When my mother was pregnant with me, my father gave her a copy of the Count of Monte Cristo to read, which she took with her to the hospital where I was delivered. The book was in Spanish and so the name of the protagonist was Edmundo Dantes. My parents both liked that name, and my Dad had an uncle he liked by that name as well, so that became my given name. Mom also had a little book on the origin and meaning of names, and when I was seven, she told me that Edmundo meant “the Protector''. She also explained that I was a "Libra," symbolized by the scale representing both balance and justice.

As such, my name is Edmundo Norte, son of Carlos Francisco Norte and Lenora Rubalcava Norte. My father’s family comes from northern Mexico, Chihuahua, the land of the Rarámuri (Tarahumara), and while my mother was born on Tongva lands (Los Angeles), her parents were from a small town in Mexico on the border between Michoacan and Jalisco, the ancestral home of the Nahuatl and Purépecha people. I was born and raised in East Los Angeles/Tongva lands and identify as an indigenous Chicano. That seed of awareness regarding my name has grown into a deep valuing of inner balance and outward justice. An abiding awareness of and value for the qualities of consideration and care also grew out of experiences with my parents, my first teachers.

Riding with my father in an old 1950s Chevy bomb that we could only drive during the day because we didn’t have enough money to prioritize buying new headlights, I never saw him drive by a car pulled over on the side of the road with the hood raised without his stopping to check if there was anything he could do to help. Likewise, I remember mornings waking up to the smell of something delicious baking and running to the kitchen area to ask my mother what kind of pie she was making for us, and she’d say something like, “Oh no, Mijo, this is for Mrs. ______'s family. She’s been sick, and her kids have been taking care of her while her husband is working, and I wanted to do something nice for them. Now that you’re up, come help me carry it over to them.” Another example of living this value on a daily basis in our household was that we learned early on to move quietly while others were sleeping, out of consideration for their rest -- especially important in a 550 square-foot apartment.

So, “consideration,” imagining what the experience of another person is, and acting mindfully in response to their needs, was a value that I developed. Maybe this is why, as an undergraduate student (the first in our family to attend college) in a human development course, I learned about our capacity for this thing called empathy; there was a resonance and connection to this deeply personal value I carried in me, which led me to pursue this as my major field of study, including more than a decade later in graduate school at Harvard University’s department of Human Development and Psychology.

In the mid-90s, while driving to work in Oakland and listening to the local Pacifica Radio station, I heard a guy talking about teaching in inner-city Detroit, dealing with student conflicts there, and facilitating mediations in the Middle East between Palestinians and Jews. While his stories and perspectives sounded grounded and insightful to me, what truly caught my attention was when he talked about teaching a method of communicating that was also a way of exercising our empathic capacity! I was late to my meeting because I waited until the end of the radio program to make sure I got the name and contact info of this person. Within a week, I ordered a couple of Marshall Rosenbergl’s books and other materials and started studying on my own, eventually using them to the best of my ability in the evening Master in Education courses I was also teaching. Even having no training, simply bringing in some of the core principles of NVC into our classroom experience and doing my best to apply these tools in my relationship with students transformed the quality of our experience, deepening our quality of connection with each other, and put teachers on a path to greater connection with students back in their own classrooms.

There is that paraphrase of Einstein’s writing, “We will never solve our problems with the same consciousness that created them.” If we are to walk a path of meaning, of joy, of creative energy in the service of Life, growing the truth of our interdependent nature and that we are in a relationship with everyone and everything around us is fundamental. This is the indigenous world view that we all need to return to, and NVC offers tools that can help bridge from the colonized mindset and ways of being, to the way of the Red Road, of understanding our sacred connection to all our relations.

As a Certified Trainer, my aim is to serve communities in their process of "decolonization" from the domination culture and reclaiming our full humanity, and also to grow the body of pedagogical strategies/culturally-congruent-ways of sharing the consciousness and tools of NVC that align with the ways of being of original indigenous communities. Likewise I hope to continue learning from my indigenous relatives/communities who collectively have an abundance of experience and insights, and perhaps most importantly, a worldview and way of connecting to Life that is in alignment with our inextricably interdependent nature––what our world needs to understand and live, now more than ever.