Mutual Aid Acupuncture

Free pop up clinic every third Saturday of the month from 4:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m.

Email us at: mutualaidacupdx@gmail.com for inquiries about volunteering or donating.

M.A.A.C’s Compass

This compass is intended to be a living and organic guide for our work. 

The Mutual Aid Acupuncture Collective (MAAC) functions to discern and interrupt deep systemic patterns of oppression, harm, and pathology through holistic life-affirming medicine rooted in the needs of community. As a mutual aid collective, we prioritize the wisdom and needs of the people we serve and stand in solidarity with those most affected by systems of oppression. 

Our medicine is rooted in Daoist science, indigenous to China, and legacies of radical organizing towards self-determination. We seek to honor and uplift the diverse lineages that inform our work, and to educate ourselves and others about the history of acupuncture in this country. 

Compass Points: 

• We recognize our interdependence with the Earth and all living beings. 
• We recognize that the harm caused by settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and all other systems of domination affect the health of individuals and communities. 
• We reframe crises as offering new possibilities, using acupuncture as a form of collective healing to provide relief and recovery and to contribute to community resiliency. 
• We operate democratically and seek to model in our work the type of world we desire. 

M.A.A.C’s Lineage Statement

The medicine we practice is informed by earth-based Daoist knowledge, Indigenous to China and developed throughout Asia for centuries. We emphatically assert that traditional medicine is an Indigenous science. This knowledge was brought to this continent by Chinese immigrants, such as Ing ‘Doc’ Hay, who used the medicine of his family lineage to treat Chinese laborers and white settlers in Eastern Oregon during the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late 1800s- early 1900’s. Asian immigrants risked their freedom in order to practice this medicine without legal authorization. Current licensing requirements continue to make state legitimization difficult for immigrant practitioners. 

In the 1970’s, acupuncture practice became more widely and legally recognized in this country, in large part due to the direct action work of Chinese American acupuncturists like Dr. Miriam Lee in California. Concurrently, in the Bronx, NY, the Black Panthers and Young Lords in collaboration with white accomplices at Lincoln Hospital, were seeking alternatives to the medical industrial complex. As an act of resistance to the state sanctioned cycle of drug incarcerations and medical dependence-based treatment, they developed a liberatory model of community-care ear acupuncture. These individuals were often faced with state violence in response to their community-care activities. 

In our work as a collective, we seek to honor and uplift this history and each of these intersecting lineages, as well as our personal histories and teachers. In taking our own places in these lineages, we recognize that solidarity is complex and inseparable from history.