12/21/2025
Our Kiva Centers Soteria Las Cruces team had the honor of attending the opening of Land of the People: Tierra Sagrada at the Branigan Cultural Center, highlighting the living history, ceremony, and dance traditions of Tortugas Pueblo.
Standing in that space, watching the dancers, listening to the drums, witnessing generations move together, we were reminded of something deeply important to our work: extreme states are not new, and neither are the ways communities have held them with meaning, dignity, and care.
Indigenous wisdom teaches us that voices, visions, altered states, and deep emotional experiences are not automatically problems to be silenced or symptoms to be managed. In many Indigenous traditions, these experiences are understood in context, held in relationship, community, ceremony, land, and story. Healing is not isolated. It is collective. It is relational. It is cultural.
At Soteria Las Cruces, this understanding shapes how we support people experiencing what we often call “psychosis” or extreme states. We do not rush to pathologize. We do not reduce people to diagnoses. Instead, we slow down, listen, and create space for meaning-making, guided by peer support, consent, safety, and respect for each person’s lived and cultural knowledge.
Western systems are now trying to rediscover, community care, non-coercion, spiritual grounding, collective witnessing, have always existed here.
We are grateful to the people of Tortugas Pueblo for sharing their history and living culture. Indigenous knowledge is not a footnote to mental health work, it is essential to re-imagining how we respond to human suffering with humanity.
Land. People. Ceremony. Relationship.
This is the foundation.
[Image Description: Kiva Centers Soteria Las Cruces team members smile together at a community cultural event in Las Cruces, standing near adobe architecture and public art in the desert landscape. Additional footage shows Tortugas Pueblo ceremonial dance, with dancers moving in rhythm to drums as community members gather in a shared outdoor space. The images and videos reflect connection to land, culture, ceremony, and collective presence.]
