Reimagining Land, Food & Medicine
Thursday, October 23, 2025
12:00 PM
Reimagining Land, Food & Medicine
Livestream Only | Pay What You Can $10-25
What are the connections between health and poverty, colonialism and climate change, farming and medicine? Join us online for a discussion with doctor- and farmer-activists on the healing and liberatory relationships between land, food and medicine. Physician, artist, author, and land steward Dr. Rupa Marya will present a lecture based on her research and work with "Farming is Medicine" program at Trinity College, Dublin, and Deep Medicine Circle in Oakland, CA, a women of color-led, worker directed organization healing the wounds of environmental injustice through food, medicine, story, restoration and learning. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Houston doctor-activist Dr. Dona Kim Murphey and Lucille Contreras, Executive Director of Texas Tribal Buffalo Project based in Waelder, TX, which rematriates Texas Indigenous land and communities.
About the presenters
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, writer, mother, soil lover and composer. She founded the Deep Medicine Circle to advance the concept of Whole System Health, where healed relationships between people and with the web of life confer health. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice and she is the co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. Together with co-author with Raj Patel, she wrote the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Marya works to decolonize food and medicine in partnership with communities from across Turtle Island to Éire. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”
Lucille Contreras is the CEO and Founder of Texas Tribal Buffalo Project (TTBP), a Lipan Apache-led nonprofit— the first Native woman-led organization of its kind in Texas. TTBP is restoring kinship between Texas Indigenous Lineal Descendants and our Buffalo relatives through ancestral governance, cultural resilience, and deep care for the Land. Our vision is a South Texas where Indigenous peoples lead in climate solutions, land restoration, and food sovereignty. Just as the Buffalo returns to the Southern Plains, so too do our lifeways—rooted in intergenerational healing, matriarchal leadership, and cultural resilience.
Dr. Dona Kim Murphey is a neurologist, neuroscientist, community organizer, and promotora. She considers health as telescoping connections between individuals, families, communities, and society at large, and frames all policy as health policy. Dona sits on the boards of Woori Juntos, Doctors In Politics, and Race and Equity Leadership and Research Collective. She serves as Chief Scientific Officer of Synthesys Brain Health and Founder and Managing Partner of prognosUs, a public benefit company that delivers early dementia screening, culturally fluent and language-specific counsel, and connects Black and immigrant caregivers to the cure finding ecosystem.
