A Medical Warrior with the Heart of a Soulful Healer

By Charles McKenzie, October 28, 2022

Victor A. Lopez-Carmen ’17 honors his families’ traditions.

Victor A. Lopez-Carmen standing against a tree

Victor A. Lopez-Carmen ’17 has dedicated himself to helping Indigenous peoples everywhere.

(Photo Submitted)

The Yaqui Nation’s native language, Yoeme, still holds on as a living symbol of the resilience that served the Yaqui well during the pandemic. Frustrated that their prayers for help and COVID-19 information were at first answered mostly in English or Spanish, the Yaqui people in Sonora, Mexico, mobilized to disseminate COVID-19 information in Yaqui to local radio stations.

Witnessing this, Victor A. Lopez-Carmen ’17, a health sciences/premedical major at IC, recognized a sustainable model and did what his family of healers had been doing for centuries. He honored his culture and his people, and he got to work, helping to coordinate translations of COVID-19 materials and setting up pathways for more representation in the medical community.

Now a Harvard Medical School student set to graduate in 2023, Lopez-Carmen has dedicated much of his time after Ithaca College to helping not just his own tribes—the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and the Yaqui Nation in Arizona and Mexico—but also Indigenous peoples everywhere, whom he credits with a kind of intergenerational mindset that is at the core of his philosophy.

“I think it is underappreciated in the medical community considering that Indigenous languages represent the overwhelming majority of world languages, and many Indigenous peoples don’t speak a second language.”

Victor A. Lopez-Carmen ’17

Most recently for Lopez-Carmen, that has meant a push in two areas: more native language health materials and more Indigenous doctors, or at least medical practitioners who better understand the Indigenous communities they serve.

“I think it is underappreciated in the medical community considering that Indigenous languages represent the overwhelming majority of world languages, and many Indigenous peoples don’t speak a second language.” Lopez-Carmen helped raise thousands of dollars in relief funds for native communities and founded Translations 4 Our Nations, a grant-funded initiative to translate critical COVID-19 information into Indigenous languages, culminating in COVID-19 information in over 40 Indigenous languages from more than 20 countries.

When he graduates from medical school, Lopez Carmen will be the first male doctor enrolled in the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, he said. “People forget that there are tribal nations inside of the United States, and that we live in a very different world,” he said. “Statistics show that some of us live in third world circumstances. For instance, a tribe that is part of my nation, the Oglala Lakota Nation, has the second lowest life expectancy in the entire Western Hemisphere. We have the highest rates of tuberculosis, highest rates of poverty, disproportionately higher rates of pretty much every chronic disease. And this all comes from the poor health outcomes of systemic oppression, so our health disparities are preventable.”

Lopez-Carmen says that people he meets who have a more Western understanding of the world often comment that, as a medical student among so few Indigenous doctors, he must feel a tremendous pressure to both represent and help his own tribes and, in many ways, Indigenous people everywhere. But he says it’s never been a burden.

“I feel like it’s equally beneficial for me. I was born into two tribes, and I see that as a privilege,” he said. “I’m not going to take for granted that I get to be a part of these communities [that have existed] for thousands of years. That’s what makes me happy, so for me, it’s not a sacrifice. I actually feel like I’m getting so much from it, and I want to give it back as well.”