My name is Natalia M. Rivera Morales (She/her/ella), and I am a recent graduate of the doctoral program in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also a recipient of the graduate certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies offered at Pitt. Currently, I work as a Curated Summer Immersive Fellow at the National Museum of the American Indian, where I research Creole colonialists’ depictions of medicinal practices employed by pre-Modern indigenous communities in the Greater Antilles. My research project homes in on descriptions composed by five authors—Bartolomé de las Casas, Pedro Mártir d’Anghiera, Fray Ramon Pané, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, and Cristobal Colón—of curative rituals involving the use of hallucinogens such as cohoba, also known by its scientific name anadenanthera. (For those interested in this topic, Constantino Manuel Torres’s recent publication entitled Anadenanthera: Visionary Plant of Ancient South America provides an excellent review of the plant’s chemical properties and its uses in therapeutic rituals). Primary source documentation indicates that shamanic uses of hallucinogens played a critical role in the construction of disease etiologies, as they sometimes constituted an ameliorative treatment for patients. I hope this research will culminate in an academic journal article underscoring the interpretive problems posed by colonial accounts of indigenous medicine, as many creole authors problematically portray cohoba rituals as a form of witchcraft, which overlooks the remedial ends of snuffing and purging.  

Working at the National Museum of the American Indian enables me to research themes and communities outside my immediate scholarly competencies. This position also exposes me to the ins and outs of curatorial work (i.e., the intensity of background scholarship required to design and erect an accurate and meaningful exhibition on a minoritized population). Moreover, examining pre-modern documents detailing endemic remedies for various ailments aids in parsing the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary physiology and, potentially, psychiatry. Whether I pursue professional opportunities in museum curation or undergraduate teaching, my work at NMAI hones my academic aptitude in Medical Humanities, which I intend to use in developing curricular materials for future undergraduate seminars. I am indebted to the Humanities Engage initiative for allowing me to consider professional opportunities congruent to academia. Overall, my experience at NMAI supplements the project management capacities I developed during the dissertation process.

I hope my work at NMAI ultimately permits me to forge alliances with indigenous scholars invested in critical disability theory. Specifically, I aim to work closely with scholars of indigenous cultures and histories to reexamine endemic medicine from a decolonial purview, shorn of negatively racializing distortions of healing practices. I also envision producing co-authored scholarship on the issue of sovereignty as it pertains to indigenous citizens compelled to forgo their nationhood to then undergo compulsory assimilation within the occupying superpower. I strive to foreground forms of indigenous scientific innovation and sovereign expressions dissembled by dehumanizing accounts fashioned by Creole observers.  

Before completing my doctoral degree at Pitt, I worked as a Leadership Programs Coordinator at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. I also have an academic background in International Relations and Affairs, which is not far afield from my research on West Indian philosophy and literature. I look forward to supplementing my competency in literary criticism by seeking curatorial and higher education positions.