#the last time I went to an open class about traditional midwifery

[songsofbloodandwater]

I'm going to complain about something that may sound petty to a lot of people but listen: anyone who works closely with indigenous communities and then offers a service (be it healing methods, cultural education, whatever) must offer either open access to indigenous peoples of that community and Nation, or at the very least an indigenous rate that is lower, and more accessible, than the honestly overpriced rate at which those same services are being offered to the mainstream public. Specially if the price you're charging as an outsider is in US dollars while the local currency used by indigenous peoples of the area is subject to US-driven inflation and US sanctions. We don't have US dollars, we can't pay extra for US dollars, the difference in currency is too big, and that's without counting fees that we, as locals, have to pay because our governments consider anything being paid in US dollars a "Luxury Buy", plus international fees, and thus there's more ridiculously high taxes to pay ontop of the price you set.

Every indigenous educator I've known is extremely flexible with pricing because we know this. We know often people of the same Nation are scattered across borders in Latin America, we know that profit is not our goal here, education and healing and building up our communities is. So we offer indigenous rates, divide payments as much as possible, sliding-scales and even half or full scholarships to other indigenous peoples, often all of these at the same time, to make it more accessible. It's nonsense for outsiders to gatekeep indigenous knowledge and medicine away from that very same indigenous people, by making it not monetarily accessible to them, but keeping it accessible only to outsiders from an entirely different country. It happens so often that we even have a name for that phenomenon, actually: spiritual extractivism.

If I, as an indigenous person from the same Nation you're taking knowledge and medicine from, read "40% of the pricing goes back to indigenous communities!" and that exact 40% inflation of the price is the reason I can't pay for it... we have a problem. Deciding the pricing based only on what white people or any outsider to the culture "should" pay to "give back to the traditional medicine holders" but never ensuring that, at the same time, you're leaving some other door open to indigenous peoples... is still centering white supremacy and profit. It makes no sense because that exact same inflated price is the thing keeping the local indigenous peoples from being able to access the knowledge and medicine you're taking from our Elders. If you want to keep true, healthy reciprocity, you should offer separate rates, or find some more ways to ensure that the knowledge and medicine you're taking from our Elders finds it's way back to indigenous hands.