by Cara Page and Erica Woodland
North Atlantic Books
2/7/2023, paperback
SKU: 9781623177140
A profound offering and call to action--collective stories, testimonials, and incantations for renewing political and spiritual liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer and Trans healing justice lineages
We reclaim the power, resilience, and innovation of our ancestors through this book. To embody their wisdom across centuries and generations is to continue their legacy of liberation and healing.
In this anthology, Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice--a political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression. They call forth the ancestral medicines and healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next.
Anti-capitalist, Black feminist, and abolitionist, Healing Justice Lineages is a profound and urgent call to embrace community and survivor-led care strategies as models that push beyond commodified self-care, the policing of the medical industrial complex, and the surveillance of the public health system. Centering disability, reproductive, environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, this collection elevates and archives an ongoing tradition of liberation and survival--one that has been largely left out of our history books, but continues to this day.
In the first section, "Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage," Page and Woodland remember and reclaim generations-long healing justice and community care work, asking critical questions like: How did our ancestors transform trauma and violence in their liberation work? What were our ancestors reckoning with--and what did they imagine?
The next sections, "Origins of Healing Justice" and "Alchemy: Theory + Praxis," explore regional stories of healing justice in response to the current political and cultural landscape. The last section, "Political + Spiritual Imperatives for the Future," imagines a future rooted in lessons of the past; addresses the ways healing justice is being co-opted and commodified; and uplifts emergent work that's building infrastructure for care, safety, healing, and political liberation.
With a foreword by Aurora Levins Morales
Reviews:
"This beautiful anthology shows us a series of challenges and is a source of possibilities, and as such should be read over and over again by anyone working for and living like they love freedom." -- Beth Richie, Activist and Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, Co-Founder of INCITE!, and co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
"Cara Page and Erica Woodland beautifully explain how the lineages of healing justice provide the history, strategies, and inspiration we need right now. Rich with lessons from legendary freedom fighters, modern Black feminist organizers, and others showing the way toward liberation, this is an essential guide for all abolitionists." -- Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and Torn Apart
"...a balm and a provocation. This book is rooted in history, of our moment, and for our future. Open to any page and you'll learn something new, be affirmed, unsettled, and inspired to ask new questions, scribble notes, and certainly keep reading. I didn't want to put it down." -- Mariame Kaba, Founder and Director of Project NIA, Co-Founder of Interrupting Criminalization, and author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us
About the Author:
Cara Page (she/her/hers) is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker, curator, abolitionist, and organizer. For 30 years, she has organized with LGBTSQGNCI, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color liberation movements. Page leads Changing Frequencies, an organizing project building power within communities to confront, heal, and transform generational trauma. She is co-founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. She is a former recipient of the OSF Soros Equality Fellowship and 'Activist in Residence' at the Barnard Research Center for Women.
Erica Woodland (he/him/his) is a black queer/genderqueer facilitator, consultant, and healing practitioner. He is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker working at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, trans, and queer justice. Woodland is Founding Director of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network, a healing justice organization committed to transforming mental health for queer and trans people of color.