connected to the food we eat, the air we breathe. The diversity of the microbes living inside of us, which regulate everything from our brain's development to our immune systems functioning. It's connected to the number of traumatic events we experienced as children and to the traumas endured by our ancestors. It's connected not only to access, to healthcare, but to the very models of health that physicians practice. In the story of cancer and chemistry, the harm comes from exposure, and exposure inversely follows gradients of social power. Disproportionate harm is wrought on liberalism's second class citizens, the working class, women, and children, the disabled, and the colonized." 

[00:05:49] Emily Race-Newmark: Our bodies, our societies, and our planet are inflamed. This context, perhaps groundbreaking for some of us and affirming for others, was a critical piece I wanted to unpack further in interviewing Dr. Marya, and to start to learn about ,some of the new models for care that might counter this current paradigm, and open our collective health to an alternative possibility.

[00:06:10] Emily Race-Newmark: With all of that in the background, let's dive into more of this interview with Dr. Rupa Marya, which was originally recorded on November 27th, 2023.

[00:06:19] Dr. Rupa Marya: The biggest challenge of our time is overthrowing capitalism. And all of the intellectual underpinnings that come with it. The colonial capitalist mindset.

[00:06:33] Dr. Rupa Marya:  We call it colonial capitalism , Raj Patel and I, our book Inflamed because we understand that colonialism is an ongoing set of structures and ideas that shape the way we form the world. Here in the United States, that is formed through land theft from indigenous people, through exploitation and wage theft of many different kinds of people, through making people vulnerable— through keeping food, shelter and medicine limited and scarce so that they will sell their labor. Which is the only thing that they then have to sell in order to keep this economic engine running. 

[00:07:15] Dr. Rupa Marya: The theft of land, the theft of labor for the purpose of making profit—these were all explicitly outlined in a papal decree from 1455 in which Nicholas V was giving the right to the European kings to go and conquer all those brown people's lands, commit them to enslavement, and use them for the purpose of your profit.

[00:07:35] Dr. Rupa Marya: Those papal decrees were collectively known as the doctrine of discovery, which it sounds like the Pope now feels sorry for. That doctrine shaped the understanding, the cosmology, the way of seeing the world that Europeans went forward and exploited and extracted from all of these different places around the world.

[00:07:56] Dr. Rupa Marya: When we look at what we're living with today, whether we're looking at Israel and Palestine, the United States, Canada. Whether we're looking even at India, which is a nation that was created in the fall of British Empire, created through the world economic relationships that were dictated by Europe. That we are still living with those structures intact. And they will determine everything from housing policy to food policy to climate policy.

[00:08:27] Dr. Rupa Marya:  If we do not understand those relationships, we won't know how to shift them and change them.

[00:08:34] Dr. Rupa Marya: The way that we understand this work, myself as a physician, is that these structures created through colonial capitalism do damage. And the body's reaction to damage, or the threat of damage, is a chronic inflammatory response. And that damage can be something as real as the effect of breathing in microplastics by the gallons. It can be as real as the impact of working the night shift, or living in a neighborhood that experiences racist police violence. T hose kinds of exposures drive a chronic inflammatory response in the body.

[00:09:14] Dr. Rupa Marya: And the more they add up, the more inflammatory disease you see. This is why black folks in America have higher rates of almost every chronic inflammatory disease we have and black Africans don't have those, because those societies are not structured in the same way. 

[00:09:33] Dr. Rupa Marya: This damage applies not just to the impact on the human body, but also the impact on the planet. Our earth is literally inflamed from the same concepts that would render beings, turn them into things. Things to be mined or things to be damned or things to be cut down and used. As opposed to things to be honored and things to be respected and things to be protected because they are part of a whole system of living.

[00:10:01] Dr. Rupa Marya: Care is political, care is, critical. and care is something that has been deeply undervalued in a capitalist economy. 

[00:10:11] Dr. Rupa Marya: The care work of making babies, the people who are raising those children and teaching them and making sure that they're fed and in a stable and healthy environment. That's a lot. That's a tremendous amount of work. I'm shocked every morning I can get my kids out the door on time to school. It's really like a small miracle that happens every day in my household and then still managed to get all the work done that we do.

[00:10:36] Dr. Rupa Marya: Imagine if carers were really centered in an economy, what that would look like. Imagine if carers who were taking care of the earth and making sure that the soil was healthy and that the water was clear and free of toxins, that the air was safe to breathe, that those people were uplifted and taking care of themselves, so that the care work could continue.

[00:10:58] Dr. Rupa Marya: I can see that world, and that world already exists, but it is diametrically opposed to the engine of our economic realities living in the heart of U. S. Empire as we're watching, the Gazan health care system completely destroyed and targeted, and destroyed by U. S. Sponsored Israeli airstrikes and military targeting. 

[00:11:26] Dr. Rupa Marya: When we see that violence towards care workers, under any pseudo justification that there must be military command centers underneath so let's bomb the hospitals and bomb the schools and bomb the residential buildings and thousands and thousands of people dead.

[00:11:42] Dr. Rupa Marya: Physicians killed in the act of serving their patients, ICU patients murdered. To me, this is the most, horrific vision, of distortion, the antithesis of what a world based in care looks like.

[00:11:58] Emily Race-Newmark: If you're liking what you're hearing so far, there's some bonus content from Dr. Rupa Maria over at our Patreon. Each contribution, no matter the size, helps to fund the production of this podcast, and as a thank you, you will receive bonus content such as: Dr. Marya's learnings from the "experiment" that is Deep Medicine Circle; what we need to unlearn as we build a culture of care; and the story behind how the book "Inflamed" was written and came to be. 

[00:12:25] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you so much for being a part of this community, supporting conversations like this one.

[00:12:29] Emily Race-Newmark: Now let's head back to Dr. Marya as she shares more about her vision for the world.

[00:12:33] Dr. Rupa Marya: I don't see health anymore as an attribute of an individual. I see health as a phenomenon that emerges when systems are in harmony. And those systems are human systems, ecological systems, social systems, economic systems. 

[00:12:53] Dr. Rupa Marya: I don't see that right now in the United States, as a whole. Even though we have different indices we could look at and go, "Okay, even though our life expectancy is falling."

[00:13:03] Dr. Rupa Marya: There are places and people on this planet where there is a vision of health, where people are living in relationship to the web of life, and people are living in relationship to each other in ways that nurture and foster care.

[00:13:17] Dr. Rupa Marya: In those circumstances and situations, health emerges. And it becomes an attribute of the whole, not something you could look at a person and say, "You're healthy. You're not healthy." So that's how I talk about health now.

[00:13:33] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, that is very helpful the way you phrase that. When these different relationships are working together, or when they're healthy, then health emerges. that's such a shift versus focusing on, "How do I get healthy? What does health look like for me?" And this zoom now on that web of life, as you mentioned.

[00:13:49] Dr. Rupa Marya: As individuals I think we can experience wellness. And I think we should, as much as we are able to control our circumstances. And that again, doesn't go for everybody. And that's a problem. 

[00:13:59] Dr. Rupa Marya: But wellness is important, like spending time learning how to quiet your mind is important. Spending time nurturing your heart with creative activities and with the company of elders and children. Those things are really important for wellness.

[00:14:16] Dr. Rupa Marya: I was bagging on the wellness bandwagon that makes us focus so much on our individual selves, but I think that it's absolutely critical that we understand how to take care of ourselves in our personal lives and in our communities. 

[00:14:30] Dr. Rupa Marya: The problem with wellness culture is that it then ends there and doesn't extend to what is the collective "we"? And how do I make sure that as I'm fed, my community is fed? So that if we all took that up just a little bit, we would be in a different place.

[00:14:45] Emily Race-Newmark: Building on that, about feeding one's community and also something you mentioned earlier around re imagining food systems, what is your vision for nourishment and food? And what a new food system or relationship could look like?

[00:14:58] Dr. Rupa Marya: We call our work with Medicine Circle "Farming is Medicine", and we believe that this should really be a part of city infrastructure, city rural interface, where land is returned back to Native people. We enter partnerships together on land care and stewardship. And if they should so agree, then that part of that land could be farmed or put into food production through agroecology; so into systems that regenerate the health of the soil and the water, and the people. 

[00:15:31] Dr. Rupa Marya: We pay farmers like stewards of health. Farmers of our health starts with healthy soil, which we believe it does, and healthy water and healthy air. If the Earth is healthy, then we will be healthy against systems level.

[00:15:44] Dr. Rupa Marya: If farmers are supported and taking care of those systems, they should be paid like the stewards of health—like doctors and nurses and other health care workers.

[00:15:54] Dr. Rupa Marya: we aim to pay our farmers area median income for their work. We give them professional development stipends. We give them opportunities to grow and learn and to teach, just like you see in medicine. That's been awesome to have the farmers and the doctors working together on re imagining what health is.

[00:16:14] Dr. Rupa Marya: The third thing we do is we decommodify all of our food. We grow it, we give it away for free to people who are experiencing food insecurity. We feed about 2,000 families in the Bay Area from two farms. One is a one acre rooftop farm in Oakland, and the other is about three acres of production space on a thirty-eight acre land return project we're working with our Ohlone friends on moving that land back into their hands. 

[00:16:38] Dr. Rupa Marya: That work, tens of thousands of pounds of food are going to people who don't have access, many of them are making less than $15,000 a year. Most of them are skipping meals so that the children in the house can eat, and almost none of them have any other access to organic food. We're looking at how that impacts health of those communities and of the farmers and of the land. We're studying all that. 

[00:17:01] Dr. Rupa Marya: And then the fourth part is that when food is liberated from the market system, it can become medicine again. We can reenter that beingness of that food, of that plant, of that medicine— as opposed to the thing and the commodity of that food. We see that as an act of liberation of our minds, of our understandings. And this work is exciting because we're now stepping into, after our second season, policymakers in Oakland very interested in seeing how this can be fit into actual city policy.

[00:17:31] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, I would love to now build on what you were just talking about with policy and bring it back to something you said earlier around the political aspect. Do we still have politics in your vision? Or what would be the vision beyond our current relationship with what's political and in our relationship with politics as a body?

[00:17:48] Dr. Rupa Marya: Oh, man, that's a big question. I think that the Earth is going to show us what she thinks of our political system. I don't think that settler colonial realities are healthy for anybody, and the U.S. is a settler colonial state.

[00:18:04] Dr. Rupa Marya: I think that unsettling is really critical, however that looks like and whatever that looks like is what will continue to imagine into being. 

[00:18:14] Dr. Rupa Marya: There will always be people who play politics and people who are involved in dynamics of power. There always have been. We have to learn how to navigate different systems and structures to affect the kinds of changes that need to happen for people who are oppressed.

[00:18:30] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. So with unsettling as a vision, and this to me connects to relationality, here you are through Deep Medicine Circle actually in partnership, as you mentioned, with the indigenous community where you were currently located. So how has that looked in practice of relationship?

[00:18:47] Emily Race-Newmark: How might we start to imagine partnership in areas where we have settler communities and oppressed indigenous communities and what is really a rife history in present that needs to be addressed alongside what we're creating. 

[00:19:02] Dr. Rupa Marya: I say that this work is the hardest work of our day and the most important work. While it's been challenging, it's something we're one-hundred percent committed to. And it's challenging precisely because of dynamics of colonialism, because of dynamics of lateral violence that colonialism inspires between different groups of people, and because this is work that doesn't really have a map. There's many different ways to do this. 

[00:19:27] Dr. Rupa Marya: For us, what we've learned in the last three years is we work with people who we feel deep alignment with, and who we feel a core of friendship with. And for us, that really has been Charlene and her family, and all the relationships she brings with her—which has been just so beautiful.

[00:19:46] Dr. Rupa Marya: It's a process of building trust, and it's a process of building a framework that I think all of us are invested in is, "Hey, here's what we've done, hopefully it's useful to you." Because it's critical that this is not just serving any particular group or any particular family or any particular tribe or tribal or whatever.

[00:20:08] Dr. Rupa Marya: This is about a movement for correction, historically. If our government, the United States Government, is not going to engage in historical reparative processes, we, together as individuals, can. We can mobilize resources. We can mobilize our local people to work together and say, "There's another way of being here together on this beautiful place of Earth."

[00:20:34] Dr. Rupa Marya: I think that entering those conversations is critical. You will screw up; and you will make mistakes; and you will either run away scared and feeling terrible, or you will just be quiet and learn and be like, "Okay, here I go. I'm committed. I'm committed to seeing this through." 

[00:20:54] Dr. Rupa Marya: That's the journey that we're on and it's phenomenal. I know that we're going to write a lot about it as it continues, because it's important for people to know where were the hiccups, and where were the missteps and what did we learn? And then how did we continue?

[00:21:09] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, absolutely. I look forward to seeing, hearing anything you share from those learnings. It brings me back to what you mentioned earlier around the feeling piece, it's like almost moving past our individual feelings that may come up [Laughter] that may not feel so good.

[00:21:21] Dr. Rupa Marya: Yeah, it's not comfortable to recognize that you're a settler. It's not comfortable to recognize that your presence is an act of violence. Just your being, because you might not have chosen to be here. I didn't choose to be born here. I was born here because they were over there, in my homeland, where a hundred million people died because of colonial policies in between 1880 and 1920 in India.

[00:21:45] Dr. Rupa Marya: That's a hundred million people. That's a holocaust we never talk about. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here. To share those stories with my friends who are Native. And to cry together and to sit in wonder together— is there a way to unravel this? Can we find the heart of our ancestors and their wisdom that was rooted in the Earth and our reverence to the Earth.

[00:22:12] Dr. Rupa Marya: Can we find a way of being together that supports and uplifts each other? Can we crawl out from under these dynamics of oppression and lateral violence to rise together. 

[00:22:26] Dr. Rupa Marya: This is why radical solidarity is a core value of the work we do at Deep Medicine Circle, and it's not something we know how to do anymore in the United States because we've been so systematically brainwashed from collective action and from collective understanding.

[00:22:44] Dr. Rupa Marya: So this has been a really beautiful part of our work is building the human family back again and saying, "Actually, of course, white people belong here. Of course, they're part of this story and part of the solution and part of the healing. Of course, these other people are part of this." So that's been a really profound and beautiful aspect of this work that I've enjoyed and been truly inspired and definitely schooled by. 

[00:23:11] Dr. Rupa Marya: I'm grateful for my teachers. I just want to give a shout out to Chief Kyleen of Winnimem Wintu Territory. She is just phenomenal and has been a great guide and teacher to me. How she walks and learns. L. Frank Manriquez as well. Sage Lapena and Tiffany Adams. So many loving women who've come by my side, Rowan White, to sit with me and listen and talk and discuss and problem solve. And of course, Charlene. This has been a beautiful experience to learn and to be committed to land returning.

[00:23:46] Dr. Rupa Marya: Because if all of California's lands were given back, and all of California's native people had an opportunity to participate in the great turning— we're standing at the edge of it. We would be in a different reality.

[00:23:58] Dr. Rupa Marya: And that's the reality. I'd happily go there, where we're bringing fire medicine back to the land, making sure the people are fed, making sure the salmon come back, making sure the water is healthy, making sure the soil is regenerated, getting those chemical weapons off the land, getting the people out from exploitative dynamics. Those are all things that will lessen our burden of chronic inflammation.

[00:24:18] Emily Race-Newmark: Mm hmm. 

[00:24:19] Emily Race-Newmark: What would be an action, if someone could pause this podcast and immediately take some action in their lives, what would that be that you recommend?

[00:24:26] Dr. Rupa Marya: I think they should donate to the Palestinian Children Relief Fund, PCRF, who do important critical work on the ground in Gaza to help rebuild the infrastructure for Palestinian children who've been just brutalized by Israeli and U.S. violence in their homelands. I would recommend that people support organizations like the Confederation of Ohlone People, or the Run for Salmon who are doing just innovative and exciting work in California native territories. There's so many different groups. 

[00:24:59] Emily Race-Newmark: Beautiful. Well, Rupa, thank you so much. This is a true pleasure and I really appreciate everything that you're standing for, that you're holding in the vision, and the ways that you're organizing others in your life to do the same.

[00:25:12] Dr. Rupa Marya: Thank you so much for taking time.

[00:25:14] Emily Race-Newmark: If you enjoy this conversation and want more, we've included links to stay connected with Dr. Marya and Deep Medicine Circle on this episode's page over at our website.

[00:25:23] Emily Race-Newmark: For more from this interview with Dr. Marya, head over to our Patreon page at patreon.com/thisishowwecare. 

[00:25:30] Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you for all of the ways that you are supporting this podcast, whether it's through Patreon contributions, listening and leaving a review, sharing episodes with the people in your life or subscribing to our newsletter and Instagram to be a part of the conversation. 

[00:25:42] Emily Race-Newmark: This episode was produced by me, Emily Race, co produced by Kimberly Ann, with audio by Andrew Salamone, and music by Eric Weisberg.