Rupa Marya (UC San Francisco) & Sage LaPena (Sacramento Native American Health Center)

**Due to COVID restrictions, only UCSD students and employees will be allowed to attend the class in person. All others must attend remotely via Zoom. Capacity is limited to first-come first-serve.

Note: The Design and Innovation Building (DIB) is located adjacent to the Structural and Materials Engineering Building on Pepper Canyon Lane

*There will be an optional outdoor reception from 5:00 – 5:45 P.M on the DIB 2nd Floor Terrace. Desserts and refreshments provided. UCSD students, employees, and external guests are welcome to attend.

**This will be hybrid event. For those attending remotely, please register via Zoom using the “Register Here” button at the top.

Decolonizing Medicine to Serve All

The Deep Medicine Circle (DMC) is a woman of color-led, worker directed organization working to heal the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, restoration, story and learning. DMC members California Indigenous Herbalist Sage LaPena and Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF Rupa Marya will describe how Western medicine is limited in its capacity to serve the health of all people by the same histories and contours of power that create and recreate the structural inequalities in society. To achieve the possibility of different health outcomes, we must re-conceptualize health with the understanding of our bodies as systems impacted by the systems we are part of – from ecological to social/historical to microbiological.

About the Speakers

Dr. Rupa Marya  is a physician, activist, writer, mother, and a composer. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. She is the co-author with Raj Patel of the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. She works to decolonize food and medicine in partnership with communities in Lakhota territory at the Mni Wiconi Health Circle and in Ohlone Territory through the Deep Medicine Circle. 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.”

Sage LaPena is a Nomtipom Wintu ethnobotanist and certified medical herbalist. She has worked for years to preserve and pass along Native uses of plant medicines — from both native and introduced plants — and other aspects of Traditional Ecological Knowledge connected to plants.

About Design@Large

Design@Large is a speaker series hosted by The Design Lab at UC San Diego, where each quarter we examine a topic in society and the relevance and implications through the lens of human centered design.

Our theme this quarter is “Rebels, Revolutionaries & Risk takers”.