Barbara Mumby Huerta: Trauma-Informed Care, Ancestral Memory, and Cultural Healing Through Art
- barbaramumby1
- 3 days ago
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By Barbara Mumby Huerta
I come to this work as an artist, cultural strategist, and survivor—shaped by lived experience, community responsibility, and a lifelong commitment to healing and equity.
For nearly three decades, my work has focused on understanding how trauma manifests across individuals, families, institutions, and communities—and how art, culture, and equity-centered systems can support collective healing.
Why Trauma-Informed Practice Matters
Trauma is often misunderstood or avoided altogether. In many professional and institutional spaces, even naming trauma can cause people to shut down. Yet unresolved trauma does not disappear—it shapes behavior, relationships, and systems, often invisibly and intergenerationally.
Trauma-informed care offers a framework for recognizing this reality and responding with intention rather than harm. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), trauma-informed practice requires realizing the widespread impact of trauma, recognizing its signs, and responding by creating environments that prioritize safety, empowerment, and healing (SAMHSA Trauma-Informed Care Framework).
Personal History as Context
I was born in a small rural town in California’s Central Valley to a family of migrant farmworkers. Raised by a single mother in poverty, I am the youngest of five in a mixed-race family with maternal lineage connected to multiple tribes within the Powhatan Confederacy, alongside Scottish ancestry. Like many Indigenous families, ours is part of the broader Native American diaspora shaped by displacement, land theft, and survival.
My childhood was marked by both resilience and hardship—family members living with schizophrenia, domestic violence, addiction, and systemic scarcity. Art became my refuge long before it became my profession.
Later, I was traditionally adopted by a Paiute/Miwuk family from the Yosemite region, grounding my spiritual home in the Roundhouse and deepening my understanding of community-based and ceremonial healing. These experiences—along with my work supporting children in foster care and founding Sacred Circle Inc., a nonprofit focused on culturally competent care for Native youth—shaped my understanding of trauma as a lived, intergenerational reality, not an abstract concept.
Ancestral Memory, Epigenetics, and Intergenerational Healing
Indigenous knowledge systems have long held that memory and experience are carried through generations—held in our blood and bones. Many tribal teachings speak of seven generations; others, including my own elders, speak of thirteen.
Western science has begun to validate this understanding through epigenetics, the study of how trauma and stress can alter gene expression across generations. Research links adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to epigenetic markers associated with depression, anxiety, PTSD, autoimmune disease, and other chronic conditions.
This is not a story of inevitability—it is a story of possibility. Just as trauma can be inherited, so too can resilience, love, and survival. Healing ourselves becomes an act of healing future generations.
Forms of Trauma and How They Appear
Trauma shows up in many forms, including:
Generational trauma passed through families
Historical trauma resulting from collective and systemic harm
Complex trauma involving prolonged or repeated exposure
Vicarious trauma experienced by caregivers, educators, artists, and organizers
Trauma may manifest as anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional withdrawal, or harmful relational patterns. These responses are often reinforced by dominant cultural norms—including those embedded in white supremacy culture, which normalize urgency, perfectionism, and disconnection (Tema Okun, White Supremacy Culture).
From Individual Healing to Collective Care
As adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy:
“What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”
Trauma-informed work must actively prevent retraumatization—particularly within institutions engaging communities historically harmed by those same systems. Equity work and trauma-informed practice are inseparable when done with integrity.
Trauma-Informed Grantmaking and Institutional Change
Over the past two decades, I have worked to integrate trauma-informed, equity-centered practices into public funding systems. While serving with the San Francisco Arts Commission, this meant reimagining grantmaking in partnership with community to increase accessibility, redistribute decision-making power, and center lived experience.
This work included:
Simplifying application language
Funding grantwriting support
Compensating community cultural ambassadors
Restructuring panel selection to reflect equity commitments
The result was a measurable shift in funding outcomes—ensuring resources more equitably reached BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled communities. This work was iterative, accountable, and community-led.
Art as a Pathway to Healing: A Place of Her Own
One powerful example of trauma-informed cultural practice is A Place of Her Own, founded by artist Cynthia Tom. The program uses intuitive art-making, ancestral storytelling, and collective process to support women and gender-expansive people in transforming trauma into self-agency and resilience.
Structured around phases of belonging, mastery, interdependence, and generosity, the program demonstrates how art functions as both mirror and medicine—supporting individual healing while strengthening community bonds.
Check out this presentation that Cynthia and I provided the National Guild for Community Arts Education's Rootwork Series:
Healing as Responsibility
As Gabor Maté reminds us, trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens inside us when we become disconnected from ourselves. Healing is the process of reconnection.
For me, healing is also an ethical responsibility. Cultural institutions, funders, and artists must recognize how trauma shapes participation, access, and voice. When we design systems rooted in care, accountability, and imagination, we create the conditions for genuine equity and cultural repair to emerge.
About the Author
Barbara Mumby Huerta is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and equity-centered leader working nationally with artists, nonprofits, and public institutions.
📩 Contact: barbaramumby1@gmail.com
🌐 Website: https://www.barbaramumbystudios.com
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-mumby
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