Atava Garcia Swiecicki is dedicated to remembering the healing traditions of her ancestors and supporting others to reconnect with their own ancestral medicine. She loves helping people build relationships with plants, whom she considers some of our greatest teachers and healers. Swiecicki works as a clinical herbalist, curanderx, and teacher and was the founder of an Oakland based school dedicated to herbal, folk and indigenous medicine. She is the author of The Curanderex Toolkit, which was released in 2022.
Swiecicki received a degree from Stanford in Feminist Studies and earned her master’s in Indigenous Mind from Naropa. She has studied healing arts for thirty years. She has family roots in Detroit and lived for three decades in Huchiun/Oakland. Swiecicki now dwells in Albuquerque with her wife and cat where she is learning how to grow food and medicine in the high desert and dreaming up her next book.