About
Hello. I am Dr. David Delgado Shorter. I was born from mixed Northern Spanish and Indigenous women on my mother's side and mixed German ancestry on my fathers. I identify as a settler (non-Indigenous), though I honor the sacrifices that my Indigenous ancestors made many generations in the past. How they labored in my family's ranches across southern and central New Mexico was an astonishing oral history to collect for my senior thesis at ASU.
I have been around healers most of my life. My first six years of life were spent in the home of my great-grandmother, Maria Lueres Maes, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. She would have visitors for whom she would make teas and advise on health matters. She was an uncertified midwife and personal advisor of sorts, having worked as a nurse’s assistant in the nearby Japanese internment camp. Her mother was a considered a very powerful woman in the area of Lincoln, New Mexico. My great grandma, Maria, was like my birth doula, and often said she knew me from inside the womb. She cared for me in her home until I was six and on many weekends and summer months onward.
In college, as a Religious Studies major, I took courses on visionary epistemés, rituals, symbols, and myths while attending Native American Church meetings and visiting with medicine men on the Navajo reservation or with curanderos (moreakamem) in Mexico. It was during this time that I began asking mediums and psychics for formal interview sessions. I was, I now know, trying to better understand what was moving inside me, trying to make sense of what I had known to be true as a child about our multidimensional world.
I have published peer-reviewed, scholarly essays on plant communication, animal and ET intelligence, and aspects of healing in Indigenous cultures. I am very conscientious of how to think about healing without appropriating Indigenous lifeways. I do not speak for, intend to convey, or impart any Indigenous wisdom. When available, I will refer people to practitioners in other communities who might best embody and determine the needs of their communities. I do, however, draw from my experience as a patient, student, and in one case apprentice, of those healers from other communities.
A life-changing event occured when my personal life conjoined with my professional life. I was asked to be the director of the Archive of Healing at UCLA, the largest digital archive of sayings about healings from around the world. My pedagogy includes practice-based research, which is learning how to embody knowledge with others and avoiding extractive methods of collaboration. In all that I do, I aim to help us become aware of our relatedness to others, including other than human person.
Be sure to check out my interviews and academic essays if you want to learn more about my research.
I have been around healers most of my life. My first six years of life were spent in the home of my great-grandmother, Maria Lueres Maes, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. She would have visitors for whom she would make teas and advise on health matters. She was an uncertified midwife and personal advisor of sorts, having worked as a nurse’s assistant in the nearby Japanese internment camp. Her mother was a considered a very powerful woman in the area of Lincoln, New Mexico. My great grandma, Maria, was like my birth doula, and often said she knew me from inside the womb. She cared for me in her home until I was six and on many weekends and summer months onward.
In college, as a Religious Studies major, I took courses on visionary epistemés, rituals, symbols, and myths while attending Native American Church meetings and visiting with medicine men on the Navajo reservation or with curanderos (moreakamem) in Mexico. It was during this time that I began asking mediums and psychics for formal interview sessions. I was, I now know, trying to better understand what was moving inside me, trying to make sense of what I had known to be true as a child about our multidimensional world.
I have published peer-reviewed, scholarly essays on plant communication, animal and ET intelligence, and aspects of healing in Indigenous cultures. I am very conscientious of how to think about healing without appropriating Indigenous lifeways. I do not speak for, intend to convey, or impart any Indigenous wisdom. When available, I will refer people to practitioners in other communities who might best embody and determine the needs of their communities. I do, however, draw from my experience as a patient, student, and in one case apprentice, of those healers from other communities.
A life-changing event occured when my personal life conjoined with my professional life. I was asked to be the director of the Archive of Healing at UCLA, the largest digital archive of sayings about healings from around the world. My pedagogy includes practice-based research, which is learning how to embody knowledge with others and avoiding extractive methods of collaboration. In all that I do, I aim to help us become aware of our relatedness to others, including other than human person.
Be sure to check out my interviews and academic essays if you want to learn more about my research.
