OJI:SDA’ Story

Tahila Mintz is an Indigenous Yaqui medicinal herbalist, educator, artist, community organizer, and founder of OJI:SDA’ Sustainable Indigenous Futures. OJI:SDA’ was largely imagined due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tahila and several community partners worked on disaster responses, partnering with international nurse organizations and communities for essential supplies and delivering over 10,000 masks, 260 gallons of hand sanitizer, food and food-bearing trees, traditional Indigenous medicine, and other essential items to Indigenous tribes and medical clinics in the Sonora region of Mexico. From there, she began to focus on the longevity of her interventions, providing community support by making herbal blends and herbal medicine, which leverages community capacity and serves as part of a recovery plan for the future. She had two major goals in mind: provide medicinal herbs with their healing properties to the community and give Indigenous communities the agency and knowledge to take care of themselves. She accomplishes this in part by putting educational programs in place for Indigenous youth, which “nurture[s] and enrich[es] the local population of youth with plants.”