Our Instructors

Dara Saville is the founder of Albuquerque Herbalism and the Executive Director of the Yerba Mansa Project, a nonprofit organization. Her work involves teaching herbalists, organizing the community to undertake native medicinal plant restoration on public lands, writing, and fostering a renewed land connection through public events and field trips.

Dara is the author of her first book through the University of New Mexico Press, The Ecology of Herbal Medicine: A Guide to Plants and Living Landscapes of the American Southwest and a contributing author to several herbal compendium books. She is a long-time columnist for Plant Healer Quarterly where she writes on a variety of botanical topics including environmental issues concerning medicinal plants and is also an instructor in UNM’s Holistic Health Program. Dara has an MS in Geography and Environmental Studies from UNM and is also a graduate of Tieraona Low Dog’s Foundations of Herbal Medicine program.

Donna has had a love of plants and nature since her youth, foraging briar leaves, admiring club mosses and orchids of the New England woods. She is ever grateful to her nature science teacher as a child. Violets and lemon balm in her grandmother’s garden and foraging wild mushrooms with her Aunt in Ireland are formative experiences. She has learned from a number of herbal teachers, programs, practitioners and a walkabout apprenticeship in the Sandia Mountains. She also studied at Albuquerque Herbalism in the Advanced Program.

Other pursuits have combined herbal activism and education through a weekly herbal radio program featuring folkways and herb talk along with many guest speakers.

She has gained great knowledge through the varied and often under radar experiences of working in herbal retail settings for the past number of years. She currently lives in the Chihuhuan desert in Las Cruces, New Mexico where she helps run the Wellness Department at a local Co-op. Her favorite strategy, while perusing the herb and supplement aisles, is to inspire people by educating about simple, accessible lifestyle supports. Offering ideas for tea blends and recipes. You will find her there doing what she loves and sharing that enthusiasm in her community herbal classes that she is offering at the Mountain View Market Co-op.

She can be contacted for classes and offerings at maytreeherbals@gmail.com

Atava Garcia Swiecicki, MA, RH (AHG) is guided by her dreams and her Mexican, Polish, Hungarian and Diné ancestors. She studied Feminist Studies at Stanford University and received her master’s degree in the Indigenous Mind Program at Naropa University Oakland. Atava has studied healing arts extensively for over thirty years and has been mentored by herbalists, curanderas and traditional knowledge keepers. She works as a clinical herbalist and teacher and is dedicated to remembering the healing traditions of her ancestors and supporting others to reconnect with their ancestral medicine. She also loves helping people build relationships with plants, whom she considers some of our greatest teachers and healers. Atava is the founder of the Ancestral Apothecary School of Herbal, Folk and Indigenous Medicine on Ohlone territory in Oakland, CA. She’s currently living in Tewa Pueblo territory in Albuquerque, New Mexico where she finished writing her first book called The Curanderx Toolkit: Reclaiming Ancestral Latinx Plant Medicine and Rituals for Healing.

Her websites are: www.ancestralapothecary.com and www.ancestralapothecaryschool.com.

Asha Canalos is an artist, landscape designer, environmental justice advocate, and writer, with over 25 years’ experience professionally gardening and farming. She has a passion for community-building, knowledge-sharing, and for protection of our ecological systems and more-than-human allies. Asha received her BA in Visual Arts from Antioch College, and a dual degree MFA and MS at The Pratt Institute. Most recently, she has been a regular Visiting Artist with The Land Arts of the American West program at The University of New Mexico, and a guest instructor in the Art & Ecology program, also at UNM.

A decade of environmental and community activism has taught Asha how critically important it is to establish healthy foundations of self-care and resilience-building. For her, this includes connectivity to plants as healing allies and teachers, and a determination to inject joy into her work, through playfulness, creativity, humor, and deep engagement with community. Asha believes in the power of collaboration and communication to breathe life into a new and better world.

This year, Asha is launching a small business featuring an herbal products line and limited edition art posters, prints, and stationery, with a dedicated portion of profits going to grassroots environmental justice campaigns across the country. You can follow Asha’s projects at her website, www.ashacanalos.com.