Ancestral Health Secrets from Indigenous Elders: What Keeps Them Strong at 100 | Hilda Labrada Gore

Before Hilda was even born, doctors told her mother that the baby would likely come into the world unable to hear or speak, because she’d been exposed to German measles in the womb. They went so far as to suggest her mother not have her at all. Her mom said no. She was going to have this baby.

Hilda was born with a hole in her heart, one of the “blue babies” doctors never knew how long would live. She spent her childhood being monitored, scanned and tested, scared that if she did anything too vigorous her heart would give out. At nine she had open heart surgery and woke up with a scar across her chest. She told me two things went through her mind back then: nobody would ever want to marry her, and she would do whatever it took never to set foot in a hospital again.

She’s over 60 now and says she feels half her age. When she shared that, I thought about how close we came to never hearing her story at all.

The word that starts with “die”

Hilda pointed out something I haven’t been able to shake. The word diagnosis starts with the sound “die.” A doctor hands someone a verdict, and the person takes it in and starts living toward it. She told the story of an elderly Chinese woman whose family chose not to tell her about her cancer diagnosis. They gathered around her, celebrated together, and she went on to live far longer than anyone predicted. She didn’t know what she was “supposed” to do.

I know that feeling from the other side. Over twenty years ago I was handed my own verdict. That was my frying pan upside the head, as Hilda’s friend puts it, and it took something that big to wake me up. Once I stepped out of the system I’d been living in, I could finally see it. While I was inside it, I couldn’t.

Ancestors, elders and the lost diet

For ten years Hilda produced the Wise Traditions podcast for the Weston A. Price Foundation. Dr. Price was a dentist who travelled the world in the 1930s and found that the healthiest people on the planet were all eating what Hilda calls “the lost diet”: local, organic, seasonal, traditional food. It looked different everywhere, but it was always real food.

Hilda decided she wanted to meet those people herself before their wisdom disappeared. As she put it, when an elder passes away, it’s like a library burns down.

One of those elders was a Maasai man, maybe a hundred years old, who didn’t know his own age. When she asked what his people did when they got sick, he said they never got sick. When she asked what had changed for the grandchildren, who now needed jackets and shots, he gave her one word: education. The children were being pulled away from the lifestyle that had kept their grandparents strong.

In Australia, an Aboriginal woman named Auntie Sib told Hilda she wasn’t following in Dr. Price’s footsteps at all. She was doing what her ancestors had called her to do. “Welcome home.” I got chills hearing that.

Be still and be led

What moved me most was when Hilda talked about dadirri, an Aboriginal practice of deep listening. That stillness leads to a deep knowing. A woman named Suzanne Thompson used it to turn away from a career as a hairstylist and become custodian of her tribe’s ancestral land.

That’s how I came through my own journey too. When I hit the wall, I knew I couldn’t find the right people on my own. You could have given me all the money in the world and I still wouldn’t have found someone like Hilda. So I asked, out loud, to be led. I promised that if I was shown something, I’d do whatever it took. And I was shown, one step at a time.

Hilda said most of us are human doings rather than human beings. We rush around entertaining ourselves and wonder why we feel lost. She told the joke about the woman pulled over for speeding who says she was going fast because she was lost. That’s most of us.

Start with one thing

If all of this sounds like a lot, Hilda’s advice is simple: start with one thing. Take a walk in the morning. Get some sunlight. Wear one less layer than you’d like and let your body adapt. Turn it into a prayer walk. When that becomes a rhythm, add something else.

Walking is the one I always come back to. You can do it forever, it costs nothing, and it’s the best quiet time I know. The tribes Hilda visited never counted their steps. They just lived a life that kept them moving.

Hilda’s new book, The Ancestral Mother Code: Six Habits to Restore Your Energy and Build Generational Health, comes out in February. It’s written for moms who pour everything into their families and leave nothing for themselves. Her message to them is one I’d give to anyone: take care of yourself first so you have something to give, and bring your family along with you.

Life is precious. Use your time well, because if you don’t, it will use you.

— Ian