Season 6, “Indigenous Voices of This Generation” by the Matriarch Movement Podcast

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There are conversations that remind you why this podcast exists in the first place. Our conversation with Daniela Riojas is one of them.

Daniela is a curandera, educator, medicine keeper, musician, and artist originally from the frontera of Tejas y México, now based in Tulum. Her Indigenous ancestry connects to the Coahuiltecan peoples of northern Mexico. As a curandera, she communes with Mother Nature and a wide lexicon of plants, animals, and energies through ancestral practices of channeling and meditation – trainings and Master Plant dietas she undertook under the guidance of elders in Nayarit, Mexico and across the jungles of Peru, within Cocama, Shipibo, Ashaninka, and Mestizo lineages. She is the founder of “Intikhana Medicina”, which creates ceremonial containers of integrity and safety rooted in Indigenous and earth-based healing practices.

But long before any of that, Daniela was a kid growing up on the Texas-Mexico border, trying to figure out where she belonged.

Growing Up “Siphoned”

Daniela was born in Eagle Pass, Texas, a small border town connected to a much older story; the Coahuiltecan peoples who inhabited those lands, on both sides of a border, long before it was a border at all.

She describes her childhood identity as siphoned, split between being “too Mexican” to be fully American, and “not Mexican enough” once the border had drawn a line straight through her ancestry. In college in San Antonio, that tension turned into activism: interviewing undocumented immigrants, doing portrait work in her community, and fighting for Indigenous voices to be included in how monuments like the Alamo tell their history.

It’s a feeling many Indigenous people carry in different forms, the disconnection that comes from colonization, displacement, or systems (like residential schools here in Canada) that were designed to sever people from their culture. Daniela’s advice for anyone trying to find their way back is simple, but not easy: the path to elders and teachers is often long and painful, and the right guidance tends to come not from chasing it, but from finding people whose values and heart-centered approach you genuinely resonate with, even if they come from a different tradition than your own.

What a Curandera Actually Does

For those unfamiliar with the term, Daniela explains that a curandera works with the plants, animals, and forces of nature to facilitate healing on every level: physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological all at once. It’s a doctoring tradition, built on generations of knowledge about which plants, roots, and vines treat which conditions, passed down through direct relationship rather than textbooks.

Central to this path is la dieta: a sacred, isolated period of communion with a single plant, tree, or flower, sometimes lasting days, sometimes years. During a dieta, a person enters deep stillness (Daniela jokingly calls herself a “professional napper”) to open a psychic and energetic connection with that plant’s spirit. It’s through this process that healers receive icaros – the medicine songs.

Songs as Technology

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was Daniela’s description of icaros. She calls them a kind of “coding technology” – a direct line of contact with the healing spirits of plants, animals, and the natural world. Each icaro has its own cadence and melody, and singing it in ceremony calls those specific energies into the space to guide, protect, and support everyone present.

It’s a beautiful reframe of something that can sound abstract from the outside: these songs aren’t performance. They’re function. They’re how the medicine actually moves.

Grief as a Doorway

Daniela didn’t wake up one day and decide to become a healer – if anything, it was the opposite. Her path deepened dramatically after the loss of her mother, which opened up years of ancestral and maternal grief carried in her body. That loss led her back into deeper dieta work in Peru, and it was there that she began receiving icaros of her own – the first sign, according to her teachers, that she was being called into a much bigger responsibility as a wisdom keeper.

A Warning Worth Repeating

As plant medicine has become more popular globally, Daniela is direct about a growing problem: people leading ceremonies without the training, lineage, or initiation to do so safely.

Her comparison is blunt and important: you wouldn’t get surgery from someone who never went to medical school. Ceremonial plant medicine work carries the same weight – physical, emotional, and spiritual safety all depend on the skill and integrity of the person holding the space. Her advice to anyone considering ceremony is to research a facilitator’s lineage and training as seriously as they would a surgeon’s credentials, and to look for containers built on clear protocols, mutual accountability, and a facilitator who has done deep work on themselves, not just someone who has learned the technical steps.

Coming Back to the Body

Holding this much responsibility takes its own toll, and Daniela is candid about how she stays grounded: consistent physical discipline, returning regularly to her own teachers to be cared for in turn, and a daily practice of cooking for herself and understanding her body’s changing needs. It’s a good reminder that even those who hold space for others need their own container of care.

What Matriarchy Means to Her

We closed our conversation the way we always do – asking what matriarchy means to our guest. For Daniela, it starts with her mother, and the women in her family who have stewarded each other for generations. But she’s clear that matriarchy isn’t about any one woman standing alone, it’s a collective consciousness, built through women showing up for each other in their own gifts and power, whether or not they have children of their own.

It’s a fitting note to end on for a season all about Indigenous voices reclaiming their stories, their medicine, and their power. Not waiting for permission, but already doing the work.

Follow Daniela Riojas at Intikhana for details on her mentorship, retreats, and upcoming tours.

@danielariojas

⁠https://www.intikhana.com/⁠

⁠https://linktr.ee/danielariojas