Victor A. Lopez-Carmen is a Dakota and Yaqui writer, health advocate, and student at Harvard Medical School. He is cofounder of the Ohiyesa Premedical Program at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), which supports Indigenous community and tribal college students to pursue healthcare education. He also founded Translations for our Nations, a grant funded initiation that translated accurate COVID-19 information into over 40 Indigenous languages from over 20 different countries. For his work, he has been featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 and Native American 40 under 40 lists. He is Co-Chair of the UN Global Indigenous Youth Caucus.

VICTOR A. LOPEZ-CARMEN

My mom and my dad would often go to protests. They would organize movements. They'd be part of multilateral indigenous people's movements, not only nationally, but internationally, that were operating at the grassroots level. Activism, it’s a tradition in my family for indigenous rights. I have aunts and uncles that were very involved as well. So as a kid, I was often at those protests. I was running around as a little Native kid with all the other little Native kids, when our parents would be in meetings discussing how to move forward discussing indigenous rights.

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One of our chiefs was a Chief Crazy Horse. When they rode into battle to meet the US soldiers, his war cry was "Only the Earth lives forever!" And to me, that's really powerful because it shows what we were fighting for, and that they were willing to die for Mother Earth to protect it from this really nasty mining.

The killing of the animals and the deforestation that they were willing to put their lives on the line for that. And the U.S. Government, from our stories and what our elders told us, they weren't able to defeat us until they started killing our women, our children, and killing elders, and massacring in a really non-honorable way.

Our elders always tell us that they weren't able to defeat us ever in an honorable battle until they started targeting the women, children, elders, and starving us by... They almost massacred the buffalo to extinction. They almost made the buffalo go extinct because that was our food source, and eventually our people were starving, and that's why they moved on to the reservation because they didn't have any more food because the government killed all the buffalo. So that's a story that we're still told today, and we keep in our hearts that our ancestors were never defeated honorably. They fought for the Earth. They fought for the land to protect it, and that we still have to do that.

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So we've been here for thousands of years, and we've developed a language during that time. So integrated into the language is so much knowledge about how to live in our traditional territories. In our traditional territories, our language developed, and because of that, our culture is so embedded within the language and the land. It's almost interconnected with it, with the different animals that live there, with the different species, the plants, all our metaphors have something to do with the land that we've been on. And because we're so connected to it, and it's part of our spirituality as well. When we say intergenerational values are in our language, that's part of it because when we are speaking our language, it's passing on our culture. It's passing on that connection that we have to our ancestors on the land. It's passing on how to live on the land. It's passing on all the methods and the science that we've developed for thousands of years of how things work on the land.

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They've shown that 70 to 80% of the biodiversity left on Planet Earth today, of all the plants, all the different lifeforms, 70 to 80% are situated in indigenous territories right now. And we only make up around 5% of the global population. So we are literally, the way that we operate and the way that we are, is literally saving the planet because we're the ones who are still taking care of it. We're still protecting it, and our languages are the things that help us do that.

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I think it's our most important battle right now to save the language for indigenous peoples. I think that I'm grateful personally that we still have it because there are only eight tribes in the U.S. that have more than 5,000 speakers of their language today, and I come from two tribes that are part of those eight.

So I'm very grateful that we still have fluent speakers because a lot of tribes don't really have that. They don't really have the numbers that they need to really make it integrated, which we could still do and which we still do. At ceremonies, you hear indigenous language all the time. I still hear my parents, like my dad, my stepdad speaking in Yaqui with someone at the ceremony. And I'm like, Wow, I'm so happy that we have that. And it just makes me feel like I'm not... I don't want to take that for granted. We have the privilege to be able to connect with this generation that grew up fluent still.

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It can be very difficult. When we say seven generations, our generations are longer - from grandparent to grandparent - it's not the Western idea of one generation. So it's even longer than most people would know, and the thing is it does take practice. It does take true intention, not only individually, but societal, community intention. It has to be built into the structure of a community, of a country, of a tribe. And for our tribes, for my tribe, that was built into our structure. It was built into the way that we lived.

Victor Lopez-Carmen with Ohiyesa Premedical Program participants and guest speaker Dr. Valerie Stone

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Maureen Nole with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Maureen Nole. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).