Meet The Couple Bringing Indigenous Wellness Into The Modern Day

“I really should have started a blog about that,” she laughs on a call to mbg.
For Luger, this realization was empowering—and she wanted to share it with other Natives across the country.
Today, Luger and her partner Thosh Collins, who is also Native, help indigenous populations across America reclaim their health and wellness through their company, Well for Culture.
There’s a massive disparity between Native Americans’ traditional way of life and the conditions that they live in today. “We don’t have terms in our language for ‘wellness,’ and it’s because a lot of our indigenous practices are automatically wellness-based,” explains Collins, referencing practices like eating foraged foods as an example. “People are living in food deserts, where they don’t have access to the food they used to subsist on,” Collins says.
They also travel around the country to host wellness workshops with indigenous people on reservations, as well as in nonprofits, schools, and corporations. “Indigenous wellness can be useful not just for indigenous people but for all people.
But let indigenous people lead that.
As for the lessons we can all learn from indigenous wellness, Luger says that respecting the earth, putting food at the center of culture, and finding balance in the everyday all rank high on the list: “I find it interesting that today many functional medicine practitioners are presenting this idea that for many people is revolutionary: We can’t subcategorize things like food and fitness as separate because everything impacts everything else.