ROOTS

Allillanchu (Quechua)! Choa Mibizine (Chibcha/Muysccubun)! I was born in the Colombian Andes, in the Muisca territory of Bacatá (Bogotá), at the base of my godparent mountains—Quijicha Caca and Quijicha Guexica. My lineages are a weaving of rooting and migration, conflict and confluence. Grounded in my Andean Indigeneity alongside my Celtic-rooted ancestry in Western Iberia (Western Spain & Portugal) - woven together by the pain of colonization, but rooted in ancestral lineages and lands whose memories and wisdoms are longer than colonial time.

ANDEAN MEDICINE

I am an initiated Paqo (medicine person) in the Q’eros lineage (Kiko territory, Apaza family line) rooted in the tribal lands above Cusco, Peru, and practice as an Andean ceremonialist and storyteller. I engage the wisdoms of my Trans-Andean (across Andean territories) ancestors while also holding the complexity of being named after the Spanish mystic, Teresa de Avila, and carrying the last name of Mateus - a Portuguese derivation of Mateos.

I honor my role as a chakaruna (bridge being) across lineages, memories, stories, and continents, between my own ancestral roots and the diasporic experience of being born in the mountains of the South (Abya Yala) while being raised in the urban-suburban centers of the North (Turtle Island). 

ACADEMICS

I hold a Master’s in Clinical Social Work with a focus in traumatology from New York University (2007) and have practiced integrative, community-based, and Indigenized healing practices for twenty years. I have served as full-time and adjunct faculty in social work programs at St. Augustine College, University of Louisville, and Florida Atlantic University. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (ESR) program.

SCHOLARSHIP/RESEARCH/STORYING

My transdisciplinary scholarship intersects Indigenous Ecology, Storytelling and Ceremony engaging Andean Indigenous approaches to Indigenous Research, Ecology and More-than-human Kinship, Indigenous Futurisms and Feminisms.

As an Andean-rooted storyteller and ceremonialist, I center the practice of "co-storying" with plant, animal, and land wisdom-keepers. This methodology creates a chaka (bridge) between Andean cosmology, philosophy, and ecology with the urgent needs of our current season of Pachakuti (the great turning), calling for Indigenous knowledge to be "re-storied" for the flourishing of all human and more-than-human kin.

My scholarship works to visibilize the sovereignty of human and more-than-human elders from the Andean territories with a focus on the unbordering of these lineages beyond the nation-state borders in the Andes, separating "el Ande" (the mountain as one contiguous spine) from herself. Additionally, exploring the migration of this "ceremonial storying" into the North American diaspora. By integrating scholarship, storytelling, and ceremony as part of one interwoven body of work, I seek to expand the academy's understanding of how Indigenous wisdoms navigate and transcend colonial borders, fostering global ecological and relational healing.

PLACING: HOME-MAKING

I currently live in Lenapehoking, in the ancestral territory of the Hackensack clan, also called Orange, New Jersey. I work to bridge across imposed borders between South (Abya Yala) and North (Turtle Island) to honor the land and peoples where I am a guest, and carry my ceremony on my back from the Andes to the Urban Ecologies & Indigenous Spaces of the Northeast United States. I share my home with a chi-mix elder pup with four-eyes markings, meaning she is a spiritual protector of the household, per Q'eros Paqo teachings. She also considers herself a reincarnated Mexican God, which she makes known in her every way of being. ​