Xóchicoatl Bello (they/she/amor) is an indigequeer healing practitioner, cultural worker, educator, Earth steward, and elder-in-training. Xóchicoatl focuses on cultivating cultures of healing by restoring our connections to the sacredness of self, each other, Earth, and ancestors through ceremony, circle practice, Indigenous technologies, and agricultural traditions. They have been co-creating healing spaces for over a decade in Boston Public Schools, in community gardens, in the Hudson Valley with Kite’s Nest and Sweet Freedom Farm, and across Turtle Island through their virtual learning herbal programming explicitly for queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC).
Their work invites the community into herbal medicine making, farming, ceremony, and circle practice. Xóchicoatl believes that these Indigenous technologies have kept our people healing for generations, and are how we find our way back from the violences of colonization, and transform the wounds of oppression into more healthy, harmonious, and justice-filled connections with ourselves, community, and the Earth.
Xóchicoatl comes from Afro-Indigenous, Portuguese, and Spanish bloods via love and colonization rooted in Southern Mexico, from a people recovering their memory, from a people in treaties with peoples and lands alike reclaiming their sovereignty. They hold healing spaces in relationship with the Earth with the prayer that when we heal the soils that sustain us, tend to the seeds, tend to our hearts, and tend to our relations, we remember our bodies as sites of wisdom, we heal our souls, and we awaken ancestral memory that we have always been free.