Healing Justice Lineages

Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety

Cara Page & Erica Woodland

Foreword by Aurora Levins Morales

Praise for Healing Justice Lineages

“From the very first page of this book, it is at once a series of powerful testimonials about survival, deep meditations on the hope that our ancestors bring, and instruction about how to build care into our liberation movements. It also reflects on how uniting our spirits, caring for our lands, and honoring our history of traditions are critical to transformative politics.

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.

“Healing Justice Lineages earns its place as one of the most essential healing justice texts that we will ever have. Page and Woodland humbly, sacredly, and masterfully weave history, stories, and invocations together, not only teaching about healing justice, but modeling it as well. This anthology is required reading for anyone working for justice and liberation.”

—Mia Mingus, Founder of SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project

“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

“Healing Justice Lineages is a stunning and important work that offers memories, insights, and provocations from Cara and Erica’s collective wisdom. At a moment when the world’s flesh is seared with pain, we can turn to this collection for intellectual, historical, and political balm—guiding a way forward by looking to the past in order to see a future. In the hands of these two amazing activist-thinkers and memory workers, we are given the gift of possibility. Thank you both.”

—Dána-Ain Davis, MPH, PhD, author of Reproductive Injustice

“The impetus to put the painful and disruptive experiences of the pandemic, escalating police violence, and the related destruction of racial capitalism, homophobia, ableism, and patriarchy behind us is strong in this moment. But this book will help all of us to process, sit with it all, and remain steadfast in our commitment to emerging from this era with renewed energy for reimagining, shaping, and birthing a better world grounded in liberation and justice and healing. This book is timely, and profoundly honest in its telling of our history and current moment, pure in its analysis of oppression, and compelling in its description of how healing justice can create the conditions for each of us and our collectives to be free.”

—Michelle Morse, MD, MPH, Co-Founder of EqualHealth and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School

“Healing Justice Lineages is 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

“Healing Justice Lineages is simultaneously a beautiful gift and a powerful intervention by longtime movement leaders and healers Cara Page and Erica Woodland. There is no better timing as global crises escalate—war, violence, white supremacy, fascism, climate change, patriarchy, and attacks on queer, trans, and nonbinary people and people living with disabilities. Communities most deeply impacted do all we can to fight back, resist, and build a different world where all of us and the world in which we live thrive in fullness. We turn to the ways we have always taken care of each other, kept each other safe and well, and found ways to find joy, affirmation, and power in the face of adversity. In Healing Justice Lineages, Cara Page and Erica Woodland lift up these practices, tell their histories, and say their names so we can honor them fully, so we can learn them with the respect they deserve and, ultimately, embrace our responsibility to continue and grow this lineage knowing that our survival and liberation depend upon it.”

—Kris Hayashi, Executive Director of Transgender Law Center

For Harriet Tubman, Charity Hicks, and our ancestors

Photograph by Margarita Corporan. Visual description: At the center of this black-and-white image, a framed picture of Harriet Tubman wearing all white is propped against a tree trunk, next to a gourd. In the foreground, an altar is captured out of focus atop a geometric black-and-gold patterned Kuba cloth, including a large woven basket, a white candle, and offerings of cornmeal, a cigar, and flowers.

Acknowledgments

We give thanks to the lands that have held us while writing this book. To Harriet Tubman’s birthplace in Dorchester County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, part of the Underground Railroad and the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, and our kinfolks’ land in the South.

We give thanks to the plants, the insects and the animals, birds, deer, foxes, rabbits, and the bald eagle that brought us their sacred medicine along the way.

We give gratitude to Oshun and the rivers that cleansed our feet and spirit along this journey.

We want to honor the root workers, healers, health practitioners, birth workers, and cultural workers that carried forth the lineage of care and safety for the next generations. And deep appreciation to Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective for your lineage, vision, and practice!

Our deepest gratitude to our amazing editor, comrade, and oracle, Lisa Factora-Borchers, who spun magic into our words and held the spiritual intention of this book even when we couldn’t see it.

To our Wise Circle for this anthology that gave us guidance to stay true to our convictions and political and spiritual imperative of this project: Shira Hassan, Tamika Middleton, Francisca Porchas Coronado, Adaku Utah, Anjali Taneja, and Prentis Hemphill.

We extend tremendous gratitude to our contributors: Shira Hassan, Tamika Middleton, Francisca Porchas Coronado, Adaku Utah, Susan Raffo, Eesha Pandit, Kenyon Farrow, Aurora Levins Morales, Tré Vasquez, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. We absolutely couldn’t have produced this without your beautiful gift of gathering story rooted in place and spiritual fortitude. Our Cultural Arts Team for their creative genius: Margarita Corporan, Amir Khadar, and Claudia Lopez. And a big shout-out to our divine resource team: Courtney Okeke, our research warrior; Afia Reynolds, our logistics goddess; and our visual descriptor extraordinaire, tae min Suh.

A sonorous clap for all of our esteemed interviewees: Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Barbara Smith, Eddie Conway, Rita Valenti, Talila “TL” Lewis, Sean Saifa Wall, Courtni Andrews, Chanel Porchia-Albert, Phoenix Smith, Nia Wilson, Adela Nieves Martinez, Kristyn Leach, Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Jackie Patterson, Tré Vasquez, Agustina Vidal, Andrea Ritchie, Cat Brooks, Patrisse Cullors, Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, Tammy Greer, Monique Verdin, Michelle Morse, Julia Bennett, Patty Berne, Geleni Fontaine, Kris Hayashi, Gina George, Mia Mingus, Rebecca Wisotsky, Paulina Helm-Hernandez, Wendi Moore-O’Neal, Aesha Rasheed, Caitlin Breedlove, Mya Hunter, Vivette Jeffries-Logan, Omisade Burney-Scott, Erika Totten, Eva Renise Turner, Nico Le Blanc, Richael Faithful, Cory Greene, Autumn Brown, Maryse Mitchell-Brody, Danielle Sered, Alana Lopez, Lauren Jan Brony, Shash Yazhi Charley, Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, Kimberly Aceves-Iñiguez, Carla M. Pérez, Angela Aguilar, Ayo Clemons, Alejandra Tobar Alatriz, Eiko Mizushima, Griffin Jeffries, Owólabi Aboyade, Tanuja Jagernauth, Stacy Erenberg, Sylvia Ledesma, Lorraine Cordova, and Denicia Cadena.

Erica’s Acknowledgments

I honor my beloved ancestors, the reason I said yes to this project: with gratitude and respect to my parents, Michelle Woodland and Raymond Woodland; Aunt Sheila (White); my grandparents Drain and Mary Riley. Big love to my sibling, Bryan Woodland; niblings Brea and BJ; and my cousins Essence, Malcolm, and Camille, who keep me honest and grounded. Eternal gratitude to Dominique and Eddie Conway for your love and political and spiritual wisdom. To my ride or die, Nanea Renteria, for your friendship, love, and academic brilliance! To Shira Hassan, friend and thought partner, for your steady support through this birthing process. To my friends and co-conspirators Ejeris Dixon and Mia Mingus for your love, clarity, and encouragement. I honor all of my teachers who have inspired me to chart my own path, trust my intuition, and remain steady in the work for liberation. To my Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, Queer, and Trans community; my family at the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network—you are brilliant reflections of what is possible when we are rooted in love.

Cara’s Acknowledgments

Deepest gratitude to my ancestors who I do this work in the name of: my father, Dr. Sabeur Bey; my godmother, Dr. Joan Sweeney; Grandma Lorraine, Grandma Betty, Great “Grandma” Victoria Bey, and my many ancestral bloodlines. To my community ancestors Charity Hicks, Mama Nayo Watkins, Ms. Mary Davis, Carmen Vazquez, Tatiana Cordero, and Ntombe Howell. Deepest gratitude and love to my family who loves and grounds me, including my partner, Sung; my mom, Lynda, and stepdad, Dennis; my siblings, Pilar and Sajo; step “ma,” Marla; and the DeHaases, Jeffersons, Beys, Shimas, Pages, Collinses, and Wades.

Thanks to the Kindred Collective co-architects of healing justice, who make this book possible for their commitment in carrying the lineage forward: Rita Valenti, Kate Shapiro, Sonali Sadequee, Sokari Brown, Paulina Helm-Hernandez, Ariana Lima, and Tamika Middleton.

Special thanks to my chosen family and the ones who have believed in me and pushed me along the way, and bring me joy and spiritual, political, and creative sustenance: Andrea Calderon, Nathalie Thandiwe, Kim Diehl, Shira Hassan, Stephanie Guilloud, Susan Raffo, Tema Okun, Karla Mejia, Adaku Utah, Luce Lincoln, Anjali Taneja, Ejeris Dixon, Adela Nieves Martinez, Caitlin Breedlove, Malachi Larrabee-Garza, Ellen O’Grady, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mia Mingus, Dána-Ain Davis, Monica E. Enriquez, Mariam Gagoshvilli, Mab Segrest, Aurora Levins Morales, Brenda Salas Neves, Patty Berne, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Akiba Onada-Sikwoia, Ebony Noelle Golden, Jack Tchen, Sebastian Margaret, Noemi Molitor, Michelle Morse, Kara Lynch, Jelena Djordjevic, and my Southern Mountain “Ride or Die” Ladies Crew: Carrie Schrader and Bree Carlson. Deep gratitude to my Korean drum crew: Sehwan Kim and Meejin Seol Richart, and to my Miss Major Jay Toole Fam: Avi Cummings, Daniel McGee, Gabriel Foster, Tourmaline, Pooja Gehi, Ola Osaze, Kris Hayashi, Jai Dulani, Krystal Portalatin, Andrea Ritchie, Amber Hollibaugh, and Jay Toole! Gratitude to the Audre Lorde Project crew especially: Myles Paisley, Ileana Mendez-Penate, Cleopatra Acquaye-Reynolds, and Roberto Tijerina; my Southerners on New Ground OGs; and to my Brooklyn Black Ladiez Crew: Tynesha McHarris, Shalini Eddens, and Zakiya Lord.

Deepest thanks to my co-conspirators from the Healing Justice/Public Health/Campaign Against Racism Abolitionist Crew; the Healing Histories Project and Changing Frequencies teams; the staff of the Barnard Center for Research on Women; INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence; and my coaches Ana Polanco, Lisa Garrett-Keisers, and Eesha Pandit. Finally, gratitude to my mentors, elders, teachers, and community who cannot all be named here but have guided my path and changed my universe for knowing you.

Invocation

We give thanks to Great Spirit, Creator, Universe, and the infinite names we have for the Divine Source from which everything emerges,

To the elements, Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, that nourish us and teach us about balance and equilibrium,

To the blessed ancestors whose dreams and visions for our collective liberation we work to realize,

To the guardians, protectors, deities, gods, and goddesses that remind us of our divine purpose and dignity.

We honor the way Spirit has been central to this project and to the survival of our peoples.

We ask for protection, clarity, courage, humility, and to remain steadfast in our commitment for total revolution.

May we be willing to sacrifice, offer, and give up all that holds us back from the collective dream of our ancestors,

To take this journey through time and space,

To radically listen,

To find our people and commit to the work of collective liberation,

To transmute fear and domination.

May we come to know and remember over and over again the abundance of wisdom available to us,

To realize our true destiny, our inheritance,

To be in right relationship with the creative energy in everything around us,

To birth a new world.

Foreword

Aurora Levins Morales

The terrain of this book is full of crossed paths for me. I was born into a storm of colonized reproduction, a Puerto Rico of mass coerced sterilization, dangerous drug trials, and medical experiments. I was raised in the Deep South legacy of Jane Speed, a white Alabama communist organizer, run out of the state for her fiery speeches, radical bookstore, and deep alliances with tenant farmers, who brought her fire to the cause of Puerto Rican liberation, built the house I was raised in, and planted Caribbean soil with forget-me-nots.

When my father was forced from his university job, we migrated to Fred Hampton’s Chicago, the Chicago of Cha Cha Jimenez and the underground abortion service called Jane. We shared a car with the Black Panther breakfast program. My father taught Puerto Rican history to the Young Lords. I was the youngest member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, raiding medical libraries for information about our own bodies and having speculum circles with mirrors and flashlights, where we wept at the sight of our own cervixes because we had been told “down there” was none of our business.

I was also raised within the magnetic field of the Cuban Revolution, listened to broadcasts of hope in the Puerto Rican predawn before the signal was jammed each day by the CIA, a witness of effervescent decolonization and de-classing at fourteen, a recipient of their full-spectrum liberated medical care in my fifties.

I come into the sacred space of this book as an artist who uses the power of the alphabet, rooted in collective memories of trauma, resistance, and deep allyship with the nonhuman world to make medicine in the biggest sense of the word. For what is revolution if not healing?

Wholeness is no trifling matter. But how can we possibly settle for less? And yet our movements for social justice, contaminated by the very systemic traumas we are trying to survive and end, have often become caught up in ways of doing that violate our own most precious dreams. If movements are rivers, sometimes they become choked with debris, poisoned with industrial runoff. We need to tend them as we tend our visions of the possible.

Healing justice, born from rich Southern roots, began as an investigation into how we can hold the traumas of deep and painful injustices and heal from them as we fight to end them. We hold them because traumatic history is reclaimed memory in the face of denial and an archive of ways through the dark. We try to heal them as we go, because if we are to transform human life on Earth, we need to be as whole as we can and because healing is our birthright as living organisms. We fight to end them, because in the only world in which the future is bearable, the conditions for wholeness must be universal and permanent.

Gathered into this book, this medicine bundle, this ritual bowl, this organizer’s manual, are heaping handfuls of possibility, of harvested lessons, visionary analyses in poetry and prose, made not just for study but for use.

They cluster around these truths:

Collective trauma is transformed collectively. We live in a society that controls its people through the privatization of pain, diverting us away from the possibility of societal diagnoses and collective healing toward psychiatric drugs and self-help books. In 1969, when at fifteen I joined a feminist consciousness-raising group in Chicago, I learned the healing justice practice of story circles, where the accumulation of individual experiences grew into a sudden recognition of the social roots of our pain. We hurt because we were oppressed. Healing justice reclaims the ancient knowledge that just as harm is collective, healing is not an individual act.

There is no single model, no one road, no one best strategy. We must use all of what we are and know, and we are and know billions of things. Audre Lorde said the remedy for the onslaught of bad news was to “find your work and do it.” The only sustainable way to heal human society is if we all stay rooted in who we are and what we bring, connected with each other, and find the works our body-heart-minds are called to. My own best gift has always been storytelling with the written word to change what we think is possible.

And we need hands-on healers moving abuse out of our bodies; ecologist farmers trying ancient/new ways to grow food; organizers of mass marches, global conferences, and civil disobedience; people who teach through film and by sitting on dirt floors listening; cooperatives and whole countries reaching for new forms of governance.

Healing justice is rooted in place and ancestral technologies. There is no “active ingredient” of liberation that can be extracted from the synergistic webs of life, human and wild. Without roots we wither. Without interdependence we sicken and die. Without access to what the soil remembers, what our ancestors carried through all that happened to them, we become adrift, vulnerable to isolation, illusion, and despair.

For healing to stay true, to resist being commodified, extracted, turned toxic in the laboratories of capitalism and its imitators, it must stay rooted in specificity, in lineage, in the sensual, cellular, local, relational, mycelial, historical, ancestral, evolutionary.

In the spring of 1991 I began a process that, like the sites of practice described in this book, refused the separation of healing and justice. I started therapy to recover from having been sex trafficked as a child, and I began graduate school to write what I called a medicinal history of Boricua women.

To write Remedios, I researched the thousands of survival strategies of my lineages, following threads of kinship and trade, the work of our hands, the foods we ate, and the many ways we invented to heal. I went deep into time, to all the mother continents that birthed us, and sought guidance from the plants that had accompanied us. By working my own healing as part of a communal reclamation, I built a cohort across space and time and learned to tap the limitless potency of sitting in story circle with long-dead ancestors to brew up a rich infusion of wholeness that I, their embodied child, could taste on my living tongue.

This book is such a gathering, a consciousness-raising group that theorizes and recounts and invokes the fundamental inseparability of healing and justice, that teaches in multiple voices this truth. That both the self-sacrificing activists working past their own limits in toxic organizational cultures that extract physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual labor as if extracting minerals from rock, without an accounting of the slag because it’s for a good cause; and the fractured, commodified, feel-good cult of individualistic self-care, claiming to heal the world by healing ourselves alone, using one appropriated and decontextualized ancestral tool at a time, are dangerous and unaffordable.

Only the integration of healing and liberation that this political framework offers has the capacity to generate the grounded, expansive, clear-headed, multifaceted mobilization of life force we need to transform these apocalyptic times into the world of which, like those before us, we dream.

Introduction

Purpose: Why This Book? Why Now?

Our ancestors, elders, and wisdom traditions speak to us in our dreams about the immense, cosmic interplanetary shifts happening at this time. Our people are reclaiming ancestral technologies and creating new ones to affirm our ability to set new blueprints beyond time, space, and form that will free us and rapidly accelerate our evolution. This is what healing justice was meant to be—an incantation, a response to new patterns of movement and resistance; a call-and-response to our ancestors who survived colonization, slavery, and attempted genocide, healed, and transmitted a radical legacy for collective care and safety.

In this moment, the call for healing justice is clear and urgent. Our movements are eager for tools, strategies, and practices to address trauma and violence that can keep us steady in our fight for liberation. We have been waiting for this moment. For years we have challenged our movements to move toward healing justice while watching our beloved barrel toward environmental, physical, emotional, psychic, and spiritual crisis. These crises are not of our making, yet we have a responsibility and the skills to intervene. This book will ask us to be in disciplined and rigorous practice for our collective survival and liberation.

We challenge the popularization of “self-care” and “healing” and the consequences of the mainstreaming of our spiritual and political work for liberation. We are witnessing the wholesale erasure, co-optation, and misappropriation of healing justice, specifically by white people, who are writing books and creating podcasts in ways that take up space and resources without honoring or being in relationship to the long lineage of work led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color—most notably people in the South: women, Queer, Trans, and disabled folks of color. This anthology seeks to imagine how we deepen and widen this work while intervening on commodification and the ways capitalism and social media can make gurus out of thieves. Healing justice is not yours to consume. It is our collective birthright that the ancestors fought and died for.

2020 accelerated a reckoning that forced us to confront all that is buried beneath the facade of “America” and this so-called dream that many of us experience as terror. We cannot turn away from the state abandoning and selling out our people during a global pandemic. We cannot turn away from a failing and harmful health care system that perpetuates eugenics and carceral strategies. We cannot turn away from the glaring impacts of white supremacy, ableism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia as evidenced by the rise of fascism, imperialism, and continued state violence, including police brutality; the mass incarceration of Black and Brown communities; and the detention and deportation of migrant communities. We cannot turn away from climate catastrophes across the world with the proliferation of hurricanes, wildfires, and extreme temperatures, and the subsequent neglect and exploitation of our most vulnerable communities. We cannot turn away from the continued extraction and commodification of our Earth’s precious resources by corporations who build pipelines across our sacred waterways, start wars, and engage in fracking for oil to fuel capitalism.

We cannot turn away from the continued criminalization of our Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities, undocumented folks, Queer, Trans, and gender-nonconforming people, our people engaging in the street economy, sex workers, active drug users, our people who are unhoused, our sick and disabled people, people with living with HIV/AIDS, organizers, activists, artists, cultural workers, and increasingly, our health, healing, and spiritual practitioners, who refuse to collude with the prison and medical industrial complexes. We cannot turn away from the increased gender-based violence and attacks on our bodily autonomy from the state, as well as within our communities and families. We are forced to confront the ongoing impacts of policies such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade and further attacks on reproductive justice; anti-trans legislation criminalizing health practitioners and care givers providing gender-affirming care to Trans youth; or the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which attempts to erase and criminalize the existence of LGBTQTSI+.

2020 was the beginning of an awakening. We are living in the midst of a growing global resistance to fascism, white supremacy, and all systems of domination and the ways they collude and build upon one another in service of the ruling class. This year brought mass uprisings, unprecedented organizing around electoral politics, and campaigns to defund the police, as well as calls for abolition in ways we have not seen within our lifetime. Our communities have shown up to care for each other in the midst of a global pandemic and extreme economic, political, and social instability. This is truly a moment of contradiction.

It was a turning point where the desire for healing justice, even when it is called something different, is increasing. We have to name the ways people heal and transform generations of grief, hate, violence, and the wounds of slavery, colonization, and white supremacist violence in order to fight for our transformative futures. Our people are ready for this healing and this transformation. This fierce longing is clear.

We are in a moment of new cosmologies. The planet is regenerating, and we are in the midst of collective degeneration and renewal. We are in a portal of life, death, and transmutation. Everything is collapsing, and this collapse requires that we take what is most useful and let go of everything else we knew before. There is a creative force that land, healers, and practitioners have been holding, seeding the ground for these prophecies and new cycles of transformation and spiritual evolution. This book is an offering of collective stories, testimonials, and incantations that explore political and spiritual liberation at a moment of deep crisis and transformation. In this anthology, we cast new spells to reground us, remind us, and help us remember we have been here before. We have existed and resisted in our legacies of survival and our descendants already live in our imagined futures.

How do we draw from our ancestral memory, lineage, and ways of knowing to heal and to be in right relationship to land, body, and spirit as integral to our political liberation? We dare to compost, regenerate, and reimagine ourselves beyond the original wounds of slavery, colonization, genocide, and displacement from our land, cultural memory, and traditions. As in the words of Toni Morrison, we must imagine, and “if there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Lineage

Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.¹

—Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

Healing justice is memory work. The work of reclamation. We remember despite the intensity of personal and collective violence happening over and over again to the bodies of our ancestors and their children. We are their descendants. We have survived. This anthology is an offering to honor and hold with reverence this history, and the infinite ways our movements for liberation have always centered collective care and safety strategies.

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.

Cara’s Lineage

I am a Black Queer Feminist, a cultural memory worker, an abolitionist, organizer, and healing justice practitioner. I am a daughter and great granddaughter of Black Seminole, Black Southern migrant sharecroppers, and European immigrants. As a survivor of family violence, I believed early on in healing remedies, casting spells and poems, and building sacred spaces to get through difficult times. Along the way I have found other political kin who mapped their own paths with remedies and recipes for survival.

I have worked in the service of reproductive justice, transformative justice, disability justice, and Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Two Spirit, and Intersex (LGBTQTSI+) liberation movements that have deeply shaped my path. In 1997 my dreams led me back to the home of my ancestors, back to the Southeast, where I learned the cultural and political practices of Black and Indigenous radical traditions. Being in the South changed me and my understanding of spiritual and cultural protocol, intergenerational organizing, and honoring the land as integral to political liberation. Another seminal moment for me was when I attended the World Social Forum in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2005 as a representative of the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment (CWPE) to present on a panel about the privatization of seeds and genes hosted by Global South Feminist Farmers. From there I began to integrate a deeper analysis—drawing from Black and Global South Feminist movements—on the reclamation of bodily autonomy, land, collective safety, and our healing traditions. This led me to organize with Project South and Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and to become an architect of healing justice and co-founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective.

Erica’s Lineage

I am a descendant of generations of Black women who sacrificed their lives to provide care, protection, and safety for their children. I was born and raised in Baltimore City, a place that holds the legacy of genocide and slavery in ways that make it difficult to differentiate the past from the present. This land, its history, and the Black community here were the foundation of my resistance, resilience, and commitment to transforming the conditions around me and my people.

My first and more formative teacher was my mother (now an ancestor), who modeled protecting your loved ones at all costs, and the strength that’s forged when we choose integrity over belonging. As a young one, I attended a private elite all-girls school on the site of a former plantation by day, and returned to my Black working-class/poor community and family at night. I understood the evils of capitalism early. But my home was a sanctuary.

In my early twenties, I met Dominique and Eddie Conway, my teachers, mentors, godparents, and comrades. Dominique and I met doing anti-war organizing with People of Color in Baltimore, and she introduced me to Eddie (former Black Panther and political prisoner featured later in the chapter “Don’t Give up and Don’t Make the Same Mistakes”) and the work he was doing in the prison, and soon I began organizing for his freedom. These two made an indelible imprint on my political and spiritual consciousness and continue to shape my understanding of liberation.

I offer gratitude to all of my teachers, guides, comrades, and co-conspirators who anchor me in my commitment to liberation, care, and protection.

We begin with the acknowledgment that healing justice is not new. Our people have always had cultural and spiritual traditions to address, transform, and recover from trauma, grief, violence, and crisis. Our people have always relied on traditions and practices that connect us to our dignity, humanity, and divine worthiness. Though the healing justice framework was conceived in the early 2000s from healers and organizers in the South responding to crisis in our movements for LGBTQTSI+, racial, economic, and gender justice, and Southern Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, this book traces the lineage of healing justice well before the co-architects birthed this framework. It actually begins exploring how collective care and safety strategies have been an essential part of generations of resistance birthed on this land.

Blueprints: From Lineage to Legacy

This book was brought to form through prayer, offerings made to land and spirit, and the willingness to accept our responsibility to heal collective and intergenerational trauma. This book pushed us to take the risk of imagining who we were and who we’d be without the legacies of violence we and our ancestors have survived. We offer this as a testament to lineage and invite you to situate yourself and your people in this collective story.

This book was forged through discipline, rigor, humility, and accountability. We have aspired to be historians, archivists, storytellers, and conduits for what our ancestors need us to know to survive. We have spent hours dreaming, sitting quietly, listening, divining, researching, questioning, interviewing, struggling, getting feedback, pushing, embracing fear, going deeper, and tending to many, many, many relationships, the bedrock of this entire project. We weave stories of survival and freedom from past, present, and future and offer our interpretation of history (which is always shaped by who is telling the story). This story intentionally centers Black and Indigenous lineage of healing justice and all the revolutionaries, freedom fighters, healers, cultural workers, and dreamers who have shaped us and our thinking about healing justice in some way. This is A book about the lineage of healing justice, not THE book. We hope this anthology inspires more BIPOC to document their relationship to this lineage.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for those who want to join us in building long-term infrastructure for collective care and safety for our people outside of carceral strategies. This book is for those who understand that we can never have liberation without collective strategies to transform trauma (intergenerational, collective, historical). This book is for health and healing practitioners moving toward liberatory frameworks and looking for a way to participate in our movements. When we began this project, we intended this anthology to be an offering for:

Black, Indigenous, Latinx/Latine, Southeast, South, and East Asian, Pacfic Islander, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA)² people,

Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Two Spirit, Intersex+ (LGBTQTSI+) people,

Sick, disabled, chronically ill, deaf, neurodivergent, and mad communities,

Social justice movements—organizers, activists, strategists, and people on the front lines resisting domination and building collective power to transform conditions of violence,

Health practitioners, doctors, nurses, social workers, psychotherapists, and public health advocates,

Cultural workers, multimedia makers, artists, and memory workers,

Earth, body, and energy healers, spiritual practitioners, birth workers,

Facilitators, consultants, coaches, and teachers,

Storytellers, academics, researchers, and archivists,

Survivors of trauma and violence.

Assumptions and Contradictions

We want to make a clear distinction between the healing justice framework explored in this anthology and other work by the same name rooted in restorative justice, reform, and healing the criminal justice system. The healing justice framework that we speak of is abolitionist and anti-capitalist and does not seek to reform or heal the prison industrial complex. This is important because the values, principles, and origins of these two approaches are not politically aligned. We wanted to make this clear so that our meaning of healing justice as a political framework is not weaponized by the state.

We offer a number of important critiques of the medical industrial complex (MIC) throughout this anthology for reasons that are named repeatedly.³ We know our people are worth more than a system built on genocide, slavery, and colonization that continues to abuse and experiment on us and denies us care. Challenging the MIC by naming scientific racism and its relationship to the carceral state is not a wholesale rejection of science, doctors, nurses, and health care workers. It’s unfortunate that we have to say this when our peoples have had sophisticated scientific and technological systems of knowledge for thousands of years. It is convenient to turn a very real critique of the MIC into being anti-science, because it serves to delegitimize the critique.

We are living in a time where we have more awareness and language around trauma, but the word has lost its specificity. We remain critical of colonial constructs of trauma offered by the medical industrial complex, and we know we need more frameworks (some will be explored in the chapter “Spiritual Conditions”) that speak to the legacies of colonization, imperialism, slavery, and genocide that we and our ancestors have survived. For the purpose of this book, we define trauma as an experience or threat that overwhelms our individual and collective nervous systems. Trauma is not the experience per se but our physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychic responses to that experience, which are shaped by our lived experiences of intergenerational trauma and structural violence. When trauma is overused to describe discomfort, difficult experiences, and political or ideological struggle, it trivializes survivors’ experiences and makes it difficult to develop strategies to transform trauma.

The Invitation

We invite you to journey through time and space; to sit in the contradictions and possibilities of this moment in our planet’s history; to ask the hard questions and be in the discomfort about the reality that there won’t always be an answer. We invite you to take notes, and challenge everything you thought you knew for sure. We invite you to pray, meditate, and ask your guides and ancestors to help you metabolize this history, and to consider your responsibility to the work of collective healing and liberation. We invite you to pause, take breaks, and commit to reengaging when you can. We invite you to relish in the centuries of wisdom we have available to us when we understand ourselves as part of a lineage—generations of work, experience, and lessons to be passed down to those who come after us. Join us as we celebrate what we have survived and healed; the joy of touching liberation in this moment!

Notes

¹ Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (Vintage Contemporaries Vintage Books, 1980), 10.

² Southwest Asian and North African or SWANA: term used instead of Middle Eastern or Arab.

³ See glossary and the chapters “Roots of the Medical Industrial Complex” and “Dismantling the Medical Industrial Complex: Alchemy and Building Power for Collective Care” for more information.

Roadmap

Here is a map to guide you along the constellations of the book. There are six portals you will enter on this journey of healing justice, collective care, and safety.

We open the book with ceremony and honoring the ancestors. We set the tone with acknowledgment, invocation, and a welcoming to ground you in our foreword by our elder, Aurora Levins Morales. The invitation to our journey begins.

Then we enter the first section, “Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage,” with lessons learned from ancestors and living warriors along the path of liberation. We begin in spirit conversation with our ancestor Harriet Tubman. Then sit with our elder warriors Miss Major, Barbara Smith, and Eddie Conway. We lay down a foundational analysis of structural barriers that have tried to block, disrupt, and attempt to take our ancestral traditions of care in the “Roots of the Medical Industrial Complex” and “We Are Our History: Transforming the Legacy of Criminalization.” We reclaim our lineage of resistance by exploring movements led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the 1960s through the 1990s, including Red, Black, and Brown Power movements, and the radical care and resistance work led by drug users, sex workers, and LGBTQTSI+ people through harm reduction and HIV/AIDS organizing.

Next we enter the “Origins of Healing Justice” to reveal the conditions that guided our political and spiritual imperative in the South to center collective care and safety for our lands, bodies, spirits, and ancestors. We conjure a new path.

The next section, “Alchemy: Theory + Praxis,” explains the political frameworks that deeply inform and shape healing justice, collective care, and safety lineages. We will travel to New Mexico, the Midwest, California, and New York City to engage with some of the sites of practice exploring, dreaming, and creating praxis at the nexus of care and liberation.

We then travel to the portal of futures, where we delve deeper into the transmissions of abolition, land sovereignty, organizing practitioners, spirit, co-optation, and contradictions of the work. This will help us to imagine what to build for care and safety for our descendants.

We close the ceremony of the book with a devocation and gratitude.

We strongly advise that you read this book in its entirety because it builds on a continuum, from front to back, from past to present to future. It truly uncovers the crossroads we have come from and are moving toward. Throughout we weave a tapestry of stories, reflections, ruminations, practices, and conjurings to get us to collective care and liberation.

Medicine for Your Journey

Endnotes are your keys to the galaxies! We are community archivists and historians, and mapped a lot of history along this journey. We invite you to explore and expand the map by reading the endnotes and learning more about the history, context, and conditions we are undoing and reimagining.

We’ve also included practices to reflect, metabolize, elevate, and embody the words in the chapters so that they sink into you and your imagination, dreams, blood and bones, and futures.

Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage 

Photography by Margarita Corporan. Visual description: A black-and-white photo taken from behind of Erica, a Black transmasculine person with locs wrapped on top of his head (on left), and Cara, a Black woman in a hat (on right), walking together in the forest at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Cambridge, Maryland. Both are dressed in all white and are surrounded by decomposed leaves on the forest floor, tree foliage, and sky.

learning to listen

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Instructions from Harriet (Araminta) Tubman also known as Moses also known as the bravest shapeshifting conductor of the Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman, a Black disabled survivor of the interpersonal and state violence of enslavement in Eastern Shore Maryland, used her knowledge of plants, the night sky, herbal remedies, and her faith in what no one else could see to lead hundreds of enslaved people out of the sites of harm and trauma that held them captive. Gifted with sight, and endowed with frontal-lobe epilepsy as a result of a traumatic head injury inflicted by a violent enslaver, Harriet Tubman was a neurodivergent leader who paused, slept, and received guidance during the freedom journeys she navigated while under direct white supremacist attack. She trusted her dreams.

Harriet Tubman led an uprising of over eight hundred enslaved people at the Combahee River during the Civil War, bankrupting a network of rice plantations that were funding the Confederate effort and leading to a series of events that secured a Union victory in the war. She refused to be dependent on the US Army, which also refused to be accountable to her in the form of the pension she earned for her service during the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman operated her own culinary business while she was a soldier and trained the women who escaped South Carolina rice plantations to create their own laundry businesses. Post-emancipation, independent laundresses in the US South enacted a major strike that shaped the labor movement for centuries.

In Upstate New York, after the Civil War, Harriet Tubman and her family created an interdependent residential community for disabled people, chronically ill people, and elders. At the end of her life, Harriet Tubman received care in the space of care she created for her community.

Fire

Learn to listen to fire. Start with the furthest fire. The fire in the stars. Look between the stars for what you need. The untraceable black of the possible.

Sometimes a healer needs a fire. To bring out the medicine in the plants. To cleanse an infected area. Sometimes the whole system is the infected area, and a healer needs to burn it down.

When Harriet Tubman led the Combahee uprising in 1863, she ordered the burning of over thirty plantation buildings. The hundreds of enslaved people who escaped together that night brought their clothing, their pigs, pots of rice still hot from the cook fire. They carried the fire within them of never looking back. The Black fertility it would take to create lives beyond anything they knew. Sometimes a community needs a fire. A thorough burning, to ready the ground for healing.

Sometimes a healer needs to do without a fire. Journeying by night barely ahead of the torches, sometimes the healing people need to trust the dark. Sometimes a healer needs to call on the fire in their own body. Hold the healing people close. Depend on the steam of breathing. Sometimes body heat is the only warmth. Sometimes close will have to do.

When Harriet Tubman traveled through the dark again and again on fugitive journeys away from literal plantations and the plantation economy, she had to understand light better than light understood itself. She had to know what light would do and do something else. She had to know where light would point and be somewhere else. She had to understand what light would find and found something else. Have you been studying fire?

What are the fires you need? What do you need them for? What are the fires you can do without? When do you need to remember that? What do you need to shine a light on? What and who do you need to keep close? Healer, where do you need to practice being something else, somewhere else, some other way?

Sky

Learn to listen to sky. Listen through the top of your head. The place where your skull breaks. Listen to the sky through any wound. Learn from the place you break open. Love from the place you break open. Lead from the place you break open. Open us up to the sky.

Sometimes a healer needs to breathe. Sometimes the limit is our breathing. Sometimes the limit is far beyond our breath. Sometimes we are healing toward something we can reach with our hands. Sometimes we are healing in the service of something we will never ever touch.

Harriet Tubman once said, “God made the North Star. God made my eyes. God meant for us to be free.” One way to read that is to understand that Harriet Tubman believed in her God-given ability to see and understand the navigational significance of the North Star as an impetus to do what she could with her body to create freedom. Another way to read it is to understand surrender. Understand the bigger than. Reckon with what you stand, sit, or lay down under. Harriet Tubman the poet doesn’t use a linear cause-and-effect relationship. She invites us to understand the between. The difference between what Harriet Tubman said and what she could have said, “I saw the North Star with my own two eyes, and I knew I could use it to free us,” is a black difference.

What if the justice inside of our healing is not about our abilities, not about our agency, not even about our actions? What if the capacity, choice, and movement are only stars, and behind it is the dark energy of everything. The cause of all. The sky. Remember, when Harriet Tubman stopped and went to sleep in the middle of the journey because her head trauma induced narcolepsy, everyone else had to stop and rest and wait indefinitely. Maybe those unexpected pauses led to the eventual safe arrivals to come. What do you think will happen if you take a breath?

Are there moments where your need to control how change happens leads you to reproduce what you know? Where are the areas where you can let go and trust something bigger (be that community, nature, or divinity). What do you believe in? What do you believe will exist because of your breathing? What do you believe will exist after your breathing stops?

Water

Learn to listen to water. Listen again and again and again to what water repeats to the shore. Listen so deep you can’t stand it and you just have to float. Listen so soft and so long that it reshapes everything. Listen to how what makes the path can cover it over.

Sometimes a healer needs water. To drink it. To get into it. To flush out the poisons. To find a reflection. Sometimes a healer might need any form of water. Liquid, vapor, ice. To calm the inflammation, to unblock the sinuses, to decrease the swelling, to water the plants.

On the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman used water as a key ally. The edge of water showed a trusted path, true enough to follow through shifting territories. Water disrupted the tracking work of the hunters, who trained their dogs to hunger for the very sweat of who they thought they owned. During the raid on the Combahee River, water was a key part of Harriet Tubman’s strategy. For a year she and eight spies infiltrated the area, learned the locations of the Confederate gunboats and spread the word to the people to prepare.

The residents of the ricelands learned to listen for her code name: Moses. As in the exiled prophet who led the enslaved people (code name Israelites) out of the plantation (code name Pharoah’s house). The reference worked because people in different communities of enslavement all knew the same key stories through songs, recited Bible verses, or mandatory Christian Sunday meetings. The enslavers used the story to try to inspire fear and obedience, but those who would be free reclaimed it as a codex of freedom.¹

So on the night of June 1, 1863, Harriet Tubman sang spirituals to tell the people to get in the water, to move toward the Union boats waiting to carry them to another shore. When the other Moses led the Israelites out of bondage, the Red Sea parted at his hand. But for Harriet, the river called on the sky. Right when the Confederates knew what had happened and could begin responsive maneuvers, the sky opened up and the water fell, covering the people in the water of grace.

What is the water of your healing practice? What is the water of healing justice? When do we need to part the water? When do we need to bring it together? What are we nurturing with this water? What are we letting go dry?

Earth

Learn to listen to Earth. Listen by putting your hands in it. Listen by putting your face to it. Listen to Earth by what Earth sends up to meet you. Earth looks stable, but Earth is moving, through the sky and under your feet. So listen to Earth and know where you are. Listen to Earth and ask where you are going.

Sometimes a healer needs grounding. Sometimes while providing the grounded safe space and the paced healing words for everyone else, a healer needs Earth to crawl into. An earthen embrace. A healing movement needs soil to sink roots and send branches. Healing justice is Earth based and alive. And every healer needs a home.

On the other side of fugitivity, Harriet Tubman built a home. After nights sleeping in the woods and the homes of abolitionist strangers, after a strategic life of being unfindable and ready to go, Harriet Tubman built the last place she would live. But she did not build it for herself alone. In Auburn, Upstate New York, Harriet Tubman, daughter of a lumber expert, built a home for herself and her family and the many like her who know that freedom was not freedom without care. Did you hear that? Freedom is not freedom without care. How did the expertise she used to evade institutions shape the institution she built? What exactly was in the garden? Today excavations still happen on the site of the care home that Harriet Tubman built and lived in and gave care in and received care in until she died. The Earth offers a message, a plate, a dried root, a pencil.

What will be the evidence of our healing? Where will we finally feel at home? What if we healed as if our healing would heal us? What if we built as if what we built could hold us? What if we listened like the Earth was moving with us? Toward freedom.

This download came after a conversation with Dr. Barbara Holmes who asked me, “What does it mean to listen darkly?”

Notes

¹ Please note that the Christian Bible, imposed on enslaved Africans, was NOT the only set of religious references or form of spiritual practice that enslaved Africans relied on as they created freedom in unfree circumstances. African-derived, syncretic, and Indigenous spiritual practices all formed part of the lexicon of freedom in the lives of African people in the Americas.

Blackprints for Freedom

Cara Page

This chapter lifts up the Queer and Trans, Women/People of Color, and feminist organizing legacies that fought for the visibility and power of our communities. We give thanks to the courage of the revolutionaries from the 1960s to the 1990s that carved out dark spaces and safe harbors for our kinfolk. To the dives and bars for Black and Brown people, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Two Spirit, Intersex (LGBTQTSI+), sex workers, and drag queens that spun sanctuaries and spiritual spaces that saved our lives. To the feminist bookstores, healing circles, and women’s health clinics that we relied on for our physical, emotional, and political/cultural survival. The raves and club scenes that took us off the streets to avert the killings, disappearances, policing, and surveillance of our communities. From the Compton Cafeteria Uprising in 1966 in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, to the Stonewall Uprising in New York City in 1969.¹ To the Trans and Lesbian, Gay, Bi, and Queer of Color formations like the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (aka STAR), founded in 1970 by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in New York City.² To the Black Lesbian–led Combahee River Collective in 1974 that amplified a Black feminist socialist political analysis and agenda for our futures. To so many formations that would leave their indelible marks, blueprints/blackprints for our freedom, and revelations for our movements of collective power, care, and safety.

The late 1970s and 1980s would also bring a critical time of uprisings against war and US imperialism, the swell of Global South/Feminist of Color movements, environmental justice, reproductive health, and antiviolence movements led by Indigenous and Women of Color. The HIV/AIDS epidemic would be another pivotal moment for LGBTQTSI+ leadership to build collective care strategies outside of the state. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) initiatives and grassroots organizations swept across the country to respond to the AIDS epidemic and answer the call for the safety and survival of our communities. This deeply shaped the legacy of BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+ movement leadership. We lift up the institutions that still hold our communities today, including the GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance (formerly known as Gay Asian Pacific Alliance)³ in the Bay Area; the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center (1987);⁴ and the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS Community Health Center (APICHA CHC)⁵ in New York City (1989). As well as critical Black women–led organizations, including SisterLove (1989)⁶ as the first women’s HIV, Sexual, and Reproductive justice organization in the southeastern United States; and Women with a Vision (WWAV)⁷ (1989) founded in New Orleans, Louisiana. These are still some of the organizations that continue to deepen political analysis inside of a public health response that often does not center our people nor confront the massive health inequities of structural oppression.

These were but a few imprints of our liberation movements and a sign of the times. Integral to these blueprints/blackprints on freedom and resistance in these decades was the leadership of two revolutionary Black women, Miss Major and Barbara Smith. They are visionaries who organized against state and communal violence and changed the future of our grassroots liberation movements.

Legends

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Barbara Smith organized against policing, state violence, and structural oppression alongside the rise of radical liberation movements of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Young Lords, and the Asian American Student and Yellow Power movements, and the anti-Vietnam war campaign that was also rising globally. But often divides inside these movements were wide because of rampant misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia. Both of them witnessed critical moments that would greatly impact their leadership. We lift up these legends and Black warrior elders that changed political direction with their vision and would set a course that would impact many of our lives.

Miss Major

I’ve been involved in this since back a long time ago before most of (you) were born, and I’m still here, and I’m still fighting the good fight.⁸

As a Black Trans woman warrior, Miss Major has played a critical role in Trans herstories since she has been leading resistance for Trans Women of Color, BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+ liberation in response to criminalization and state violence. The neglect and invisibility of the Trans community by state and our movements caused immense pain, harm, and isolation for Trans People of Color. Miss Major would push against this in her leadership. “As a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a survivor of Dannemora Prison and Bellevue Hospital’s ‘queen tank,’ her global legacy of activism is rooted in her own experiences. She continues to uplift Transgender Women of Color, particularly those who have survived incarceration and police brutality.”⁹

For Trans People of Color, there were multiple fronts of struggle; the increase of state violence and the invisibility in movements not responding to the conditions of Trans People of Color in communities. It is necessary to name the deep fissures within community health and feminist care strategies, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Often feminist health clinics and LGB communities would create a transphobic, anti–substance user, and anti–sex worker culture, leading to wide gaps in services and care for Trans communities. Trans Women of Color had to become adaptive and visionary in their organizing of collective care and safety as a liberatory practice outside of state and, at times, without other communities. Miss Major reflects on this in the following:

We were concerned that so many girls were dying, so many girls were disappearing . . . It was about us taking care of us, as we had done for years. We continued then, and we continue to do so now and always. We had been on the outskirts looking in. So that not one person is left behind, and all of us are taken care of. It should be equitable straight across the board. That’s the way it should be.

In the 1980s and 1990s BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+-led initiatives and grassroots organizations swept across the country to build advocacy and harm-reduction strategies that became a necessary salve and liberatory practice rooted in pro–sex worker, abolition, anti-capitalism, and street/survivor economies (see the chapter “Holding Our Beautiful Mess”). Critical to Miss Major’s leadership was meeting other liberation organizers along the way that would support her vision for the safety and dignity of Trans People of Color.

Attica Uprising

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who were incarcerated at Attica would risk their lives to expose the truth of inhumane treatment within the prison industrial complex and this would greatly shape prison abolitionist movements globally. Miss Major recalled a poignant turning point in her leadership when she met Black,¹⁰ one of the organizers of the Attica Prison Uprising in 1971.¹¹

When Black got transferred to the prison after Attica that I was in, he told me what it was that I was doing was not helping the community. So, it made me think of becoming more aware of what was happening, more aware of what I can do to make sure my girls were safe, secure, and out of harm’s way. So, that is something that I will always remember, you know. That’s the one thing that stays constant.

This inspired her to build more organizing strategies for the livelihood, safety, and dignity of Trans People of Color, especially Trans Women of Color who were experiencing heightened racist, transphobic, and misogynist violence, both inside and outside of prisons, that was often fatal. Integral to this vision was her work at the Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (2004).

Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project

The Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) was founded by Alex Wick in San Francisco, California, as “a group of transgender, gender-variant, and intersex people, inside and outside of prisons, jails, and detention centers, creating a united family in the struggle for survival and freedom.”¹² TGIJP quickly rose up to become a political sanctuary for Trans and Intersex communities and a critical voice for prison abolition at the intersections of housing, prisons, and health care for Trans and Intersex communities. Alongside such Trans-led political organizations as the Transgender Law Center, Trans Queer Pueblo, Casa Ruby, TransLatin@ Coalition, LaGender Inc., the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Trans Justice, a program of the Audre Lorde Project, they brought to the forefront a Trans justice political agenda that has changed BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+ liberation movements.

Miss Major was deeply involved in the leadership and legacy of TGIJP as the former executive director. There she led a Trans justice vision that centered the livelihood and safety of low-income Trans People of Color, especially those who were formerly incarcerated and living within a street economy.

TGIJP became a really vital and unique resource for the Trans community. I was in charge of the women in the system, who got out [of prison] without nothing. No chance for survival, no subsidized housing, no place to go, no place to live, no place to eat . . . We would write the girls in prison, and when they came out we would meet them. We treated them like they were family, and that is so important even today. Because when somebody calls us a faggot or points at one of us, or tries to kill us, we have us to turn to. We have us to rely on, to stand up and say, “No Motherfucker! BRING IT ON!”

Since rolling out of TGIJP, she continues to fight for rights and justice work that focuses on the conditions of incarceration, poverty, health, employment, and heightened violence deeply impacting Trans and Intersex People of Color. Spanning from her own personal support she provides as an elder in the community to speaking on legislation that advocates for safety and liberation of Trans communities. She is also fiercely committed to elevating BIPOC Trans and Intersex leadership within BIPOC and LGBTQTSI+ liberation movements.

Miss Major speaks to the strategy of care as being inseparable from resistance, and recalls it as being deeply undervalued in our movements. She has always been fiercely committed to centering collective care and safety strategies for Trans Women of Color as integral to her political vision.

Care and resistance, they have to be together and they have to work together. One thing that has really used to drive me crazy was the fact that we always separated care. We kept care over here, and every time you try to bring it together, our communities and movements separate it again. And the fact that it’s been so hard to do both. One of the things that I have found is, when I work on different aspects of the community, like civil rights or gender [justice] . . . that it is so important to care for the people you are building power with.

She continues to influence and transform so many of us with her powerful voice, humility, power, and righteousness as a Black Trans woman leader.

Barbara Smith

Black feminist organizing built a political environment in which one could assert the importance of [Black women’s] work and not necessarily just lose everything—one’s sanity, one’s job, one’s status, one’s credibility. We were building a real-life context in which Black women could, if not be free, at least be free to express what we needed to express.¹³

Another legend of our movements, Barbara Smith, is a renowned Black feminist, Lesbian activist, and author of such seminal writings as “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,¹⁴ and “Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.”¹⁵ Her writings have been formidable and groundbreaking across social justice movements. She is the founder of the Black-led Kitchen Table Press¹⁶ and co-founder of the Combahee River Collective,¹⁷ a Black Feminist Lesbian organizing collective founded in Boston, Massachusetts, and known for the powerful “Combahee River Collective Statement.”¹⁸ Barbara has spent her lifetime fighting against state and communal violence and building a Black socialist feminist ideology at the intersections of many social justice movements.

In 1974, the Combahee River Collective would rise as a critical Black feminist political voice centering socialism through a gender, race, class, and sexuality lens as a pivotal voice for global feminism and social change. As Barbara Smith recalls, “In the 1960s there was a Third World Women’s Alliance and they had a newspaper, Triple Jeopardy.¹⁹ They were looking at race, class, and gender, but they were not talking about sexuality . . . Combahee was unique because we had a socialist analysis and the fact that we were talking about the oppression of people who were not Black cisgendered heterosexuals . . .” Their work centered a political analysis against state and communal violence that was unprecedented. One example is the campaign they led to respond to the murders of Black women.

Combahee’s Response to Black Women Murders in Boston in the 1970s

In 1979, the level of violence targeting cisgendered Black women in the Roxbury neighborhood in Boston was heightened during a period of back-to-back murders.²⁰ Barbara Smith reflected on this as a pivotal moment for the organizing of the Combahee River Collective, “I consider the organizing in response to the murders of eventually twelve Black women in 1979 to be the pinnacle of Combahee’s political organizing and political practice . . . We were motivated, of course, as Black women, to speak out about violence against Black women.”

They organized Women of Color and white women allies to form a Women’s Coalition of Safety and to mobilize rallies in response to the murders. No one else was organizing against the murders, let alone building safety strategies with Black women during this time. Barbara recalled the misogyny at the rallies from Black men. “The Black community, at the time, they didn’t have any thoughts about violence against women as being even real. That was not even something that they would have been able to wrap their minds around. The suggestions that were made, or the advice that was given from the stage, was that Black women always needed to go somewhere with a man to be safe . . .” This led her to writing the pamphlet called Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?,²¹ which highlighted strategies on safety and care for Black women and presented a gender, sexuality, race, and class analysis on the root cause of why Black women were being killed.

In addition to organizing rallies and meetings, the Combahee Collective also created spaces to care for Black women.

We created a rich Black women’s culture in the context of Combahee. Demita Frazier [a member of the Combahee River Collective] for me was key to bringing wellness because of her commitments to healing and well-being.

We were all devastated during that period because every time we looked around, another Black woman was being murdered. After one murder that happened in late April, my sister Beverly and I decided to have a Mother’s Day brunch. And that was our effort and desire to acknowledge and to give people something to experience that wasn’t tragedy.

This strategy built an essential space for collective grief and reflection while organizing against these murders, showing building care strategies as integral to our political liberation.

The Combahee River Collective also organized for reproductive rights and fought against the continued use of state-coerced sterilization abuse under the guise of population control²² and the US government’s belief that single Black welfare mothers were a national security threat. Barbara expounded on the work of Combahee in these moments, “We worked with the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. We also were actively involved with the founding of the Abortion Action Coalition in Boston, which was a leftist, socialist feminist response to the Hyde Amendment.”

In her recent organizing, in response to the police killing of George Floyd, Barbara Smith has written a proposal for an anti-racist program, the “Hamer-Baker Plan” (in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker). In the plan she calls for a “comprehensive racial justice program that would imagine new ways to challenge systemic racism.”²³ Barbara Smith continues to be innovative and a powerful force of Black feminist organizing and leadership for our futures.

Toward Our Collective Healing Futures

When we asked these two warriors to radically imagine and dream for the collective care and safety for BIPOC and LGBTQTSI+ futures, Miss Major and Barbara Smith were clear in their vision.

I don’t think that movements are supposed to be safe. I think that people should be respected in movements and that they should not be abused within movements, but that, to me, is maybe word choice. I would not talk about that as safety, per se, because the thing is I feel like if the focus is on safety, we may not go to the wall when we need to go to the wall . . . You can’t be safe under systems of massive oppression. It’s not possible while we live under heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism . . . We can draw lines about what we will accept, as far as our physical integrity and our emotional and spiritual integrity in our lives. But we can never expect to be safe under white supremacy.

—Barbara Smith

Healing justice (HJ) was never meant to ensure safety, but as Barbara speaks to, HJ was to be in the practice of building care, respect, dignity, and protection that was self/community determined. HJ does not discard struggle but instead requires we embrace principled disagreement and struggle in relationship to knowing our collective oppression and generational trauma have greatly contributed to our pain and discordance with one another.

Miss Major spoke about collective care as the sanctuary she is building in Little Rock, Arkansas, for Trans Women of Color, known as Telling It Like It Fucking Is (TILIFI), formerly named House of GG:

It’s a place of complete serenity and tranquility. I want it so that girls can come, relax, and rejuvenate themselves . . . to touch nature if they so choose. To relax and understand what it is they’re doing, because doing this work is not easy. It’s not easy, it’s not! You’re not going to get rich doing it. You’re not going to all of a sudden become the head of the ball. It becomes a really tough thing to do, and when you come here you let go of all that. You simply relax, feel good about yourself, which is so important. Then you go back and you prepare to fight again . . . which is also important that we must always be prepared to fight and win because we’ve got to.

Barbara Smith also reflected,

Our ancestors want us to transform oppression and eradicate it. They want us to fulfill the beautiful potential that we are born with and that almost never, or so seldom, comes to full blossoming under the systems in which we live. They want us to live as the cherished babies they think we are . . . Our ancestors want that for us. They also want us to fight. They want us to be as courageous as they were.

We give our deepest gratitude to the leadership of these two legends who live and struggle and breathe among us, embodying our collective liberation and practice. They love with strength and clarity, pushing forward a dream for our people without apology to offer safe harbor and political power in teaching us how to set the political and spiritual mandate for our futures.

Notes

¹ “1969: The Stonewall Uprising,” Library of Congress, accessed July 19, 2021, https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/stonewall-era; Sam Levin, “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot: A Historic Act of Trans Resistance, Three Years before Stonewall,” The Guardian, June 21, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/21/stonewall-san-francisco-riot-tenderloin-neighborhood-trans-women.

² “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR),” Global Network of Sex Work Projects, accessed September 19, 2021, www.nswp.org/timeline/street-transvestite-action-revolutionaries-found-star-house.

³ “History and People,” Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA), accessed January 19, 2022, https://www.gapa.org/about-us#historyandpeople.

⁴ “About Us,” National Native American Aids Prevention Center, accessed January 12, 2022, https://www.nnaapc.net/about-us.

⁵ “History & Evolution,” Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS Community Health Center (APICHA CHC), accessed January 12, 2022, www.apicha.org/en/about.

⁶ “Who We Are,” SisterLove, n.d., accessed February 16, 2022, https://www.sisterlove.org/who-we-are.

⁷ “Our Mission,” Women with a Vision, accessed February 17, 2022, https://wwav-no.org/our-mission/.

⁸ Lucy Diavolo, “Miss Major Griffin-Gracy Is Still Here and Wants Young Activists to ‘Keep on Fighting,’” Teen Vogue, June 17, 2020, www.teenvogue.com/story/miss-major-griffin-gracy-still-here-young-activists-keep-fighting.

⁹ “Miss Major,” accessed February 14, 2022, https://missmajor.net/.

¹⁰ Louis J. Massiah, Thomas Ott, and Terry Kay Rockefeller, dir. Eyes on the Prize, season 2, episode 6, “A Nation of Law? 1968–1971.” Aired February 19, 1990, 58:00. Highlights an interview with Black, who was incarcerated during the Attica Uprising. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896125/.

¹¹ Stanley Nelson, “How the Attica Prison Uprising Started—And Why It Still Resonates Today,” Interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, October 27, 2021, audio, 37:00, www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1049295683/attica-prison-documentary-stanley-nelson.

¹² “About Us,” Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, accessed January 19, 2022, http://www.tgijp.org/about-us.html.

¹³ Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks with Barbara Smith, “Building Black Women’s Studies,” chap. 4 in Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014) 97–136.

¹⁴ Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Conditions 1, no. 2 (October 1977): 25–44, www.jstor.org/stable/20709102.

¹⁵ Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (Naid Press: 1983).

¹⁶ Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10, no. 3 (1989): 11–13, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346433.

¹⁷ Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective History,” n.d., accessed January 19, 2022, https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/history.html.

¹⁸ Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement,” April 1977, accessed January 19, 2022, https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/the-combahee-river-collective-statement.html.

¹⁹ “Third World Women’s Alliance,” Wikipedia, accessed December 14, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World_Women%27s_Alliance.

²⁰ “Roxbury Murders,” Wikipedia, accessed May 17, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxbury_murders.

²¹ Combahee River Collective, “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?,” Black Feminism in Boston: Radical America 13, no. 6 (1979): 42–51, https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1124979008226934.pdf.

²² Population control (see glossary).

²³ Barbara Smith, “How to Dismantle White Supremacy,” The Nation, August 21, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/how-to-dismantle-white-supremacy/.

Uninterrupted Legacy of Resistance

Erica Woodland

Forgetting is a tool of white supremacy. It keeps us from building upon prior strategies led by our ancestors and elders. White supremacy also teaches us that we must be the first—the first to confront a particular issue or problem and therefore need to create something new instead of drawing from our rich history of revolutionary work available to us.

Memory.

In direct opposition to white supremacy, the lineage of healing justice is built upon each instance of resistance led by oppressed peoples to confront state violence. Revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s offer important milestones along the arc of strategies at the intersection of liberation, protection, care, and healing. During this historical period we witnessed the emergence of the Red, Black, and Brown Power movements, alongside other movements including the Asian American Student and Yellow Power movements, the movement against US imperialism and the Vietnam War, and the growing movement of feminist and LGBTQ organizing. We must acknowledge, learn from, and mark this history to honor our ancestors and to serve as a reminder of the uninterrupted legacy of resistance that anchors our work today.

The Black Panther Party (BPP), American Indian Movement (AIM), Women of All Red Nations (W.A.R.N.) and the Young Lords (YL) are preeminent organizations in the larger tapestry of revolutionary work for the liberation, self-determination, and sovereignty of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. Set in the broader context of revolutions happening throughout the world to confront colonization, slavery, and the exploitation of land and labor, these groups have set the course for huge political and cultural shifts around education, public health, poverty, and more. However, their role in these changes are overshadowed by erasure and co-optation by the state and other institutions.

Another strategy to delegitimize the work of BPP, AIM, and YL was COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), the FBI program developed to neutralize and eliminate movement leaders and organizations considered a threat to the US government. These groups were targeted because of their ability to build power within and across communities to effectively confront the state. The Black Panthers, AIM, YL, and others were considered most dangerous because they engaged in armed self-defense to protect their communities from police violence, and took over state buildings and institutions calling for the dignity and self-determination of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. They also provided clear and tangible examples of how to care for our people better than the state through community and survival programs.

The American Indian Movement

AIM is part of a centuries-old legacy of resistance against settler colonialism. Founded in July 1968 by activists in Minneapolis, including Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt, AIM played a key role in organizing a Pan-Indigenous movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. Well known for their participation and leadership in several occupations including in Alcatraz in San Francisco, Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington, DC, AIM was successful in drawing attention to the demands of Indigenous sovereignty—specifically US treaty obligations and police violence against Native people in Minneapolis.¹

While their work tackled police abuse, unemployment, lack of access to health care and culturally relevant education, treaty rights, and cultural/spiritual preservation, AIM’s power was rooted in their assertion of self-determination and refusal to submit to the state. Their strategies, such as the AIM Patrol (to combat police brutality), Indian Health Board, (the first urban health facility for Native Americans in the country), and survival schools (to ensure Native children received good, culturally and spiritually relevant education), continue to shape the lives of Native Americans decades later.

Trail of Broken Treaties and the Occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

The Trail of Broken Treaties was a cross-country political campaign to build power and support for Indigenous sovereignty. It remains a clear example of how our organizing can and does lead to long-term political and cultural shifts that resonate for generations.

The Trail of Broken Treaties (1972), led by AIM and other Native American organizations, sought to memorialize the Trail of Tears by leading caravans from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle to march on Washington, DC. The caravans traveled across the country and gathered in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, where activists developed the 20-Point Position Paper to present to the White House in advance of the 1972 election, which called for the restoration of treaty making (ended in 1871); the return of millions of acres of land stolen from Indigenous people; abolition of the BIA; and protection of Indigenous spiritual, religious, and cultural practices, among other demands, to reestablish sovereign relationships between tribes and the US government.²

More than seven hundred Indigenous people from two hundred tribes drove to DC expecting to present their demands to President Nixon, only to find he was out of town on the campaign trail for the upcoming election. Attempts to negotiate with the US government escalated when activists’ requests to hold a ceremony in Arlington Cemetery and to meet with the BIA were denied,³ their housing arrangements fell through, and attempts to use government buildings for housing were shut down. Activists staged a weeklong occupation of the BIA.

The occupation was meant to bring attention to the twenty-point plan and ended the day after the election. While the Nixon administration agreed to create a task force to review its demands, they were ultimately rejected. Despite this, the twenty-point plan and occupation went on to significantly shape the Nixon administration’s Indian policy as evidenced by the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975.⁴ This legislation would undo much of the Indian Termination policy,⁵ in effect for thirty years, and reestablished tribes’ ability to enter into contracts directly with the federal government. Once again, activism and organizing shaped long-term shifts in federal and social policy, but the role of AIM and other Indigenous groups has not been properly recognized.

W.A.R.N.

Founded in 1974 in Rapid City, South Dakota, by Lorelei DeCora Means, Madonna Thunderhawk, Janet McCloud, Phyllis Young, and others, the Women of All Red Nations was a Pan-Indigenous women’s organization with more than three hundred women from thirty tribes at its inception.⁶ Many of the founding members were also members of AIM and other Red Power organizations and participated in the occupations at Wounded Knee (1973) and the BIA (1972). W.A.R.N.’s work explicitly centered the leadership of Indigenous women in response to sexism and focused on domestic violence, access to health care, reproductive health, environmental rights, education, the removal of Native children from their families, political prisoners, and treaty rights.⁷

They took our past with a sword, and our land with a pen. Now they’re trying to take our future with a scalpel.⁸

—American Indian Journal

Building the Bridge to Reproductive and Environmental Justice

W.A.R.N.’s work helped to bring national attention to the forced sterilization of Native women. Their survey determined that a large percentage had been sterilized by the Indian Health Services in the 1970s.⁹ W.A.R.N.’s work to expose these reproductive abuses contributed to the eventual adoption of federal regulations requiring consent for sterilization in 1979,¹⁰ again exemplifying how revolutionary work during this time was able to shift policy, legislation, and culture.

Concerned about the environmental and health impacts of uranium mining in the Black Hills, W.A.R.N.’s study of families on the Pine Ridge Reservation documented increased miscarriages, and increased likelihood of long-term effects of water contamination.¹¹ Their organizing ultimately interrupted further contamination of the water and again brought attention to an issue affecting Indigenous communities.¹² W.A.R.N.’s work was pivotal during this period as it articulated the connections between the broader fight for Indigenous sovereignty and forced sterilization, residential schools, and environmental degradation as crucial aspects of settler colonialism to be addressed by the Red Power Movement.

Young Lords

The Young Lords (YL) was a revolutionary organization rooted in self-determination and independence for Puerto Ricans. Originally started in 1960 as a Chicago street gang, the YL transformed into a radical civil and human rights movement under the direction of Jose Cha Cha Jimenez in September 1968. Their work began in response to urban renewal policies in Chicago and other major cities that led to eviction, displacement, and widespread neglect of Puerto Ricans. Their organization was explicitly modeled after the Black Panther Party (BPP), and they worked in solidarity with BPP and other groups to fight for the liberation of all colonized peoples—most notably the Rainbow Coalition in Chicago led by Fred Hampton of the Chicago chapter of BPP. The New York chapter of YL began in 1969 to respond to the needs of the large number of Boricuas in the city.¹³

The Takeover of Lincoln Hospital: Radical Organizing for Health and Healing

The Young Lords, in coalition with other revolutionary groups, took over Lincoln Hospital on two separate occasions in 1970 to demand access to quality health care for Black and Puerto Rican people in the South Bronx. The takeovers are radical examples of the power of organizing—health workers and community members—to disrupt harmful systems and create community-led systems of care. Lincoln Hospital, known as the “Butcher Shop” due to its long history of medical negligence and abuse, was in grave disrepair, severely underresourced, and previously condemned.¹⁴

The overwhelming majority of hospital workers were Puerto Rican and Black. They were directly impacted by the horrors of the hospital and had already begun organizing to change the conditions of the facility. The Young Lords, along with other groups including the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, led the second takeover on November 10, 1970, following Lincoln’s plans to start a heroin detox program. The YL, along with the BPP and other groups, started a community-led detox program—the People’s Program—due to ongoing concerns about the hospital’s inability to provide adequate care for Puerto Rican and Black residents. The program provided methadone treatment, political education, and organizing for substance users. Participants in the People’s Program received information, such as the pamphlet The Opium Trail: Heroin and Imperialism, to learn about the intersections between “capitalism, dope, and genocide” and asked to consider how revolution could be a part of their healing.¹⁵ The political education drew attention to the US government’s role in bringing heroin into poor Black and Brown communities as an act of “chemical warfare” and echoed concerns of both activists and health care workers about the use of methadone for addiction due to distrust of the government and pharmaceutical companies,¹⁶ who both stood to gain from former substance users now dependent on methadone.

Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Black revolutionary and member of the Republic of New Afrika, was hired to lead political education for the Lincoln Detox, which included education about revolutionary movements throughout the world and the history of the drug trade to facilitate consciousness raising as integral to healing from addiction. Mutulu grew up advocating for his disabled mother in the health care system and later went on to study the “barefoot doctors” in Maoist China, where lay people were trained to provide acupuncture to poor and rural communities. After reading an article about the use of acupuncture for symptoms of detox, he became interested in acupuncture as a nonchemical intervention. In New York, acupuncture was illegal to practice without a medical license at the time. But Shakur and others went to California and Canada to be trained and eventually developed the five-point ear Acudetox protocol that is now standard treatment for detox according to the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association.¹⁷ Lincoln Detox was the first detox program to use acupuncture in the country and is revolutionary for “expropriating medical knowledge for community use and building networks of care, without the approval of institutional power.”¹⁸

Lincoln Detox is a central part of the Black and Brown lineage of harm reduction, mutual aid, and healing justice and illustrates the power of providing revolutionary care for us, by us rooted in solidarity, not charity. Using community-based acupuncture to treat addiction threatened the structure of the medical industrial apparatus because it did not rely on doctors. The People’s Program was shut down in 1978 and the activists who started the program were removed. Soon after, Mutulu Shakur and associates from Lincoln Detox were targeted and harassed for their revolutionary work by law enforcement and (unbeknownst to them) the FBI via COINTELPRO. In the context of growing repression against radicals in the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Shakur was arrested in 1986 despite a lack of evidence and has been a political prisoner for more than three decades. He continues his care and organizing work behind bars.¹⁹

Acupuncture in the hands of the revolutionary-minded, particularly addressing addiction, was an intervention that the government was not willing to accept at the time because it attacked and exposed the complicity of the government in imposing chemical warfare on certain segments of the community. We weren’t only providing medical care and exposing chemical warfare, we were challenging Western occidental medicine by Eastern medicine and natural healing.²⁰

—Mutulu Shakur

The Black Panther Party

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Oakland, California in 1966, which was instrumental in the fight for the liberation of Black people in the US and all around the world. A militant, revolutionary organization, the BPP was born in response to police harassment and violence, poverty, blatant neglect of Black people by the government, and increased militarism both inside and outside the country. The origin of the BPP was also shaped by the limitations of the civil rights movement to “improve the condition of blacks outside the South”²¹ and the assassination of Malcolm X, inspiring their commitment to revolutionary strategies rooted in Black Power. Armed self-defense and community survival programs, including free breakfast, food, health, education, and police patrols, showed the possibilities of Black self-determination. Their Ten-Point Program²² remains a powerful set of demands, a recipe for liberation, that have yet to be realized in this country.

Free Breakfast Program

We started a program that has now fed millions of Americans, all because we put social theory into practice.²³

—Billy X Jennings, It’s About Time BPP

The BPP’s Free Breakfast for Children programs shifted access to breakfast for generations of children and young people in this country. Started in 1969 in Oakland, the free breakfast programs went on to feed thousands of children a day in forty-five sites across the country.²⁴ Relying on volunteers and donations from community members and local businesses, these programs were a clear and practical example of the BPP’s commitment to revolutionary intercommunalism.²⁵ The programs helped the BPP to build community relationships and trust while combating the media’s portrayal of them as dangerous villains that were a threat to Black people.

The BPP’s survival programs became a target of COINTELPRO. The FBI, in collaboration with local law enforcement, would raid the free breakfast programs, lead disinformation campaigns, and harass party members to deter parents from sending their children in an effort to weaken the Panthers’ reputation in the community.²⁶ These strategies, along with many others,²⁷ may have sought to destroy the BPP, but the legacy of their work, specifically around free breakfast, lives on. The Panthers are widely credited with the USDA’s decision in 1975 to permanently authorize free breakfast for kids in schools.

In the spirit of Sankofa, we honor our ancestors and elders by claiming our lineage. This memory work can show us what is possible when revolutionary care is at the center of our liberation work. What can we learn and adapt from the revolutionary work of the 1960s and 1970s to shape our understanding of healing justice? How can these lessons sharpen our strategies for movement building, organizing, healing, care, and protection?

Notes

¹ Laura Waterman Wittstock and Elaine J. Salinas, “A Brief History of the American Indian Movement,” American Indian Movement, accessed on November 30, 2021, www.aimovement.org/ggc/history.html.

² American Indian Movement, “Trail of Broken Treaties 20-Point Position Paper,” October 1972, accessed November 30, 2021, www.aimovement.org/archives/index.html.

³ “The Trail Of Broken Treaties: A March on Washington, DC, 1972,” Muscarelle Museum of Art, accessed November 30, 2021, https://muscarelle.wm.edu/rising/broken-treaties/.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Indian Termination policy refers to laws between the 1940s through the 1960s, including the Indian Termination Act (1953), which sought to dismantle the reservation system by eliminating federal aid and treaty agreements between tribes and the federal government. These policies led to urban relocation, loss of tribal affiliation and recognition, and the selling of tribal lands largely to non-Native people. “The Termination Era,” Native American Netroots, accessed November 30, 2021, http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1511.

⁶ “Women of All Red Nations,” Wikipedia, accessed November 30, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_All_Red_Nations.

⁷ United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1979, “National Indian Civil Rights Issues: Hearing Held in Washington, D.C., March 19–20, 1979,” Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1979, https://babel.hathitrust.org/shcgi/pt?id=mdp.39015011030361&view=1up&seq=44&skin=2021&size=125&q1=personal%20sovereignty.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ “Women of All Red Nations,” Wikipedia.

¹⁰ “Warrior Women: #WARNRidesAgain,” Lakota People’s Law Project, January 24, 2020, https://lakotalaw.org/news/2020-01-24/warn-rides-again.

¹¹ “Women of All Red Nations,” Wikipedia.

¹² “Warrior Women,” Lakota People’s Law Project.

¹³ “Young Lords,” Wikipedia, last updated February 17, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Lords#Organization.

¹⁴ Mia Donavan, “Dope is Death,” YouTube, Vice News, February 21, 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua-m7AANkQ4.

¹⁵ Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard, “How the Young Lords Took Lincoln Hospital, Left a Health Activism Legacy,” Filter, accessed November 30, 2021, https://filtermag.org/how-the-young-lords-took-lincoln-hospital-and-left-a-health-activism-legacy/.

¹⁶ Mia Donavan, August 31, 2020, in Dope is Death, podcast, https://dopeisdeath.com/.

¹⁷ National Acupuncture Detox Association, accessed November 30, 2021, https://acudetox.com/.

¹⁸ Kuwabara Blanchard, “How the Young Lords Took Lincoln Hospital.”

¹⁹ For more info about Mutulu’s work and efforts to bring him home, visit his website https://mutulushakur.com/.

²⁰ Eana Meng, “Dr. Mutulu Shakur and the Lincoln Detox Center”, Of Part and Parcel, February 20, 2020, www.ofpartandparcel.com/blog-2/dr-mutulu-shakur-and-the-lincoln-detox-center#_ftn10=.

²¹ “The Black Panther Party: Challenging Police and Promoting Social Change,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, July 23, 2019, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/black-panther-party-challenging-police-and-promoting-social-change.

²² Safiya Bukhari-Alston, “Notes on the Black Panther Party: Its Basic Working Papers and Policy Statements,” Freedom Archives, accessed November 30, 2021, http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Safiya_Bukhari/513_Safiya_Notes_BPP.pdf.

²³ Pendarvis Harshaw, “The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program: A 50-Year-Old Blueprint,” Arts & Culture, KQED, October 3, 2019, www.kqed.org/arts/13867337/the-black-panther-partys-free-breakfast-program-a-50-year-old-blueprint.

²⁴ Erin Blakemore, “How the Black Panthers’ Breakfast Program Both Inspired and Threatened the Government,” History, accessed on November 30, 2021, www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party.

²⁵ Concept developed by Huey P. Newton in 1970, whereby “the people seize the means of production and distribute the wealth and the technology in an egalitarian way to the many communities of the world.” Mike Harman, “Huey Newton Introduces Revolutionary Intercommunalism, Boston College, November 18, 1970,” libcom.org, February 15, 2018, https://libcom.org/library/huey-newton-introduces-revolutionary-intercommunalism-boston-college-november-18-1970.

²⁶ Blakemore, “How the Black Panthers’ Breakfast Program.”

²⁷ Additional strategies further explored in the chapter “We Are Our History: Transforming the Legacy of Criminalization.”

Don’t Give up and Don’t Make the Same Mistakes:
Interview with Marshall “Eddie” Conway

Erica Woodland

Eddie Conway,¹ former Black Panther and political prisoner, has been my teacher, mentor, and comrade since 2004. We met while he was incarcerated at the Jessup Correctional Institution leading Friend of a Friend, an intergenerational antiviolence program supporting men to transform conflict and work together to change the conditions of their confinement. Eddie and the Black Panther Party have shaped my political and spiritual consciousness and my work for the last two decades. What follows is a conversation between Eddie and me about the legacy of the Black Panther Party and its role in the lineage of healing justice. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Erica Woodland: How did you come into your work with the Black Panther Party?

Eddie Conway: Well, I came into this work after I returned from Europe. I had spent three years outside of America [in the Army] and wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on. When I got back in ’67 there were riots and all kinds of incidents, and there was a tremendous amount of organizing going on. And of course, Malcolm X had been assassinated a few months after I got back. Dr. Martin Luther King got assassinated.

There was a serious problem—a hunger problem, lack of health care, a poverty problem in the Black community. We were still at that point in our history, getting manual [labor] jobs. We weren’t in management or professional capacities except in a very small way, and our community was being devastated from government funding of putting highways through our communities, etc. It seemed like the organizations that were working to change that, the NAACP, the CORE, Urban League, other organizations like that weren’t really addressing the problem we had—a systemic problem in America. And that was capitalism, and it was continuing to eat our children. So the Black Panther Party was addressing that, and that attracted me and caused me to join it.

Erica Woodland: Can you talk a little bit about your role in the Baltimore chapter and what that work looked like?

Eddie Conway: I had been a medic in the army, so I certainly was teaching first aid and self-care and so on to the members of the Black Panther Party and to the community. I also had been in the army for three years, so I was teaching technical operations of various equipment that we had to defend ourselves. And finally, my actual position was that I was a lieutenant of security in Maryland. It was my job to vet new members as well as old members and make sure that our buildings were secure. I was doing all that even while I was working, and in some of the cases I was actually going to school. The final thing was, and this was when I got off work in the morning, I would also be responsible for picking up some of the children that we fed at the free breakfast program and taking them to the program and then taking them to school.

Erica Woodland: In what ways were care, safety, and healing integral to the political work that the Black Panthers were doing?

Eddie Conway: We created a number of health care clinics, several of them are still operational today on the West Coast, even in Maryland. There’s a People’s Health clinic up on Thirty-Third and Greenmount [in Baltimore], I believe, that we were instrumental in encouraging the development of. We were mainly concerned about our people, the physical aspect of injuries, and so on of our people. We did not focus a lot on healing, spiritual healing, etc., and I think that was one of the flaws of the Black Panther Party. We were engaged to the point we kind of sacrificed our own care, and we didn’t make time for our own care because we were so busy.

Even as I was giving you that litany of things that I was doing, I was also selling papers in the process. So there was very little time, and the result was that there were some people that were drinking. There [were] real strict rules about drinking on duty and drugs on duty, but there were some people that were smoking. And there was a lot of escapism in terms of intoxicating oneself, as opposed to sitting around and talking about what the problems [were].

The medics in each one of our chapters dealt with the physical and the collective kind of stuff that we did together, mainly focused on the political. And so that was a fallacy and that caused a lot of burnout, and it caused a lot of deaths later on after the party collapsed, because people couldn’t cope.

Erica Woodland: Just so you know, every training that I do, I talk about you, I talk about the Panthers as a central part of the lineage, my entry into the lineage around this work. Because it was very clear to [the Panthers] that in addition to protecting people, in addition to political education, that you needed to feed people, and that people needed access to health care. At that time, and still today, Black folks don’t have access to basic human needs. Y’all really saw that as very important to building power. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about why it is important to feed people. Why is it important to take care of people physically? Why is it important to educate folks as you are trying to build power for liberation?

Eddie Conway: Well, I think there were several levels involved. One was that there actually was a crisis, and always have been, and continues to be, in the Black community around food. It was clear that if you go to school hungry, you are not going to learn anything because you can’t focus, but in addition to that, malnutrition itself is going to cause all kinds of health problems. So it was clear to us that one, we needed to address the food issue of young people in order to give them a chance to go into the future. It was also a concrete example by practice of the theory of socialism, of what people were talking about when we say we are socialists, we are collectively [working] together to take care of our community and provide for [ourselves]. We showed that by the institutions and the structures that we created, I think, in thirty-seven states. We created breakfast programs and we showed that we could work with people around the conditions of our community and still be in charge.

Prior to that, most Black organizations that interacted with white organizations or any other color organization ended up kind of taking a second seat or taking the back seat. And our position was that “No, this is our community, this our struggle, this is what we going to do and you can come and help us, but understand that we are maintaining control of the leadership.” It was a necessity to show people that we could do it. It was a necessity that it be done in order to protect our young people. But thirdly, it was an example that people could see that we could all work together and we could still follow the leadership of the Black community.

Erica Woodland: You talked a little bit about the impacts of trauma, the impacts of the violence that folks were navigating inside of the Panthers specifically, but also in the Black community more broadly. Can you talk about how our people were transforming that trauma and violence through the work?

Eddie Conway: Well, I guess the most important thing in terms of that is community violence—transferred aggression. Coming home from work after being abused by your bosses or the industry, and bringing it back to the community and exploding on friends or families and so on. One of the things we did, we were always bringing the community together. We were always talking to the community. We built the kind of camaraderie in the community that allowed us to intervene when and where it was [happening] . . . and people would come get us like, “Hey, come. This is a problem.” It would be people that had worked with us or had seen our work or just respected us because of our work, and it gave us an opportunity to communicate and interact. In most cases, out of respect, even the gangsters would kind of like take a step back, not out of fear or anything like that, right. And they were even instrumental in helping us maintain a more healthy communication in the community among everybody. Of course, that’s also the reason why, at some point, the government decided to use the gangsters against us, to subvert the street organizations, and instead of supporting what we were doing, redirect them to selling drugs. At that point, drugs weren’t that proliferate in the Black community, and they certainly weren’t that public, although they always existed.

Erica Woodland: That’s a good segue. My next question is about the Counterintelligence Program. One of the things that I talk a lot about and will be written about in the book is the way that the state weaponizes [our trauma]. They create the conditions for our trauma. They exacerbate intergenerational trauma, and cycles of violence and trauma in our own communities. Then they weaponize that against us for further control and domination. When you have communities that have high levels of trauma, are cut off from basic human needs and healing resources, as well as our ancestral and cultural practices, they’re much easier to control. Can you talk about the role of COINTELPRO in furthering these cycles of trauma and violence that were already happening in the community.

Eddie Conway: Well, I was just talking about this recently. The one weapon that the government used was COINTELPRO, very successfully, because it had access to every agency, every government administration department, etc., the military, the intelligence, and so on. They used that weapon to psychologically attack members within the Black Panther Party, among [themselves]. They used that to psychologically prep the larger community, the Black community, and the white community for an attack upon the Black Panther Party, at some stage in the near future. They used the newspapers, they used the church, they distorted all kinds of information, like the coloring book they put out that they claimed we were giving to children at our breakfast program. They said [it] was basically designed to encourage children to kill the police. They made it in their laboratory. It was discovered later on at the Church Committee hearings.²

The insidious thing was that they used their agent provocateurs to accuse outstanding members of the Black Panther Party of being agent provocateurs and they created situations where several people got killed. In some cases, they just created situations where people disappeared, and even today we don’t know what happened to them. So COINTELPRO played a really key role. I was working at the post office at the time. They had a file on me, of course, and they made several efforts to get me fired from the post office up above the regional management heads, you know? And it didn’t serve them well, but the fact was that they was using every agency they could.

They audited people, they followed people, they harassed people. The harm that they did, they made you feel like, well, somebody really was always watching us. I was going to say, it made you feel like somebody was watching us, but we could look out the windows of our office into the areas in which they had set up surveillance to get everybody’s tag number that came to the office or everybody’s face. They made [their] presence known as harassment, but also intimidation for the rest of the community so that the community would not feel comfortable coming into the office. So it was a lot of things that they did on the surface, but then there was a lot of stuff that they did in the dark, which unfortunately today, now all of that stuff is legal.

Erica Woodland: Exactly. You taught me that, with the Patriot Act, etc. I would love to hear about your work after you became incarcerated, because you continued to do the work of the party behind the walls. I would love for you to talk a little bit about that. I know it’s many decades of organizing and care and political work that you were doing.

Eddie Conway: Yeah. Well, and I have to admit that that work behind the walls was an accident, it was not my intention to be there. My intention was to focus on leaving the next day if I could, right? But the conditions that I landed in were horrendous. I mean, they were actually dehumanizing people in such a way that it shocked me. And I think, to be honest, what bothered me most was that we had a breakfast program, two, maybe three blocks from the penitentiary. And I would drive past every school morning, taking children back and forth to breakfast and school. And the penitentiary was always sitting there and never even paid that much attention to it.

It was there, but it was missing, and I went past it every day, and I had no idea of the kind of suffering and the dehumanization that was going on behind those walls until I stepped in there. Of course the first day I was in there, I had an incident because they were treating me like they was treating everybody else and that wasn’t going to work. So we started off right at the beginning with a conflict, and it lasted for about seven years before it was clear that neither one of us was going to change. So they basically backed off. But it’s like minor things. You got four thousand people caged in a square block area, and there’s not a library. There’s not a single book in there. There’s four televisions, and you have to appreciate that when you sit around a house with your family and they want to see something . . . Imagine five hundred people want to see something in front of one TV. You could see a problem that that would cause immediately.

The birds are flying around inside the place where you got to eat and sleep, and so there’s bird poop all over the walls and everywhere. The windows are broken out. I could not believe the conditions. There [were] brothers in there, though, that wanted to deal with it, wanted to address it. I’m not going to say they didn’t have the leadership, but they did not have that person that could kind of pull them together. They had leadership. There were some good brothers in there, but they couldn’t get it together. Eventually they convinced me to work with them, and I did. We made a whole lot of changes. We addressed all the things. We built the library, and it embarrassed the state. So the state ended up building a library so that we wouldn’t have control of it.

Survival packages, that was part of our program. Something would happen—two guys would get in a fight, for instance, and the police would come break it up. They would drag both of them off and put them on lockup, and they didn’t have any soap, toothpaste, stamps, writing material. Then they might not pack their stuff up for five or six days. So their family don’t know what happened, or nobody knows what’s going on with them. And they’re over there washing up with water. So we created programs that [when] somebody got snatched up like that for whatever reason, we would send them a care package. What kind of made me happy [is] we end up sending Rap Brown a survival package.

It was programs like that that we put together and that gave us the credibility in the population to eventually organize a United Prisoners Labor Union,³ which the administration really hated. They did everything in their power to stop it, including trying to create violence among the prisoners. Our organizing was so effective that no violence ever occurred. People would walk away from incidents, or they would be [dragged] away from incidents and go willingly because they recognized that this was an effort to destroy the union. They ended up destroying the union anyway, even though there was some very powerful people outside supporting it by using drug addicts. In fact, they used drug addicts to create an incident, and then they blamed it on us. And of course they controlled the narratives so there was nothing we could do. You know, they end up locking all of us up and the drug addicts went to the camp center and went home.⁴

The work inside eventually expanded beyond the different groups that we were working with to a collective kind of thing. Later on [after] coming in contact with one of our key supporters, we organized [the Friend of a Friend Program] to mentor and educate young people using veteran gang members, warriors, etc. We did popular education. It was not just consciousness raising, but I think that was also healing in the sense that people got to talk, they got to understand, they got to interact. They got to transfer information intergenerationally and learn and gain some level of respect. The older generation got the opportunity also to learn from the younger generation of things that they were doing wrong, or ways in which [they were] stuck in the past.

Eventually that work led to the Tubman House,⁵ and it led to people coming home and working in the community. But most of all, it led to people staying home; even when they did not work in the community, they were still a positive aspect of the community. So I’m kind of proud of that work, but my wife, Dominique, is probably the architect of and the designer of that work, popular education. Probably one of the most effective tools that we had beyond organizing the labor union was the Friend of a Friend Program.⁶

Erica Woodland: Yes. I got to witness that firsthand. Just hearing you talk about the intergenerational pieces, the state has been very successful around disrupting our relationships, which are the biggest resource that we have. And so through all of the work that you just described inside, but specifically the Friend of a Friend Program, those intergenerational patterns of abandonment, of neglect, of harm, are getting healed through that group. You have elders who are able to mentor young people in person and are cut off from their children. The long-term impacts of that work and what you are continuing to do is shifting our descendants and their access to liberation.

Eddie Conway: It’s true because you have to have a whole healthy person that loves themselves, and that recognizes the conditions that they’re in are not their fault. And they won’t blame the victim or blame themselves. And that’s how you start first with that kind of healing, and then beyond that, you can then decide how to deal with it.

Erica Woodland: Right. I’m glad that you’re proud of that, Eddie. There’s a thousand things you need to be proud of. The next question is more future oriented. What do our people, our ancestors, want to see us build in the future?

Eddie Conway: I would honestly think, and this is probably in our DNA, but it’s probably deeper than that. It’s probably spiritual. I would honestly think that our ancestors would want a world that respects the planet, that respects human life, that was devoid of divisions, that used the resources in a way that was not abusive to the planet and that recognized that we are all part of the universe. I think that’s probably from tens [of] thousands of years [ago]. And I think that’s where we are trying to go. That’s what has been disrupted for the last five hundred years, and I think that’s what we are trying to get back together.

Erica Woodland: What are some pieces of advice that you want to offer to movements today based on the lessons you learned through your political work?

Eddie Conway: Well, don’t make the mistakes we made, first. So that means study and learn and look at what movements before you did, and look at what worked for them and what did not work for them. But also, don’t try to duplicate what was done in the past, because the conditions are different. The culture is different, the contradictions are different, so the best thing probably is theory and practice. Study, look, and then try to see how to apply that practice and see whether it’s practical or not. Communication and working together is the most important thing.

We need to pay attention to how we are dealing with our ecosystem, our environment. We need to pay attention to what role we play in the destruction of the environment and how that’s impacting, not just us, but we’re in the sixth mass extinction period. Species are disappearing every day, two to six hundred species disappear from the planet. That’s true and has been true for the last several years, and that’s our responsibility. We need to figure out how to address that in such a way where we don’t neglect ourselves also. That’s an important factor because we’re going to have to be in this for the long haul.

Erica Woodland: Can you speak to some of the long-term impacts of the trauma and violence of revolutionaries who were targeted during that time?

Eddie Conway: Well, the long-term impact for a lot of people boils down to this. If you continue to do the work, if you continue to engage, the harm reduction is significant. If you did not continue to struggle, the impact is that there was a lot of drug use, there was a lot of alcoholism, and there was a lot of premature deaths just from self-abuse.

I’ll give you one example of this: it’s just like two people, same size, same age, same health conditions, etc., both of them get shot with the same caliber weapon in the same place. One of them said, “Oh my God, I’m shot. I’m going to die.” And that one dies. The other one said, “You shot me. When I get up, I’m going to get you.” That one will probably live.

So, a lot of it is psyche, the [psychic] well-being, what you think and how you think makes a real difference in how the impact of any kind of attack happens. You can meet it head on and challenge it, or you can give up and succumb to it.

Notes

¹ Also known as Marshall Edward Conway. For more information about Eddie’s life and work, read The Greatest Threat by Marshall Edward Conway (iAMWE Publications, 2009), Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther by Dominque Stevenson and Marshall “Eddie” Conway (AK Press, 2011), and The Brother You Choose: Paul Coates and Eddie Conway Talk About Life, Politics, and The Revolution by Susie Day (Haymarket Books, 2020).

² For more information about COINTELPRO, see the chapter “We Are Our History: Transforming the Legacy of Criminalization.”

³ The movement for prisoner labor unions swept the country in the 1970s to resist exploitation of prison labor or modern-day slavery. “United Prisoners Union,” Freedom Archives, accessed February 27, 2022, https://search.freedomarchives.org/search.php?view_collection=196.

⁴ Eddie explains that prisoners organizing the union were put in solitary confinement, while other prisoners were sent to a minimum security facility and then released.

⁵ Tubman House, founded in 2016 by Eddie and Dominique Conway, is a liberated site (land and row home) in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in Baltimore City. Rooted in self-determination, their work is modeled after the Black Panther Party survival programs. https://www.tubmanhousebaltimore.org/.

⁶ The Friend of a Friend Program (FoF), conceived by Eddie and Dominique Conway, is an intergenerational mentoring program focused on personal development and conflict resolution with incarcerated men in Maryland. Tubman House is a project of FoF.

Resilience Practice
Building and Sustaining Our Resistance

Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle it must be for a lifetime.

—Angela Davis

We are part of a lineage of resilience and resistance. While our peoples have fought for liberation for centuries, we know that we may not experience it in our lifetime. Yet, we must do our part to honor our ancestors and protect future generations. This work is hard, and we may become weary and hopeless, so we have to fortify ourselves spiritually. This practice invites you to reflect on the roots of your resistance to persevere in the midst of despair.

How will you sustain your commitment to liberation for the long haul?

What can you draw from to stay the course?

Imagine: ancestors, elders, living revolutionaries, or communities; a specific place, land, element of the natural world (Earth, Fire, Air, Water); a creation story, parable, or tradition; a song, poem, piece of art, or dance; an affirmation, quote, or nougat of wisdom that keeps your eyes on the prize!

Create a vision board, oracle card, drawing, song, poem, or affirmation that inspires faith, hope, and commitment to the lifelong work of collective liberation. Consider what you can draw from to never give up!

Roots of the Medical Industrial Complex

Cara Page

The medical industrial complex (MIC) is a for-profit system and network of thought leaders historically, and power brokers, culture brokers, and institutions that define what is a good body and is incredibly oppressive. The MIC includes, doctors and individual doctors, hospitals, durable medical suppliers, pharmaceutical industry, and the industries that keep those industries running . . .

—Patty Berne, Artistic Director of Sins Invalid

The medical industrial complex is an outcome of private ownership—of land, medicines, human beings through slavery. It is the expression of treatment given to protect an investment, such as humans as property, or to advance profit through experimentation on human life. The medical system is a corporate system; a system focused on profit over care. Health care in this country was developed to be a commodity.

—Rita Valenti, an abolitionist and retired nurse, Founding Member of Project South and Kindred Collective

We are on the precipice of imagining something new around abolition: the defunding of police and prisons as well as an intervention on archaic white supremacist institutions. Within this moment it will be critical to understand the role of profit and policing through the medical industrial complex that has impacted our communities for centuries as an extension of state control, capitalism, and exploitation through racist/ableist science. Rather than center on care, the MIC is rooted in ideologies and systems of colonization, population control,¹ slavery, and eugenics. Historically, state models of health care services for mental, developmental, cognitive and physical disabilities, assisted living, substance abuse facilities, and prisons were meant to keep what is seen as the “unhealthy” population isolated from the “healthy” population. People with disabilities, BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+, and institutionalized communities especially have been seen as disposable and used for profiting the medical industrial complex through nonconsensual medical testing and experimentation. One example is Dr. J. Marion Sims—the supposed father of obstetrics and gynecology—who experimented on enslaved African women to test his medical theories and primitive instruments through multiple surgeries without any anesthesia because he believed Black women had a higher tolerance for pain.² But unfortunately there are far too many other historical and contemporary abuses to name.

The MIC is also rooted in the collection and theft of the DNA and biological data of Indigenous and People of Color in the US and the Global South against their will or unknowingly. One perfect example is the Human Genome Diversity Project,³ a project led by a group of scientists at Stanford University who collaborated on an unprecedented study to understand genetic diversity in human populations by analyzing and collecting “genomic DNA from 1,043 individuals from around the world.”⁴ The data is supposed to be available publicly in preserved gene banks, which is highly unethical and violent. Many Indigenous communities are fighting against this project, calling it an act of biocolonialism.

Other harms of the medical industrial complex are concepts of beauty and purity, upheld by Christian ideals of “sin and cleanliness.” The beauty and medical industries capitalize off this by preserving ideas of beauty as something that can be “fixed or cured.” Finally, central to the MIC are eugenic ideas that “healthy and fit bodies” should be reproduced, while those seen as “unhealthy and unfit” bodies are for the sole purpose of reproducing labor and profit for the wealthy elite.

Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, when defining healing justice, names the MIC as a system that:

Relies on wealthy, white, cis, heterosexual, abled, male, and Christian ideals of whose body is healthy and whose is diseased,

Prescribes who is expendable and who is deserving of access to quality and dignified spiritual, emotional, physical, psychic, environmental, and mental care and who is not,

Determines whose body is criminalized and pathologized based on notions of beauty and desire, and what bodies are “fit and unfit” to survive, and who should exist for the purpose of labor or reproduction,

As an extension of state control and violence, it uses medical and scientific institutions as a platform for surveillance, policing, and erasure of those seen as expendable, “incurable,” “unfit,” “abnormal,” or “dangerous” based on ableist and racist eugenic science,

Relies on doctrines of fear, curative models, and racial capitalism to reinforce and militarize global responses of care under the guise of global security, and criminalizes practitioners and traditions outside of Western medical models of care.

As Patty Berne poignantly describes, “What’s important to realize is that there is a framework always evaluating body and mind to see who is valuable, who is pure and who is sinful, who needs to be cured, and who needs to be fixed, always trying to restore some kind of normative idea of body and mind. It’s inherently pathologizing, reductionistic, and violent.”

A Perfect Ideological Marriage

Let’s unpack some of the roots of the MIC that work in tandem with colonization and white supremacy. When speaking about the MIC, I often describe the perfect marriage of population control and eugenics as the root of the MIC. These ideologies have been foundational to the systems of health care in the US.

Population Control

In 1798 Thomas Malthus, a white English scholar published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,”⁵ which would introduce his theory that overpopulation will inevitably lower wages, cause poverty and hunger, and be an economic burden to the white ruling class. He argued that increases in population would eventually diminish the ability of the world to feed itself.⁶ This population control ideology fueled fear and a racist religious fervor that led to blaming environmental degradation of the planet on the fertility of Indigenous and Women of Color because they were perceived as overpopulating the planet and destroying natural resources. This overlooked the real root cause of environmental degradation which is the production of war and militarization.⁷ There are many examples of population control atrocities committed by the state for centuries, including the Indian Removal Act of 1830, when President Andrew Jackson had his troops murder Indigenous women and children in an attempt to decimate future generations of Native peoples as part of maintaining the “health of the nation.”⁸ Population control ideology would perfectly marry eugenic beliefs in the nineteenth century used to justify the massive sterilization of people with disabilities; poor people; and Black, People of Color, and Indigenous communities in the US and Global South.

Eugenic Science

In the early twentieth century, Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), an English mathematician, geneticist, and eugenicist made numerous contributions to biometrics and statistics. But he is most well-known for coining the term eugenics.⁹ He introduced his ideologies of eugenics as positive and negative:

Positive Eugenics: Those who should be procreated to ensure the “healthy” human race as they will be the fittest to survive.

Negative Eugenics: Those who will not survive based on not having a “healthy body.” These people will be dependent on society and have a predilection to be criminals.¹⁰

Galton defines eugenics as “the use of genetics to improve the human race.” His first priority was to stop reproduction of “imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, moral imbeciles, and such inebriates, epileptics, deaf, and dumb, and blind persons.”¹¹ Eugenics may have been an outlying belief system if it had not been invested in by major philanthropists such as the Carnegies and Rockefellers.¹² Both the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations hired eugenicists to gather data from psychiatric institutions, prisons, and orphanages to “calculate the ethnic makeup of societal dependents and the cost of maintaining them in public institutions,”¹³ directly associating it to what was most profitable and beneficial to the wealthy elite. This science was then used to prove that someone’s genetic makeup was the root cause of poverty: having a predilection to criminality, substance use, or a tendency toward homosexuality, to name a few.

Another example of using eugenic science to prove racial purity was the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s, “used to control Chinese immigrant communities by barring Chinese people in the United States from naturalization while encouraging the continued abuse of Chinese workers.”¹⁴ This act was also used to preserve white racial purity for the “well-being” of the white wealthy class. Eastern European immigrants were also targeted by eugenicists. Factory owners used eugenicists to prove laborers organizing for better working conditions were genetically inferior to deflect being accountable for their dangerous factories. Essentially eugenic science was used to blame poor people, BIPOC, immigrant, and refugee communities for their conditions based on genetics as opposed to structural violence. This is still applied today in governmental policies, laws, and societal beliefs.

Constructs of Deviance and Dependence

Central to eugenics and population control are concepts of deviance and dependence to perpetuate that some bodies deemed “unfit and diseased” are expendable. Abolitionist organizer and attorney Talila “TL” Lewis powerfully describes the processes used to categorize, pathologize, and criminalize Black people. TL offers the example of the 1880 US census categories of “defective, dependent, delinquent” as an example of how US social, economic, legal, and medical systems have always been deeply rooted in eugenics, ableism, and racial capitalism:

These systems intentionally construct and define categories that can look, to the outsider, to actually be accurate or substantive. I’ll give an example: the conception and construction of delinquency, defectiveness, and dependency. This post-emancipation census [in 1880] allowed a government that had recently “legally” freed Black people without providing any remuneration or reparation to label the very same Black people, “dependent,” for example. This categorization, as well as “defective” and “delinquent” were used to incarcerate Black people in various institutions, justify continued refusal to provide support, and extract yet more unpaid labor.

TL goes on to describe those same constructs of disability, deviance, and dependence as deeply steeped in the “violent illogics” of the institution of slavery. Uplifting another example in the concept of “sound mind and body” that was used to rank Black enslaved workers based on white supremacist capitalist ideas about fitness and productivity. TL goes on to explain:

Labels of “without sound mind” were assigned to Black enslaved people who resisted enslavement in any way, including engaging in work slowdowns and work stoppages, or in the destruction of so-called property . . . like the burning of crops and plantations. That was deemed deviant! This, when it was quite valid to do those things. It was right to do those things . . . It is really important to keep these constructions in mind in order to understand how the medical-carceral industrial complex functions.

Eugenics and Population Control in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

In the US in the 1920s, the eugenics movement grew through three different fronts: “The Eugenics Research Association working in partnership with the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the American Eugenics Society promoting the eugenics movement at both the scientific and popular level; and the Eugenics Records Office, founded by Charles Davenport, providing the scientific data to support the eugenics movement.”¹⁵ These institutions propelled a theory that “dependent populations” who could not reproduce labor for the wealthy white elite were disposable.

Over 60,000 forced sterilizations were already performed in the United States on mostly poor (and often African-American) and people confined to mental hospitals. The practice of forced sterilizations for the “unfit” was almost unanimously supported by eugenicists. The American Eugenics Society had hoped, in time, to sterilize one-tenth of the U.S. population, or millions of Americans.¹⁶

In the early twentieth century, more insidious practices of state eugenics would follow, including the landmark case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, in which the Supreme Court upheld “that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the ‘unfit,’ including people with mental, emotional and developmental disabilities, for the protection and health of the state.”¹⁷ Compulsory sterilization laws that led to the unethical sterilization of thousands of people with disabilities include the eugenics sterilization Law 116 in Puerto Rico, passed in 1937, which was used to massively sterilize one-third of all Puerto Rican women between the 1930s and 1970s under the guise of population control.¹⁸ Though many of these insidious laws are now off the books, eugenics is still embedded within sociobiology programs, Western psychology, criminal justice, and medical schools. Of course, it is also embedded in our cultural beliefs, which continue to pervade our institutions, government policies, and legislation. As well as white supremacists who use it to purport ideas of genetic and racial purity, using genetic and DNA testing to validate their racial superiority.

Today, even more critical is the impact of consumerist eugenics, where individuals working on their own accord perpetuate eugenic and population-control ideals. One example is Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (now known as Project Prevention),¹⁹ which gives monetary incentives to women substance users who are predominantly Black sex workers in exchange for tubal ligations and long-term sterilization so they cannot reproduce. Based in North Carolina, they have several chapters across the US. Another example is the recent case of sterilization abuse of detained women at the Irwin County Detention Center that the nurse and whistle blower, Dawn Wooten, courageously exposed.²⁰ This shows yet again eugenic violence and population control still exist within the carceral state.

Toward a Healing Justice Future

If we understand the implications of these histories of the medical industrial complex, we can change the systems and abusive harms and practices they continue to commit. As mentioned, eugenic science creates theories of “superiority,” “cleanliness and health,” and who is diseased and who is not. This has been at the expense of disabled, Black and Brown, im/migrant, incarcerated, sex worker, Queer and Trans, and Intersex communities. Over these last few years, during the COVID-19 global pandemic, the blaming and shaming of Chinese communities created a massive anti-Asian xenophobic wave of violence directed against anyone perceived to be Asian and was deeply rooted in old ideas of who is seen as “dangerous and diseased.” In the same way, African refugees were outcast for the Ebola Virus, or the LGBTQTSI+ community, substance users, and sex workers were targeted and blamed for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The health disparities were widely exposed during the pandemic and showed us still the eugenic approaches to who was deemed worthy of saving during the pandemic and who was not based on who got access to ventilators and quality care.

In this moment of COVID-19, “the pandemic portal,”²¹ we are truly confronting and healing not just from the global pandemic but from these pervasive ideas of “healthy” and “diseased” that have been heightened. Yet long before the pandemic exposed these inequities, these concepts were ideologically rooted in our systems of care. We will need to push back against these ideas of “cure” and “fix” that continue to put our communities at risk and in danger.

How will we hold the line of supporting our families and communities to have self-determination and agency around our care? How will we as advocates and practitioners not be complicit or become mechanisms of the state that controls, contains, and perpetuates these ideas? We must understand our role in relationship to the MIC to change its harmful ideologies and practices that only reinforce colonization, slavery, population control, and eugenics. Our liberation depends on it.

Healing justice as a political framework aims to challenge and transform the MIC, to interrupt and abolish these harms and abuses toward our collective care and liberatory futures.

Notes

¹ Population Control (see glossary).

² Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, (Penguin Random House, 2008), 1–51.

³ Human Genome Diversity Project,” Human Genome Diversity Project, accessed December 19, 2021, https://www.hagsc.org/hgdp/.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Thomas Malthus and George Thomas Bettany, An Essay on the Principle of Population, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). First published 1798.

⁶ “Historic Figures, Malthus, Thomas,” BBC, accessed January 4, 2022, www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/malthus_thomas.shtml.

⁷ “Population in Perspective, 2nd Edition,” PopDev, accessed January 7, 2022, https://sites.hampshire.edu/popdev/population-in-perspective/.

⁸ “Indian Removal Act,” Wikipedia, accessed January 19, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act.

⁹ “Eugenics Archives Discover Connections,” Eugenics Archives, accessed January 27, 2022, https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/518c1ed54d7d6e0000000002.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² William A. Schambra, “Philanthropy’s Original Sin,” The New Atlantis, no. 39, (Summer 2013): 3–21, www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/philanthropys-original-sin.

¹³ Steven A. Farber, “US Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939),” Zebrafish 5, no. 4 (December 2008): 243–245, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757926/.

¹⁴ Irene Hsu, “The Echoes of Chinese Exclusion,” The New Republic, June 28, 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/149437/echoes-chinese-exclusion.

¹⁵ Farber, “US Scientists’ Role,” 243–245.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ “Buck v. Bell,” Wikipedia, accessed February 24, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell.

¹⁸ Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutierrez, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 220–221.

¹⁹ Project Prevention, accessed February 19, 2022, www.projectprevention.org/.

²⁰ Eesha Pandit, “The Many Abuses at the Irwin Detention Center in Georgia,” The Nation, October 30, 2020, www.thenation.com/article/society/hysterectomies-sterilization-irwin-county/.

²¹ Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.

We Are Our History:
Transforming the Legacy of Criminalization

Erica Woodland

To truly understand healing justice, it is essential to understand the role of criminalization. Criminalization extends beyond mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. It includes the way we are socially, culturally, and spiritually policed in ways that collude with the state and render people, activities, and their communities “illegal.” Criminalization is insidious and pervades our communities and interpersonal relationships making it difficult to uproot.

Criminalization functions as a primary tool to incarcerate, murder, surveil, and control our communities in order to undermine the work for collective liberation. It fosters dehumanization based on race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, citizenship, religion, disability, HIV status, and class. We are also criminalized for engaging in our land, body, and spirit traditions as People of Color.

The state employs a few strategies that it repeatedly uses to dominate and control. The timeline that follows provides a historical overview to help us better understand how patterns of criminalization work together and shape one another. It maps the legacy of colonization through land dispossession, enslavement, exploitation of migrants, weaponization of citizenship, and state-sanctioned violence against those deemed inferior or less than human. We know our people have rich and brilliant legacies of resistance and resilience. We must document these stories for ourselves and our descendants. We owe the world the full story, not just the tragedy, of what we have done to survive and resist since the founding of this country.¹

Historical Overview of Criminalization in the United States 1492–2000

Year
Event
DESCRIPTION

1492
Christopher Columbus began colonizing the Americas
With the backing of the Spanish monarchy, Columbus headed to the Americas, initiating generations of land dispossession, genocide, and enslavement.

1493
Doctrine of Discovery
Issued by Pope Alexander VI, granted Christian Europeans authority to dispossess non-Christians in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas of their land. In the US, this doctrine allowed Indigenous tribes occupancy but no rights of possession/ownership. This doctrine became law in 1823 by the Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’Intosh and has never been rescinded.

1607
First permanent British colony
Established in Jamestown, Virginia.

1610
First sodomy law in British colonies
Virginia made sodomy illegal and punishable by death. This law and subsequent colonial sodomy laws were based on British buggery laws.

1619
Enslaved Africans brought to first British colony
Africans kidnapped by Portuguese and sold to English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, marked the beginning of the institution of chattel slavery in the US.

1675–1678
Metacomet’s Rebellion/King Philip’s War
Series of uprisings by Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, and Narragansett tribes in response to English settlers’ encroachment in New England.

1691
First anti-miscegenation law
Passed by Maryland General Assembly, making interracial marriage illegal. Majority of states had these laws, which were deemed unconstitutional in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia.

1713
Lantern laws
Legal code in New York City that required Black, mixed, and Indigenous enslaved people not accompanied by a white person to walk with a lantern at night to be hypervisible—early system of surveillance.

1778–1779
First European contact in Hawaii
Captain James Cook of the British navy arrived at the island of Kauai. He and his crew brought numerous infections and diseases. When he returned the following year to the island of Hawaii, he was killed by Native Hawaiians during a conflict.

1790
Nationality Act
First law to explicitly restrict citizenship to free whites.

1793
Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
Allowed local governments to capture and return enslaved Africans to their owners.

1821
First abortion law
State of Connecticut banned medicinal abortions after the “quickening”² with penalties falling on midwives and birth workers.

1830
Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears
Forced removal of five tribes from their homelands in the Southeastern US. President Andrew Jackson signed the law to open up those lands for tobacco and cotton farming by enslaved Africans.

1848
Gold Rush and western expansion
Gold found in California led to millions of settlers moving west. State-sponsored murder of thousands of Native Americans.

First cross-dressing law
First explicit law passed that prohibited wearing clothing of the opposite sex in Columbus, Ohio. Masquerade laws such as the one enacted in New York in 1845 were also used to criminalize Trans and gender-nonconforming people.

1850
Act for the Government and Protection of Indians
Newly formed state of California passed a law allowing for indentured servitude of Indigenous people under certain conditions. From 1852 to 1857 state paid $1.5 million to bounty hunters to murder Native people. Native children routinely “adopted” and forced into servitude.

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Expansion of previous act from 1793. Criminalized anyone who interfered with capture of fugitives, denied enslaved Africans the right to a jury trial, and further incentivized federal agents to capture escaped Africans.

1857
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Denied citizenship to both free and enslaved Africans.

Lorette Law
City ordinance in New Orleans restricting “prostitution” and driving it underground. First law in the country to restrict sex trade and explicitly required white women and “free colored” women to work in separate spaces.

1860–1978
Indian boarding school era
Tool of cultural genocide and assimilation that led to thousands of Native children being removed from their families and sent to boarding schools. Based on supremacist ideologies such as “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”

1862
Homestead Act
Granted 160 acres of land to any “citizen” and fuels western expansion and land dispossession for Native Americans.

1863
Emancipation Proclamation
Legal end of chattel slavery but continues via convict leasing and current labor exploitation of incarcerated people.

1865
Civil War ends
Jim Crow era begins
Black Codes
Vagrancy laws passed after the Civil War that essentially criminalized newly freed Africans for unemployment and homelessness. Based on previous laws governing movement of freed Africans before the end of slavery.

Convict leasing
System of forced labor that proliferated after the end of slavery to continue labor exploitation of newly freed Africans.

1867
First Ugly Law
Eugenic ordinance in San Francisco that criminalized begging and prohibited people with visible disabilities from being in public.

1871
Treaty making ends
US government stopped treaty making with Indigenous tribes, thereby no longer recognizing them as sovereign nations.

1873
Comstock Laws
Made it illegal to send sexual or obscene content through the mail, including sexual content, contraceptives, and substances that could be used to induce abortion.

1875
Page Act
Federal legislation that restricted migration of undesirables—forced laborers from East Asia and East Asian women brought to the US for “immoral purposes” (“prostitution”). Law is rooted in anti-Asian racism, primarily targeted Chinese people, and targeted Chinese women specifically as sex workers.

Opium Den Ordinance
First drug law passed in San Francisco which criminalized the use of opium or visiting an opium den.

1882
Chinese Exclusion Act
First major law criminalizing migration based on race. Suspended immigration for ten years and denied naturalization to Chinese immigrants.

Immigration Act of 1882
Additional restrictions to prohibit immigration of the poor, “convicts,” and “lunatics.”

1883
Code of Indian Offenses
Made Native traditions, ceremonies, gatherings, and cultural practices illegal. Government established an Indian police force.

1887
Allotment/Dawes Act
Government divided up tribal lands, imposing the notion of private property for individuals instead of communal stewardship. Led to loss of over one hundred million acres of land for Indigenous tribes.

Bayonet Constitution
King Kalākaua of Hawaii forced to sign new constitution at gunpoint by settlers from Europe and the US. Greatly limited power of Hawaiian monarch.

1893
Overthrow of Hawaiian monarch
Queen Lili‘uokalani overthrown by US Marines and businessmen in effort to push annexation of Hawaii. Sanford Dole (of the Dole Pineapple company) named president of the Republic of Hawaii.

1898
Hawaii annexed
President McKinley signed amendment for Hawaii to become a territory. This further solidified plans of US corporations to take over the sugar industry.

Treaty of Paris
Ended the Spanish-American War, with Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines becoming US colonies after three hundred to four hundred years of colonization by the Spanish. Puerto Rico and Guam remain colonies of the US.

1907
First eugenic sterilization law passed
Indiana passed the first eugenic law in the world, permitting the involuntary sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.”

1909
Smoking Opium Exclusion Act
First federal law regulating substance use for nonmedical reasons. Banned use, possession, and transportation of smoking opium and used to further target Chinese immigrants.

1910
Mann Act of 1910
Aka White Slave Traffic Act of 1910. Criminalizes transportation of white women for “immoral purposes.” Criminalizes consensual sexual acts considered immoral, such as “prostitution,” pre-/extra-marital sex, interracial relationships, etc. Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson is the first to be charged in 1913 for traveling with his white girlfriend. Law is still on the books today— in 2020 Ghislaine Maxwell charged under this act for her role in sexual abuse of minors with Jeffrey Epstein.

1913
American Social Hygiene Association
Founded to fight venereal disease and “prostitution.” Actively participated in criminalization of sex workers and others in the sex trade or any women deemed “suspicious” under the guise of public health.

1914
Harrison Narcotics Act
Federal law that regulated and taxed production, distribution, and transportation of opiates and cocaine. Granted doctors permission to distribute. Supporters of the law used the racist myth of the “negro cocaine fiend” to help legislation pass, which further criminalized Black men in the South.

1917
Immigration Act of 1917
Excluded non-white migrants from Middle East and Asia, criminals, disabled people, radicals, poor and homeless people, sex workers, homosexuals, and illiterate people.

Espionage Act of 1917
Passed shortly after US entered WWI, criminalized sharing of national defense information that could harm US. Repressive law that gave the postmaster power to interrupt mail considered a violation of the act. Expanded via the 1918 Sedition Act, which further criminalized radicals and dissidents, including labor movement organizations and leaders.

1918
Chamberlain-Kahn Act
Created during WWI to protect soldiers from sexually transmitted infections. Established the American Plan, which allowed the government to quarantine and incarcerate women suspected of having a sexually transmitted infection (STI) and required medical exams. Having an STI was considered evidence of “prostitution.” Law was used to criminalize women for any behavior considered “immoral.”

1919
Palmer Raids
Raids conducted by the Department of Justice to arrest and deport radicals—leftists, anarchists, communists, etc.

1920–1933
Eighteenth Amendment: Prohibition
Ban on manufacturing, sale, and transportation of alcohol marked a major shift in federal criminalization of substances. Largely seen as a failure, this ban led to increased alcohol use, violence, and corruption.

1921
Sheppard–Towner Act
Also known as the National Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, it established the regulation of midwifery by requiring licensure and training. This act targeted Black and Indigenous midwives, furthering the medicalization of home births and criminalization of community midwifery.

Emergency Quota Law
Following WWI and based on eugenic ideology, this law limited the number of migrants based on nationality for the purpose of excluding undesirable ethnic groups. This law was made permanent in 1924 and did not end until 1965.

1924
Indian Citizenship Act
Grants Native Americans citizenship, further complicating the ongoing fight for tribal sovereignty.

1927
Buck v. Bell
Carrie Buck, plaintiff in the case, was sterilized while institutionalized at a state facility in Virginia under the Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924. Supreme Court upheld the law, which set precedent for forced sterilization laws and practices across the country for those deemed “unfit” or people with disabilities.

1937
Marijuana Tax Act
Federal law that criminalized marijuana possession, distribution, cultivation, and transportation. Regulated this industry through taxes. Laws targeted Mexican and Black people.

1938
House Un-American Activities Committee
House of Representatives committee created to investigate activities considered subversive to the government, primarily by communists and their supporters.

1941
May Act
Criminalized “prostitution” near military bases.

1942
Bracero Agreement
Agreement between the US and Mexico that established a guest worker program designed to address labor shortages in the US during WWII. Led to increase of both legal and “illegal” migration from Mexico and laid the foundation for the exploitation and abuse of Mexican migrants.

Japanese internment
More than one hundred thousand Japanese people sent to concentration camps during WWII after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

1947
Sex Perversion Elimination Program
The beginning of the “lavender scare,” this program was initiated by the US Park Service police in Washington, DC. Criminalized homosexuality and led to arrest and harassment of Gay and Lesbian people.

1951–1952
Operation Wetback
Highly militarized and largest mass deportation in history. Deported Mexican nationals while the Bracero Program was still in operation.

1953
Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
At the height of the Red Scare/McCarthyism, the Rosenbergs were executed after being convicted for espionage and involvement with the Communist Party.

1956–1971
Counterintelligence Program
Covert and illegal operation established by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to undermine social movements, including Black Power, anti-war, civil rights, American Indian Movement, etc.

1959
Hawaii becomes a state
Ninety-three percent of population votes for statehood through referendum. At the time, more than 90 percent of population are US citizens (non-Native Hawaiians) and referendum only had two options—become a state or remain a territory with no option for sovereignty.

1960s–1970s
Sterilization of Native American women
Between the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service (IHS) sterilized thousands of Native women. Practice continued even after IHS was exposed in a 1974 study by Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri.

1966
Compton’s Cafeteria Riot
Trans women led a riot in the Tenderloin in San Francisco in response to police harassment of Trans and Gay people in the cafeteria.

1969
Stonewall Rebellion
Uprising led by Trans Women of Color sex workers in response to the raid of the Stonewall Inn by police who harassed and abused LGBT patrons.

1971
Attica Rebellion
More than one thousand people incarcerated at the Attica prison in Upstate New York rebelled in response to dehumanizing prison conditions. During negotiations, Governor Rockefeller ordered a brutal military attack on the prison, leading to thirty-nine deaths, followed by abuse and torture of prisoners.

War on Drugs
Declared by Richard Nixon after the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Led to increased criminalization (mandatory minimums, etc.) of drug possession and use and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973.

1973
Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws criminalizing abortion and established the right to an abortion in the first trimester. In 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court leading to a large-scale loss of abortion rights in states across the country.

Rockefeller Drug Laws
Established mandatory minimums for drug possession in New York state. These harsh laws served as a national model for other states.

1976
Hyde Amendment
Banned use of federal funding for abortions, directly impacting poor people and People of Color.

1978
American Indian Religious Freedom Act
New law promised to “protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions.” However, the law lacked methods of enforcement.

1982
Broken Windows theory
Developed by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, it advocated for the criminalization of minor “crimes.” Later adopted by the Bratton Group and Mayor Giuliani in New York City. Broken windows policing was the precursor to stop-and-frisk and quality-of-life policing.

1986
Anti-Drug Abuse Act
Law established under the Reagan administration advances the War on Drugs through an increase in mandatory minimums. Establishes 100:1 disparity between criminalization of crack versus powder cocaine.

1987
HIV travel ban
Prohibits entry into the US for immigrants living with HIV. Repealed in 2010.

1989
Crack baby myth
Study conducted by Dr. Ira Chasnoff on cocaine exposure in utero led to criminalization of women using crack cocaine, specifically Black women. Study ran for twenty-five years and found no significant impact of cocaine exposure in utero but was used to justify other laws criminalizing substance-using mothers.

1990
Ryan White Act
The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act requires states to have laws criminalizing the transmission of HIV to receive federal funding for HIV/AIDS care.

1993
Religious Freedom Restoration Act
Prohibits the government from imposing restrictions on the free exercise of religion, unless the agency can show “compelling state interest.” Amendment to AIRFA (American Indian Religious Freedom Act) adds additional protections and enforcement mechanisms following Employment Division v. Smith, which criminalized the use of peyote in religious ceremonies.

1994
Violent Crime Control Act and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
Legislation is a main driver of mass incarceration. Includes policies such as the Three Strikes laws, providing financial incentives to states to build more prisons and jails. Led to the creation of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which led to increased criminalization of survivors of intimate partner/sexual violence that VAWA was created to protect.

1995
Superpredator theory
Racist criminology theory developed by John DiIulio, which targets Black youth as inherently violent and without remorse. Dilulio renounced this theory in 2001.

2000
Trafficking Victims Protection Act
Federal legislation that criminalizes human trafficking. Creates a distinction between sex trafficking and labor trafficking, conflates sex work and sex trafficking, and increases criminalization of sex work/sex trade.

Patterns

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.³

—James Baldwin

It is critical for us to understand patterns of criminalization across time and context. When we fail to recognize patterns of state violence, we risk believing the false notion that our current experience is new. We know and understand that the nature of time itself is nonlinear and spiralic. If the past is in fact playing out in the present, then we have the opportunity to transmute the past by reckoning with these patterns in the present and the future. We open up to the possibility of interrupting patterns of violence and calling forth the strategies of resistance of those who came before. This is reclaiming ancestral patterns.

The generational consequences of criminalization are everywhere—mass incarceration; detention and deportation; the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous children in the child welfare system, in addition to Indigenous children being forced into residental boarding schools; and disproportionate rates of poverty, disease, and death. Even more, the state exploits our complex and pervasive intergenerational grief and trauma that disrupt our sense of safety, belonging, and worth. The state weaponizes our responses to violence and trauma by blaming us for our suffering and employing carceral strategies to address the ways we’ve learned to survive.

Healing justice examines how we respond to and transform trauma inside our own work for liberation. In order to do that, we must look closely at the criminalization of resistance and protest so we comprehensively understand political and spiritual repression. As we reclaim our ancestral traditions and practices, we will also sharpen our ability to identify key strategies of the state that directly undermine our work.

Political Repression: When They Come for Our Freedom Fighters

In March 1971 activists broke into an FBI office, discovered, and subsequently leaked documents about the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a covert and illegal operation started by J. Edgar Hoover. Between 1956 and 1971 this program’s goal was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” revolutionary political organizations, including anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and animal rights groups, the Black Panther Party, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, American Indian Movement, Young Lords, and others.⁴ COINTELPRO’s strategies include infiltrating radical groups using agent provocateurs, incarcerating movement leaders on false charges by intimidating witnesses, and falsifying and hiding evidence. In collaboration with local law enforcement agencies, COINTELPRO routinely wiretapped, harassed, spread misinformation, and even assassinated radical leaders for the purpose of undermining the legitimacy of revolutionary groups considered a threat to the status quo. Prominent targets of this operation were Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and countless others.

In 1976 the Church Committee, the US Senate committee investigating abuses by the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies, determined that some of COINTELPRO’s operations were illegal:

Governmental officials—including those whose principal duty is to enforce the law—have violated or ignored the law over long periods of time and have advocated and defended their right to break the law.⁵

—Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities

Unfortunately many of us believe that COINTELPRO is of the past when in fact many of the operations deemed illegal by the Church Committee are now overt and legal, such as the Patriot Act passed in 2001. The long-term generational impacts of COINTELPRO have been enormous for our movements and our communities. An entire generation of freedom fighters have been jailed, murdered, or driven to exile, interrupting the generational transfer of resistance strategies. This was a direct attempt by the state to disrupt the transmission of knowledge and memory due to the threat it poses to its control and domination. Hearing the stories and living the consequences of state violence against political organizers makes our movements easier to control as reformist tactics are deemed safer and more strategic than more revolutionary ones.

Healing justice asks us to consider: How do we respond to state violence and abuse (e.g., COINTELPRO) while transforming the traumatic consequences of this violence in our liberation movements?

Spiritual Repression: When They Come for Our Spirit

Spiritual and cultural warfare are the bedrock of settler colonialism. The Doctrine of Discovery, a decree issued by the Roman Catholic Church in 1493 and sanctioned by dominant religious, political, and cultural institutions of the time, served as the driver for conquest and the expansion of Christian supremacy.⁶ Under this ideology, our ancestral traditions were deemed sinful and immoral, and yet they continue to be some of the most important resources we have for our resistance. Our ancestors relied on spiritual technologies as part of their overall strategies for liberation. Spiritual technology refers to our ancestral and ancient sources of knowledge rooted in memory, intuition, and embodiment, which acts as a conduit to transcend time and space. It is how our peoples have used our spiritual practices to manipulate and transform conditions of violence and domination toward our collective futures.

Christian supremacy forced Indigenous and Black folks to hide and at times totally abandon our cultural and spiritual ways for survival through policies such as at the Code of Indian Offenses,⁷ which outlawed ceremony and other spiritual and cultural practices, and residential boarding schools based on the ideology “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”⁸ These strategies were employed after large-scale land dispossession and displacing Indigenous tribes on reservations.

But Indigenous communities had their own technologies of resistance. The Ghost Dance Movement began in 1889 and was a spiritual movement based on the visions of Paiute elder, Wovoka, who prophesied the end of European expansion and the reunion of Indigenous peoples with their ancestors.⁹ The Ghost Dance, a continuous dance done in a circle, was believed to call the spirits of the ancestors to assist in the fight against settlers thereby bringing this prophecy into existence.

It was a spiritual technology to directly intervene on settler expansion and preserve Indigenous cultural traditions. Threatened by the spread of the Ghost Dance to other tribes, specifically the Lakota, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) targeted Lakota Chief Sitting Bull in an effort to stop ghost dancing. It was believed that ghost shirts, worn by warriors, were so spiritually powerful they had the ability to repel bullets. At this time, as tribes were resisting assimilation and allotment, targeting the Ghost Dance was part of the settlers’ genocidal strategy to enforce criminalization of Indigenous ceremonial practices as a form of resistance to colonialism. The confrontation between the BIA and the Lakota led to the murder of Sitting Bull and soon after was followed by the Massacre at Wounded Knee, where the US Army killed 153 Lakota, mostly women and children.

The Native American Church (NAC) is another powerful example of spiritual and political resistance to attempted genocide. Quanah Parker, Comanche leader and famous early peyotist, helped to bring peyote to Indian Territory in Oklahoma.¹⁰ In a conversation with my friend and Indigenous scholar, Nanea Renteria, they explained:

Although many scholars associate the Native American Church with religious freedom laws—specifically the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—it began as a strategy of survival, healing, and adaptation, which for me means resistance to genocide. After removal from their homelands during the Trail of Tears, and the risk of prosecution for holding large gatherings, ceremonies were constantly being raided and shut down by the Indian police. The early Oklahoma peyotists did what they could to evade persecution, reknit kinship networks, and continue to pray and heal in the face of ongoing assimilation and genocide.

In order to hide from Indian police, the NAC’s ceremonies took place overnight in a tepee using mundane objects like the kettle (for the drum), and the bow (for the staff) in direct response to the criminalization of peyote and the Code of Indian Offenses, which escalated as Oklahoma prepared for statehood. The ability to continue these practices by doing them in secret speaks to the enduring nature of our connection to spirit despite attempted genocide.

Spiritual criminalization also has a deep history with enslaved Africans and their descendants. The targeting of African traditions practiced by enslaved Black people dates back to the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Forced to convert to Christianity, a system used to uphold and justify slavery, the spiritual traditions of enslaved Africans were adapted and went underground to evade violence. Traditions such as Lucumí or Santería (Cuba), Voodoo (New Orleans), Candomblé (Brazil), and Haitian Vodou, were practiced in secret as well as in plain sight as forms of resistance to the horrors of chattel slavery. In Lucumí, for example, the orishas or deities were masked behind Catholic saints to evade Spanish colonizers.¹¹ While there is some disagreement among practitioners about whether enslaved Africans syncretized¹² their traditional practices with Catholicism or used Catholicism as a front to practice their ancestral traditions, these spiritual technologies survived, transformed, and live on as a direct confrontation to the cultural genocide of slavery.

The major court battle to fight against the criminalization of Lucumí in the United States happened in 1987 in Hialeah, Florida. The city banned animal sacrifice in Lucumí ceremonies in an effort to outlaw the religion, which was seen as immoral and demonic.¹³ These city ordinances were deemed unconstitutional in 1993 in Church of the Lukumí Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. Ernesto Pichardo, founder of the church, took this fight all the way to the Supreme Court, thereby ending the criminalization of animal sacrifice on paper. However, before and since this ruling, many Lucumí practitioners fear that their ceremonies will be reported to the police due to the continued widespread fear of African traditional religions.

Knowing these stories of resistance to spiritual repression and criminalization serves as a reminder that our connection to Spirit and the ways of our ancestors is not lost. Slavery, colonization, and white supremacy have attempted to disconnect us from this wisdom and delegitimize the traditions of our peoples. Our oppressors have set us up to disavow our spiritual technologies and adopt their traditions as a way to control and dominate us not only spiritually but also politically. Reclaiming our spiritual lineage is a resistance strategy to heal this disconnect. It allows us to know the unknowable through ceremony and practice giving us access to the infinite resources available in the spirit realm. To rebraid these stories of political and spiritual resistance is to make good on our commitment to liberation. Healing justice as a political AND spiritual framework calls us back into alignment with the destiny our ancestors imagined for us, a future where we remember that our connection to Spirit is indestructible.

Notes

¹ This timeline names some of the patterns of criminalization that we are still grappling with today. While not exhaustive, and focused on the continental US, it gives context to the resistance strategies shared throughout the anthology.

² Refers to the first fetal movements experienced by a pregnant person.

³ James Baldwin, quoted in I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck, (Magnolia Pictures and Amazon Studios, 2016), documentary film.

⁴ “COINTELPRO,” Wikipedia, accessed September 1, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO.

⁵ Select Comm. to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, S. Rep. No. 94-755, at 5 (1976), accessed September 1, 2021, www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_II.pdf.

⁶ “Doctrine of Discovery,” First Light Learning Resources, Upstander Project, accessed September 1, 2021, https://upstanderproject.org/firstlight/doctrine.

⁷ “Code of Indian Offenses,” Wikipedia, accessed September 1, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Indian_Offenses.

⁸ “History and Culture: Boarding Schools,” Northern Plains Reservation Aid, accessed September 1, 2021, www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools.

⁹ “Ghost Dance,” Wikipedia, accessed September 1, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance; Stephanie Hall, “James Mooney Recordings of American Indian Ghost Dance Songs, 1894,” November 17, 2017, https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/11/james-mooney-recordings-ghost-dance-songs/.

¹⁰ Peyote is one name of a plant medicine used by Indigenous peoples in the Americas for thousands of years. See also Daniel Swan, “Native American Church,” Oklahoma Historical Society, www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=NA015.

¹¹ Marta Moreno Vega, The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santería (Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, 2000), 2.

¹² Syncretism is the merging of different traditions or cultural practices.

¹³ “Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah,” Wikipedia, accessed September 1, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Lukumi_Babalu_Aye_v._City_of_Hialeah.

Illustration by Amir Khadar. Visual description: A black-and-white illustration of four figures, each wearing light-colored clothing. Two darker-skinned Black people sit with their backs pressed against each other, one with an afro and a mustache, the other with locs pinned up in two ponytails, adorned with cowrie shells. Their arms are folded upward at the elbow, both extending their palms upward to hold out clay bowls. Behind them, two lighter-skinned Black people stand shoulder to shoulder, one with chest-level locs, the other with an afro and full facial hair. They look away from each other, each nestling a similar clay bowl in their arms. The universe spills in a liquid stream from their bowls into those of the people sitting below them, continuing to flow off the page. Behind them sits the pale moon and a sky speckled with stars.

Holding Our Beautiful Mess:
Liberatory Harm Reduction and Our Right to Heal

Shira Hassan

Harm reduction, like many radical philosophies, was co-opted by institutions of public health, social work, and the medical industrial complex. Activists fighting for the rights and safety of drug users; people in the sex trade, street economy, and involved in sex work; and people with chronic illness and disabilities sought to make the philosophy of harm reduction a part of the United States’ public health strategy in order to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s. As a result of the successful work of these revolutionary organizers, some of you may have heard about syringe exchanges, the most popularized example of harm reduction.

What you may not know is that while the risk-reduction strategies embedded in harm reduction (condom distribution programs, syringe exchanges, etc.) did eventually become part of public health’s standardized approach to HIV prevention in most states, much of what actually makes up the daily practice of saving our own lives—the core values of the philosophy of harm reduction—was stripped away inside these institutional settings. The truth is that harm reduction was designed and created by drug users, sex workers, feminists, trans activists, people with chronic illness and disabilities, those of us working to end violence without the police, and those of us working to end prisons and the violent state. It is a practice steeped in joy, in living into the beauty of our lives no matter how messy they may (appear to) be.

This chapter will not be discussing “public health harm reduction.” Instead we will be talking about its origins as a liberation practice—Liberatory Harm Reduction—and how it intersects and pushes healing justice practitioners to find a place for all of us in the work.

Redefining “Risky” and Reclaiming Trauma-Centered Practice

In order to understand the philosophy of harm reduction, we have to interrogate our understanding of the idea of “risky behaviors” and reimagine our trauma-centered practice. The strategies survivors use to fight back, heal, cope, and yes, seek pleasure, are highly stigmatized and criminalized. Minimally, drug use and involvement in the street economy, the sex trade and sex work, self-injury, or not using prescribed (psychiatric or other) medication are often criminalized.

Survivors whose survival strategies have been deemed morally wrong or criminal are made even more vulnerable by healers and health care providers who lack a complex trauma analysis. We have become targets of a system that cannot make sense of us and seeks only to control us. Sometimes I think these systems have little help to offer, and other times I think these systems hoard resources from our communities intentionally and force us to fight each other for what little access we have. Depending on a person’s age, race, or gender presentation, the judgments of institutional representatives can and often do have carceral implications.

So we are forced to lie to our health care providers about our drug use, sex work, housing, medication adherence, and more to cover our tracks as much as we can. Even if we want to stop using drugs and seek out rehab or other forms of assistance, we are subject to humiliation and monitoring of our bodies that is designed to reduce caseloads and keep costs down.

When seeking medication-assisted treatment (MAT) like methadone or suboxone, the average person can wait months or even years to get into a MAT program, and then they must be free of other drugs to stay in the program. I have had several friends who intentionally became pregnant for the sole purpose of getting into rehab or on methadone because pregnant people have access to priority placement. If you felt shock or judgment come up when you read that statement, I invite you to answer it with curiosity and compassion. What is life like when becoming pregnant is the best option for someone who wants to get off drugs? What does it mean when the system is so violent that extremes become logical options?

When I was finally able to find a doctor who prescribed me suboxone, which is how I effectively stopped using heroin (but not all opioids) in my thirties, I was able to get into a program at my local syringe exchange. The program required a few hoops because it was in a harm-reduction setting. This is far from a common experience, and I know that my community relationships are what kept me alive.

What Is Liberatory Harm Reduction?

This is the definition collectively created in the book Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction:

Liberatory Harm Reduction is a philosophy and set of empowerment-based practices that teach us how to accompany each other as we transform the root causes of harm in our lives.

We put our values into action using real-life strategies to reduce the negative health, legal, and social consequences that result from criminalized and stigmatized life experiences such as drug use, sex, the sex trade/sex work, surviving intimate partner violence, self-injury, eating disorders, and any other survival strategies deemed morally or socially unacceptable.

Liberatory Harm Reductionists support each other and our communities without judgment, stigma, or coercion, and we do not force others to change. We envision a world without racism, capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, policing, surveillance, and other systems of violence.

Liberatory Harm Reduction is true self-determination and total body autonomy.

Harm reduction disconnects the ideas of sobriety and healing. We center all of our lived experience and don’t create false hierarchies with sobriety at the top. We honor decisions to be off medications, herbs, engage in the street economy though the sex trade or selling drugs. We hold each other close and fall in love with each other’s survival and survival strategies.

The idea of keeping our community safe from harm through the practices of abundance, love, joy, and welcoming each other as whole people is deeply rooted in the cultural practices of many Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color who find ways to survive in the United States. The impact of harm we are reducing results from the long-term impact of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, and structural violence.

Where Does Liberatory Harm Reduction Come From?

Liberatory Harm Reduction focuses on transforming the root causes of oppression that cause the actual risk for illness, death, and incarceration.

In the United States, the story of the evolution of harm reduction predates the AIDS crisis. Parts of Liberatory Harm Reduction came through Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and activists like Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Trans Women of Color who were sex workers and street based and who created shared housing, syringe exchanges, and sex work safety information. Liberatory Harm Reduction came through the Black Panthers creating free breakfast programs to feed and nourish a revolution, and from the Young Lords taking over Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to demand—and ultimately create—community-accessible drug-treatment programs. It comes from underground abortion providers, Indigenous resistance fighters, and AIDS activists.

Liberatory Harm Reduction came to be because people in the sex trade, people of color, queer people, and transgender, gender-nonconforming, and two spirit people, people with disabilities, those who were houseless, and fat people saved our own lives. It is a collective story of Bad Date sheets passed between sex workers to warn each other of dangerous customers. It is the story of clean syringes, “liberated” from empathetic doctors’ offices and then passed between punks in squats in the East Village by women like Isabel Dawson and Kelly McGowan—early AIDS activists—who made sure that everyone had syringes and knew how to use them in 1983.

While it is difficult to say for certain when it all began because of the underground nature of syringe exchanges, Catlin Fullwood in Seattle and Women with a Vision both began Black and queer/lesbian harm-reduction projects led by people with life experience using drugs and in the sex trade in 1986.¹

Much of the mainstream harm-reduction movement that operates alongside public health has historically treated people in the sex trade as an afterthought. As though the most important intervention ever contributed to the field of harm reduction is syringe exchange and that sex workers, even those of us like me who also shot drugs, are not a central part of the creation of this life-affirming philosophy. The few books that are written about harm reduction barely touch on sex work and focus entirely on drug use. People in the sex trade and sex work and survivors of all kinds are the breath of Liberatory Harm Reduction because, as uncomfortable as this sounds to many, as people with life experience in the sex trade and sex work, we place the importance of relationships and care work as a core practice in everything that we do. Liberatory Harm Reduction hinges on the depth of relationships we have with each other.

Fuck Your Healthy. Fuck Your Wellness.

The idea of wellness, especially individual, consumer practices of self-care (like massages), is often confused with healing justice. Healing justice is inherently anti-capitalist. Full disclosure, I was among many activists and organizers who are partially responsible for how wellness became something that you buy at a Walgreens. Like most poorly thought-out shitty strategies, this particular moment in conversations about wellness started out with good intentions.³

In the 1990s, Liberatory Harm Reductionists and radical healers began to use the word wellness as a response to the use of the word healthy. Everywhere we went there was the looming judgment of “healthy choices,” “healthy food,” or “healthy habits.” While the word health was predetermined, you had to be born with it or buy it; the word wellness felt broader at the time. We put it on zines and names of activist projects, and generally plastered the word wellness everywhere we could as a pushback on the MIC’s view of health and to challenge healthism.⁴

Healthism stands in contrast to both healing justice and Liberatory Harm Reduction, which are grounded not only in ideas of collective care but also in the thinking that physical and mental health cannot be “achieved” and does not have a singular destination or representation. Healthism is inherently ableist, not survivor led, nor does it try to understand how generational, individual/collective trauma impacts our collective bodies and lives. Harm reduction and healing justice counter healthism because they embrace what Glenn Marla, radical activist and art therapist, says perfectly: “There is no wrong way to have a body.”

Pushing back on the overwhelming healthism that is embedded in concepts of healing is too little discussed among both mainstream harm-reduction and healing justice practitioners alike. Healers, activists, and practitioners of all kinds are equally flummoxed by the multitude of creative ways that we, as survivors, queer and transgender people, people with disabilities, drug users and sex workers, are living in our bodies on our own terms. We—drug users, sex workers, queer and transgender people—have long demanded body autonomy, and we will not stop until we have reclaimed the right to be in our bodies and make decisions for ourselves—at all times.

The Intersections of Harm Reduction and Healing Justice

Healing justice is rooted in the philosophy of Liberatory Harm Reduction. The lifeblood of each is self-determination, the belief that healing and growth happen best inside long-term relationships, and the right for people to choose how and when they engage the allopathic medical model. They both demand that healers and health care providers fight systems of power, like the medical industrial complex, prison industrial complex, and carceral social work. These systems form a dangerous web that interrupts our ability to get care on our own terms.

Healing justice and Liberatory Harm Reduction are inextricably tied up together because they are both about the active strategies that people use to collectively heal and push back on the medical model/industrial complex. The MIC tells people that the only way to have an acceptable body is to be nonsick, nondisabled, nonfat, and non–drug using. The MIC tells us that we cannot have a normative body if we use it to make money via selling sex or use our bodies to regulate our trauma via self-harm. We cannot have acceptable bodies if we decide to not take our psychiatric medication, accept (or struggle with) our eating disorders, or if we hesitate to buy whatever supplement or prescription we are told to without being called “noncompliant,” in “denial,” or “resistant to care.”

Liberatory Harm Reduction and healing justice both are largely ignored by activists and popular thinkers because it is uncomfortable. Both require doctors, social workers, legislative policymakers, healers, and organizers to make room for the fact that their ideas of bodies, safety, and health leaves out enormous swaths of our communities. It requires us to make room for the reality of what it means to show up in our bodies exactly as we are without anyone asking us to leave, change, or conform. At this point, ideas of health, wellness, and self-care, which may have been ideas that initially existed outside the MIC, are now so intertwined with capitalism that they have become lost to those of us who are committed to dismantling the medical industrial complex and disconnect it from carceral thinking and systems.

Empowerment means being in control of your choices—it means self-determination and body autonomy—regardless of whether those choices make healers uncomfortable.² For healing justice strategy to live into its full intention, it must be able to hold me as a complicated person, as someone who wants to feel better and yet does not want to be cured, as someone who wants to be whole and yet cannot be forced to be “embodied,” as someone who wants to stay alive and may make choices you think are dangerous. Drug users, people in the sex trade and street economy, sex workers, those of us who self-injure, survive violent homes and relationships—we deserve strategies that value us. The ability to make change in our own lives and make change in the communities we live in—that is our power.

Notes

¹ The first syringe distribution venture is often attributed to Jon Stuen-Parker in 1983, a heroin user and medical student at Yale. However, my own QTBIPOC lineage puts him among many other radical activists who were operating clandestine projects all over the country in the early 1980s.

² It is critical to mention that harm reduction does not mean that harming others is okay. Empowerment does not mean power over or taking power away from others through violence or coercion.

³ Dr. Laura Janine Mintz, MD, PhD notes: “the history of the word began around the 1940s and the concept of a wellness spa is way older—most prominently here in the US with John Harvey Kellogg in the early twentieth century, and with the earlier natural healing ideas internationally for . . . forever. The wellness/natural living concept also has a huge history in the right-wing world as in ‘be a natural nordic nazi, etc.’ I don’t think you can talk about wellness as an emerging capitalist project without mentioning all of the ‘wellness’ influencer shit, which is deeply entangled with the racist nonsense of ‘purity’ and ‘naturalness.’”

⁴ Healthism is the idea that there is one ideal, able body and that body has certain test scores that account for everything from cholesterol to IQ to levels of physical activity. From “ideal body weight” and fatphobia to ideas about sobriety and medication adherence, healthism permeates the social service field and is the foundation for the entire allopathic medical system. Robert Crawford’s 1980 article defines healthism as a “preoccupation with personal health as a primary—often the primary—focus for the definition and achievement of well-being.”

A House Is a Temple:
How Dance Music Culture Became a Refuge in the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

Kenyon Farrow

When people think about house music or electronic music clubs, we usually joke about glow sticks, weird dancers with whistles, and drug use—like ecstasy or ketamine (aka Special K). Or drinking and sometimes sex. The American idea of dance club culture is very much shaped by the disco era and images of NYC’s Studio 54 as the epitome of decadence and debauchery. And as a result, dance club spaces are often also highly policed and criminalized, and therefore undervalued for the role they play in people’s lives.

They’re not just places of fantasy, glamour, consumption, and escape (all of which are totally acceptable forms of human expression and healing). It’s not just thumping drum loops and synthesized, repetitive tinny noises. House music DJs aren’t just playing one record after another; their mixing creates a full experience, a journey through sound that picks up the clubgoers, and takes them along for the ride. The music is not just (mostly Black) singers with gospel chops shouting and squalling the same phrases over and over. All of these things are happening, but taken together, house music parties and clubs are also sacred, quasi-religious spaces that can provide a space for emotional and spiritual release. A place where care, love, and connection happens. And house music spaces, and bars and clubs writ-large, were very important to the lives of Black queer communities in many cities living through, dying of, or impacted by HIV/AIDS in the first two decades of the epidemic.

When I was twenty-one years old in the summer and fall of 1996, I spent a semester interning for an off-Broadway theater company in the East Village in New York City. It was the summer just after club kid Michael Alig murdered Angel Melendez, and then NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ramped up his crackdown on the dance clubs in New York. I remember picking up HX Magazine, a weekly gay nightlife publication that listed many of the LGBT parties and dance clubs in NYC. I spent quite a bit of my stipend money going to the different house music clubs and quickly got bored with some of the more white gay dance spaces like The Roxy and Twilo, which I found pretty soulless. But when I found parties like Milk, U+Me (at the Octagon), Sound Factory Bar, and Shelter, I found an entirely different kind of house music space.

Most people think about house music spaces as the biggest, most elaborate, and expensive clubs in big cities, or circuit parties with hundreds of shirtless, muscled, white gay clones. I’m not talking about those spaces, which oftentimes had exclusive (and oftentimes racist and classist) door policies that kept people out with the infamous velvet rope. But there were a lot of more egalitarian spaces, and in some cases intentionally organized to be relatively low-cost alternatives—a space to dance for people from all walks of life—and many of the clubs that had a core Black queer following tended to be in that category.

Househeads (as we often call ourselves), treat the space with reverence. We carefully plan how to dress for the occasion—making sure to be fly but comfortable with baggier clothes, shoes you can move in and won’t hurt after dancing for hours. Unless the DJ is spinning one of your favorite tracks when you arrive, you may come through the doors of the venue only to wait on the sidelines for a while, feeling out the DJ’s set, the crowd, the dancers, where there are open, less-crowded spaces on the dance floor. It’s almost a ritual, getting into a meditative spiritual space. Some folks bring talcum powder, and when they find an open space on the floor, they will sprinkle the powder like a shaman, a priestess, very carefully and deliberately so that you can slide and move easily as you dance. Other people may sometimes also slide their shoes along the powdered part of the floor so that wherever they go in the club, they’ll have a little less friction when they dance. Adding to the ritual, some people bring whistles and percussion instruments like tambourines or drums to add additional layers of sound to the DJ’s offering.

And then there’s the dancing itself. Much like other forms of Black folk dance traditions (voguing, hip-hop, capoeira) there’s definitely a dance vocabulary of several standard moves in house music. There are the circles of dancers that get spontaneously created, where dancers enter and exit the circle, usually one or two at a time, to take that dance vocabulary to exhibit proficiency in that language, only to improvise on it, bringing in other dance elements to make it your own. There’s both friendly competition and comradery. As you are watching the movement of a dancer who may be a friend or someone you happen to lock eyes with seconds before, you’re feeling each other, you are moving in unison; sometimes you break off and let that person demonstrate their skill and then you play off of that. Regular attendees of house music parties may “know” one another in that space, always dance together, hug and talk, but may never know each other’s first name, and never see one another outside of that space. But the connection and affection is no less real or important.

The feeling of being in a house music space can be powerful. I have myself and have seen others behave in a similar manner to being “mounted” by a spirit. Like catching the Holy Ghost or being mounted in the West African orisha tradition. The rhythms of the music, the other dancers, the vocal messages of the songs all create a powerful space where you feel like you’ve become so fully present in your body and spirit you lose your sense of self and feel completely one with everything around you.

There’s the music, which itself often has love, community, connection, and self-empowerment as the core themes representative of the house music genre. The repetition of beats and rhythms, of jazzy instrumental riffs, and gospel-tinged vocals provide the backdrop of how this community creates a context of love, care, spiritual renewal, and healing. And during the height of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s through the 1990s, it’s hard not to look at some of the most popular house music songs as about creating a place to grieve, celebrate—a place to feel renewed.

Songs like “Keep Pushin’,” the 1995 release from Boris Dlugosch and Inaya Day, where Day sings, “Keep pushing on, things are gonna get better / It won’t take long, keep on pushing to the top.” There’s also the 1996 track “Inspiration” by Kerri Chandler (the DJ and producer) and vocalist Arnold Jarvis, where the lyrics offer, “You’re an inspiration to me / Let’s celebrate life in the name of those not living.” I have seen people break down in tears in clubs when songs like this play. I have broken down in tears too. These songs were being released and played in a moment where people knew they were likely going to die from AIDS. Or many Black queer people and folks in our community as allies had just lost so many people and had lost so much. Sometimes these songs played at house music parties that were dedicated as fundraisers for DJs, regular partygoers, drag queens, and other folks who were broke because they could no longer work, as they were suffering from late-stage HIV illnesses or families or lovers had abandoned them in their fear and ignorance.

When people died, these spaces sometimes held parties that were memorials to the departed. To this day, Shelter in NYC hosts an annual party that is just for attendees to remember those that have died. Far from being just spaces of vacuous drug use and mindless music, house music spaces were and are still very powerful locations of emotional and spiritual care for people who found little else in the world to uplift and celebrate them without reservation or condition. There’s an entire subgenre of house music called gospel house or inspirational house, which are songs written in the Black American gospel tradition (even if they’re not specifically Christian-themed), or sometimes using Indigenous African religious songs and chants on top of house music beats. For some people who were unable to be embraced by their church or religious traditions for being queer, house music spaces could and did provide a source of spiritual connection for people who needed and desired it.

For the past thirty years, house music spaces were created by Black gay men, lesbians, transgender folks in order to care for one another, but these spaces also created an entire cultural movement that became just as global and influential as hip-hop but is rarely ever given that kind of attention.¹ Many of my Gen X Black gay friends really resent the changes to the Black LGBT clubs and bars that happened when hip-hop became the more dominant music played in our clubs, which they see as having helped entrench stereotypical gender roles and celebrating problematic forms of masculinity and a certain level of cynicism over the more hopeful vibes of most house music. Whether or not hip-hop can be blamed for that, the reduction in the number of Black LGBTQ bars and clubs that play house music has been profound.

But house music spaces represent some of the most important parts of what an infrastructure of care can look like. When we think of how people were cared for in the history of the AIDS pandemic in the United States, you tend to think of the images of gay men wasting away in hospitals, cared for by the very small number of doctors and nurses, orderlies and attendants who dared touch people with HIV. Or you think of the images of lovers and groups of friends taking care of one another in the midst of a scourge that some thought was God’s punishment for being queer, a sex worker, drug user, or just generally sexually promiscuous, or all of the above. Sometimes we also think of the HIV ministries that a small number of churches established, mostly women who, despite homophobic religious doctrine, decided to not let the congregation members or the members of their families and communities just die in anguish and shame.

To be sure, political activism of the early era of the AIDS epidemic was a form of care. The work by groups like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), created networks of activists who, while sometimes at odds, did also become communities in themselves that provided networks to care for people living with HIV. While activist groups were forcing the federal government to create resources for AIDS research, they also invented the concept of “safe sex,” which became a worldwide slogan and paradigm shift, and created federal systems of prevention, treatment, and care while making researchers, public health officials, and practicing medical providers actually listen to people who are living with an illness to inform their work. Gay Men of African Descent, which was founded one year before ACT-UP, was an organization that did political organizing and created networks of care and support for people living with HIV and dying from AIDS, as well as formed a writing collective, Other Countries, which helped produce some of the finest Black gay poets, essayists, and novelists of a generation, and still exists today. Outside of New York, other organizations like SisterLove (Atlanta, Georgia), Us Helping Us (Washington, DC), and Women with a Vision (New Orleans, Louisiana) all formed in those early years of the epidemic to provide life-saving and life-affirming services for those communities most impacted (but the least invested in) by HIV.

But outside of what we think of as political activism, and the literal handful of doctors, nurses, and faith-based efforts to take care of people suffering, the role of house music spaces cannot be overestimated. House music fans and artists raised money for HIV-related causes. Many house music artists (the trio Dee-Lite being the most famous) launched campaigns against nightclubs that had exclusionary door policies, which were often racist and elitist, keeping many Black and poor people out. DJs and promoters built and threw successful parties in spaces with low or no cover charge and no racist gatekeeping by door security.

This kind of insistence on participating in the work to save lives ruined by the AIDS pandemic by providing a space for people to celebrate, mourn, and commune with others while usually hearing pretty positive and uplifting music really matters. Care can happen within the context of medicine and public health—and that is crucial to our health and survival. But networks of friends, family, and loved ones taking care of one another was and is an indispensable part of the survival of the Black queer community through the HIV epidemic, then and now.

A club can be a temple, a place of refuge, a home, for all who enter.

Note

¹ BET, for instance, has both the BET Awards and the BET Hip-Hop Awards, but house music artists are rarely given a platform or honored, even when they have huge mainstream success.

Movement Practice
Playlist

You are invited to move, dance, and feel taken by the Spirit of House.

“Keep Pushin’” (1995) by Boris Dlugosch and Inaya Day

“Inspiration” (1996) by Kerri Chandler (the DJ and producer) and vocalist Arnold Jarvis

“Sometimes” (1997) by the Brand New Heavies

“Fly Away (Butterfly Reprise)” (1997) by Mariah Carey

“Sing It Back” (Single) (1998) by MOLOKO

“It’s Alright, I Feel It,” featuring Jocelyn Brown (1997) by Nuyorican Soul

“Red Alert,” Jaxx Club Mix (1999) by Basement Jaxx

“Feeling for You” (1999) by Cassius

“Everybody Everybody” (1990) by Black Box

“Back to Life (However Do You Want Me?),” featuring Caron Wheeler (Masters at Work House Remix). Original by Soul II Soul (1995)

Origins of Healing Justice

Photograph by Margarita Corporan. Visual description: A black-and-white photo taken of a lookout building at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County, Maryland, seen at a distance. The building has a wide and tall opening without a door; the opposing interior wall has several window openings to see the water. The image also captures the wooden panels and handrails that create a path leading up to the building, surrounded by long grass, a pair of thin trees at the path’s opening, and endless, open, wispy skies.

The Current That Carried Us

Eesha Pandit

Movements for social justice are rivers.

They shape and are shaped by the environment. Sediment moves. Stones are smoothed. Dams are built to slow and harness their power; sometimes they crack. Sometimes they run through lush riverbanks. They swell. Then, sometimes, they dry. They traverse mountains. They carry life from one place to another.

Movements are rivers, but what constitutes the energy and momentum that these rivers need? The healing justice framework serves as a powerful current within the movements for racial justice, reproductive justice, disability justice, queer and trans liberation, and environmental justice. These movements are propelled by this current. They are shaped by the conditions that created it.

In this chapter, I will draw attention to a few (of the many) political forces that helped create the conditions for the healing justice framework to emerge. They are based on my vantage point as someone working in the reproductive justice movement starting in the early 2000s and with a particular focus on policy and politics. My goal is to contextualize healing justice inside the political moment that gave rise to the framework, as one might contextualize a force of nature. What are the conditions which shaped it, and what should we know about its origins and deltas?

Focused on the first decade of the century, I will pay particular attention to the rise of the religious right into mainstream politics via the George W. Bush administration, the precipitous rise of the carceral state, and ultimately the politics of bodily autonomy in order to draw some connections between these three forces and how they latched on to the state structures that were never intended to center our health nor promote our interdependence and collective well-being.

While the forces that stoke the politics of resentment, punishment, and backlash consider access to rights, health care and dignity a zero-sum matter, our movement responses swell and grow. The healing justice framework is not merely a response to these forces, it is a reconfiguration of how we understand what it means to be in collectivity, and accountable to generational structural harm.

We look back to look forward.

When he ran for president, George W. Bush did not run on an agenda to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, he advocated a “reverence for life” to avoid alienating moderates. This was a performance, perhaps one to entice some moderate democrats to vote for him.

On his first business day in office, which was also the twenty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, he reinstated the Global Gag Rule in 2001. This policy restricted foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive USAID family-planning funds from using their own non-US funds to provide legal abortion services, lobby their own governments for abortion law reform, or even provide accurate medical counseling or referrals regarding abortion.

As early as the first day, and certainly by the end of his first term, it became clear that the administration was committed to eviscerating any protections for access to abortion both here in the US and abroad. The criminalization of reproductive autonomy, from abortion to home birth, are hallmarks of this decade.

During these years abstinence programs became far more prominent and support for contraceptive programs decreased. During Bush’s first term, the focus was on criminalizing “partial birth” abortion (a misnomer deployed to great effect). In the second term, he focused on the Supreme Court and continued support for a national effort to pass restrictions on abortion at the state and federal levels. Building on the punitive policies before the first Bush era and subsequent Clinton administrations—including the exploitation of the crack epidemic, welfare reform, and the start of the drug war—the Bush administration pushed for intertwining the War on Drugs with their opposition of reproductive freedom, stigmatizing and vilifying substance-using mothers, particularly those who were Black and Brown.

The Bush administration sent delegations to international conferences full of representatives of the religious right who fought to roll back long-standing agreements and approved language on reproductive health care. They threatened to cut assistance to countries that refused to comply with these rollbacks. They withdrew funding from groups providing basic care that could have saved the lives of millions of women. For just one example, the Reproductive Health for Refugees Consortium lost millions of dollars in US funding for its work to prevent gender-based violence and to provide emergency obstetric care, HIV/AIDS prevention services, and emergency contraception in refugee settings.

In 2003, the administration established the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)—a five-year, $15 billion initiative to fight HIV/AIDS in fifteen of the most affected countries. They compelled the promotion of abstinence-until-marriage policies for young people around the world. They required that any organization who received money to work with people who have HIV/AIDS must adopt an organization-wide policy that explicitly opposed sex work. Failure to endorse their “anti-prostitution pledge” would mean that health care workers who were fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS could lose all funding and be forced to abandon their life-saving programs. In response to this criminalization and stigmatization of sex workers, community-led strategies emerged, as they always do. Organizations like the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (2002) and Different Avenues (2001), both founded by activists who had been working on these issues since the 1990s, anchored the fight for community-safety strategies for reducing harm and centering the survival of sex workers despite these legislative odds.

Over eight years, the administration granted unprecedented access to the religious right, who leveraged this access in a crusade against reproductive justice and queer and trans liberation. When the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, the GOP leveraged their base to take their fight to the states. They unleashed a state-by-state strategy to propose legislation banning same-sex marriage and whipped their base into a homophobic fervor all over the country.¹ The so-called family values at the heart of this crusade centered individual responsibility over mutual aid and considered sexual expression immoral and deserving of punishment. Unfortunately, wealthy white LGBTQ donors and philanthropists moved all of their funding to gay marriage, while grassroots organizers centering racial, disability, gender, economic, and trans justice were underfunded for organizing strategies to intervene on poverty, policing, and massive criminalization of our communities that were increasing astronomically.²

As these major forces of war and violence and control shaped the terrain over which our rivers flowed, and as they constructed dams in our path, our movements fought back. A Women of Color/People of Color feminist intervention, which had begun in the 1970s, deepened its roots into the twenty-first century. We resisted, and in our resistance, created alternatives. There were hundreds of antichoice bills proposed and passed in this decade. We responded by creating vast webs of mutual aid in the form of abortion funds throughout the country. There was dangerous conflation between human trafficking and sex work, inflated by a religious savior complex and enabled through actively ignoring the criminalization of those very bodies it purported to protect. In 2000, President Clinton signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), which only contributed to this conflation. We fought for the decriminalization of sex work, and the decriminalization of drugs, knowing that what makes something a crime is never the action itself, but based on who is taking the action. Wealthy white drug users were not incarcerated at the rates of poor Black and Brown communities, for just one example. This was never about safety; it was about control, the religious right, and liberal mainstream white feminism.

In this decade our bodies were more policed, imprisoned, and surveilled. But through this, new frameworks emerged as our currents.

Alongside the attack on reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, this decade brought the expansion of the carceral state. The twentieth-century average was that about one hundred per one hundred thousand residents of the US were being imprisoned. Despite being high for so-called liberal democracies, this was merely the beginning of a dramatic and precipitous rise in incarceration in the US. By the end of 2000, nearly five hundred residents of the United States were in prison for every one hundred thousand free persons.³

These increasing numbers were also a result of laws like the 1994 crime bill, which used taxpayer funds to build prison after prison. More prisons needed more people to fill them. Harsh sentencing laws, such as mandatory minimums, kept many people convicted of drug offenses in prison for longer periods of time. By 2004, the average sentence had increased almost threefold, with people expected to serve sixty-two months in prison.

After September 11, 2001, the number of amorphous wars were increased with the “war on terror” joining the ranks of the interminable wars on drugs and crime. The power of creating wars on concepts, rather than groups of people is that the war machine raged on and adapted in perpetuity. Never-ending wars are the grist for global militarized capitalism, constantly churning. The increase in Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and vitriol against anti-war protestors was bolstered by laws like the Patriot Act, which granted access to surveillance at unprecedented levels in the name of national security—which condoned organizational sweeps within our social justice movements and increased our risk of being targeted as terrorists. Programs targeting Muslim Americans often confused belief with behavior and launched government-sponsored programs ostensibly to “counter violent extremism,” which were expanded over time to target those critical of the US and human rights abuses abroad; those critical of foreign policy, like the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement for the Liberation of Palestine; or Black activists fighting for an end to police brutality. Movements touting abolitionist, anti-Zionist frames were quickly targeted and surveilled, while, notably, the same deployment tactics were not used to target the slow rise of white supremacist violence beginning in the early 2000s, similar to the rise we have seen in the form of gun massacres and violence, rising to a fever pitch throughout the Trump years (2016–2020).

The rise in incarceration in this decade is, of course, aligned with the regressive gender policies that the administration was advancing in the US and around the world. In the weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration mobilized a set of contrasting gender images to define the situation as an attack on American ideals of freedom and democracy that required a global response, a “war on terror.” Those ideals included gender justice, creating an argument riddled with irony and hypocrisy. News showed images of Afghani women clad head to toe in shapeless burqas, even their eyes hidden by a veil—a symbol of women’s oppression and invisibility that belies a fanatical, fundamentalist portrayal of all Islam. As First Lady Laura Bush put it in a presidential radio address in November 2001, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

This surprising embrace of such warped white feminism on the part of the Bush administration, particularly as they worked day and night to eviscerate reproductive rights and target communities of color and queer and trans people, exposed the internalized superiority and paternalism that has justified US imperial interventions for hundreds of years and continues.

Movements are rivers. Our frameworks are the currents that move those rivers.

There is no such thing as zero-sum when it comes to healing. In fact, the physics of healing requires an attention to interdependency. As we have seen recently exposed by the devastating response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, our wellness and safety are inextricable from our ability to care for our most vulnerable. In addition to the generative work of creating new structures outside the state, the healing justice framework is rooted in politics of dismantling that which is no longer serving us. The framework pushes us to ask: What do we need to untether from racist, classist, sexist, ableist notions of what is healthy, and what creates healthy societies?

Our frameworks move rivers. They create the currents that break down dams. They change laws and policies too. They shape and are shaped by the environment. Sediment moves. Stones are smoothed.

They swell. Then, sometimes, they dry. They traverse mountains.

Rivers seek the sea. We seek the sea.

Notes

¹ James Dao, “Same-Sex Marriage Issue Key to Some G.O.P. Races,” New York Times, November 4, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/politics/campaign/samesex-marriage-issue-key-to-some-gop-races.html.

² Lisa Dettmer, “Beyond Gay Marriage,” Weaving the Threads 17, no. 2 (Fall 2010), www.reimaginerpe.org/book/export/html/5822.

³ Allan J. Beck, Jennifer C. Karberg, and Paige M. Harrison, “Prison Inmates at Midyear 2001,” U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. April 2002. 1–16. NCJ 191702.

Spiritual Conditions:
Mapping the Origins of Healing Justice

Cara Page

Sometimes you can’t turn away from what calls you

turning you around and around

until you see it and you remain unflinched.

Ancestors pushing you forward.

Some paths never escape what must be done.

This needed to happen

on the red clay of Georgia

in the roots of the South.

Fire in the Belly

In the early to mid-2000s the sweltering of uprisings on all fronts of struggle, both nationally and regionally, brought an immense moment of power and exhaustion for Southern Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and Queer/Trans communities. Many Southern organizers were tired, a bone tired from the hustle and grind of organizing against conservative backlash, heightened racism and xenophobia, and a rise in the right wing particular to the South. Organizers were having breakdowns—or as I like to call them, breakthroughs—from immense collective burnout and grief. While some of us were being asked to take breaks or medical leaves to refresh until we were feeling “whole” again—which presumably led to ableist ideas of what it meant to integrate organizing work while living with chronic illness, anxiety, stress, burnout, or other mental, physical, and emotional disabilities. Internally our organizations were combusting from long, unsustainable work hours, abusive power dynamics locking up movement spaces, and little time or value for reflecting or grieving the loss of campaigns and freedom fighters to police, detention centers/prisons, and deportation.

A burnout work culture was having an immense impact on our collective emotional, physical, psychic, and spiritual well-being inside of movements, but it was often relegated to individual experiences and isolated incidents, not a generational phenomenon of trauma. This was taking a toll on movements everywhere and was inextricably connected to increased conflict. It was clear that we had unresolved grief and pain within organizations and movements because we also didn’t have the tools and practices to hold it or each other. We didn’t know how to replenish ourselves while keeping up the fight, but we also didn’t pay attention to the stress and trauma we were all experiencing from structural oppression throughout our lives. During this time, I was being asked to hold healing sessions and conflict circles, but they were often one-off retreats without any ability to deepen practice for the long haul. I often did them but always said this will not be enough. This led me to ask the question, “How have Queer, Trans, People of Color, and Indigenous movement organizers in the South held loss and grief from collective trauma in our lives and movements?”

A Collective Breath . . .

In 2004–2005 I began to ask elders in the South from the Black Power movement and the civil rights movement—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Black feminist movement leaders—about how they held loss, pain, and grief in past moments. They often mentioned they didn’t have time to heal; they would just need to keep moving and take it in stride. They would name spiritual and faith-based practices or cultural traditions of gathering to sing civil rights movement songs as a salve on open wounds of loss and grief. Other practices were rooted in Black radical traditions, including John O’Neal’s Story Circles,¹ to hold organizers through story in the tradition of building power and transformation. As a cultural worker and sound healer, I thought about how much the work of Southern BIPOC/QTPOC and Two Spirit artists and cultural workers is often to heal wounds of genocide, slavery, and violence.

I crossed paths with phenomenal cultural practitioners rooted in the South and Black, Indigenous, and immigrant liberatory creative traditions from prominent organizations such as Alternate Roots, Project South, Spirit House, Southerners on New Ground, Junebug Productions, and the Highlander Center. I had the honor to witness such powerful artists holding the work of healing and transformation within our Southern movements, including Ebony Noelle Golden, Carolyn Morris, Wendi Moore-O’Neal, Carlton Turner, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mama Nayo Watkins, and Tufara Muhammad to name only a few in a huge constellation of Southern BIPOC creative liberatory practices wrestling with healing at the center of our work. This shaped my understanding of not only the role of energy-, earth-, body-, and ancestral-based traditions but the role of cultural creatives holding the evolution of healing strategies and traditions at the crossroads of the twenty-first-century Southern social justice movements. But I wanted to deepen how we use healing in our movement spaces beyond just to cleanse the room or build a sacred space in meetings—though important, I wanted to know how we could explore the role of healing as a long-term political strategy.

Interrupting Trauma

I believe our people have always known the ways trauma is transmitted across generations, from cell to cell and bloodline to bloodline. I want to give pause here and explain this because the newer field of epigenetics has overshadowed decades of cultural and spiritual work by People of Color and Indigenous practitioners who have told stories for centuries about the transmission of trauma being passed down by generations through psychic and cellular memory.² So it feels critical to reclaim our spiritual and cultural understanding of generational trauma as BIPOC communities; as survivors of slavery, war, and colonization long before the concept of epigenetics. In my reclamation I was wrestling with the questions: what could we understand about trauma and the generations of healing and resistance that has transformed our trauma? How can we imagine our futures if we don’t reconcile our traumas from generations? All of my previous studies had been as a survivor of family violence and looking at trauma as very individualized, not as collective, so I began to search for People of Color, feminist, and Indigenous knowledge on collective trauma rooted in historical legacies of slavery, genocide, colonization, forced migration, and structural oppression. Seminal books written by Black and Women of Color scholars would deeply impact and shape my understanding of generational trauma’s imprint on the past, present, and our futures.

These scholars include Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up Cities Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What Can We Do About It (2004), which gives a powerful critique of the long-term impact of modern urban development in America in the late 1940s. Dr. Fullilove reveals how the massive displacement of Black communities attempts to rip out the foundation of cultural survival for Black and People of Color communities. Dr. Joy DeGruy, who wrote Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (2005), reckons with the long-term generational trauma from slavery to today. Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2006), speaks to the specter of gynecologist J. Marion Sims and reveals the truth of horrific experimentation on formerly enslaved African women as the root of contemporary abuses in reproductive health for Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color. Aurora Levins Morales’s book, Kindling: Writings on the Body (2013) is a groundbreaking testimonial of her journey as a Puerto Rican writer/historian and disability justice organizer navigating the US medical industrial complex and choosing self-determined care in Cuba. Or the quintessential Killing the Black Body (1997), by Dorothy Roberts, which explores the sociopolitical history of government institutions using archaic concepts of eugenics and population control to create a social welfare system invested in killing Black communities, especially Black women so they will not reproduce more generations. These were some of the textured quilt of works I was reading to weave a narrative of generational trauma from the viewpoint of communities of color.

I learned about historical trauma through the stories of trauma and resilience of Indigenous communities—as survivors of mass genocide and attempted erasure of cultural traditions. While I was touring with SisterFire: INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Arts Tour, I was introduced to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition,³ which was doing generational healing work with Indigenous survivors and descendants of boarding schools. Boarding schools were used as a violent colonization tactic to remove Indigenous children from their homes and community networks in an attempt to systematically wipe out tribal nations’ cultural traditions, language, and memory. Their work was so impactful and led me to go deeper into studying historical trauma and the work of Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart.⁴

An impactful voice to the field of trauma, Dr. Brave Heart conceptualized historical trauma in the 1980s while exploring the generational impacts of genocide—specifically cultural genocide through strategies such as boarding schools—on Indigenous people. Historical trauma refers to the “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations.”⁵ Dr. Brave Heart states:

Children of massacre survivors, children of boarding school survivors, pass on the trauma to their descendants, in order for healing to begin, it is critical that we concentrate on healing the next seven generations. It’s important that we incorporate our ceremonies in the healing process as well as develop Native research on historical trauma and its interventions. Our historical trauma, including individual current lifespan trauma, must be acknowledged and validated. Our purpose is to heal from the historical unresolved grief that many indigenous individuals and communities are struggling with. Historical unresolved grief is the grief that accompanies the trauma.⁶

Dr. Brave Heart’s transformational body of work speaks to healing historical trauma as also needing to understand the historical trauma response, which includes historical grief and ancestral suffering.

All of this scholarship makes invaluable connections between slavery, genocide, war, colonization, mass incarceration and cycles of family violence, depression, substance use, and suicide for our communities that I had never seen before and critically shaped the roots and strategies of healing justice. That not only should we create, re-create, and remember our traditions of collective healing as liberatory practices, but we also should understand the implicit and explicit role of the medical industrial complex as a site of harm, colonization, slavery, and historical trauma.

Community-Led Interventions on Generational Trauma

I often talk about the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective as having the audacity to talk about healing from trauma outside of a state, therapeutic, or academic lens. After all, social work, psychology, and psychiatry monopolize the scholarship of trauma but are often rooted in the same eugenic, racist, and ableist science framing. The medical industrial complex does not listen to the communities experiencing the trauma themselves. So I looked and studied groups moving community-led practices that held the discipline and rigor to intervene in generational trauma without perpetuating racist, ableist ideas of healing and finding a cure. I built relationships with formations of people seeking to transform generational trauma collectively, including the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, a peer-based organizing project in Chicago led by and for young People of Color who had current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies (to know more about them read the chapter “We Move in Relationship: Sites of Practice in the Midwest”); Generation FIVE, Communities Against Rape and Abuse and the Boarding School Healing Project previously mentioned; and Casa de Salud in New Mexico (also highlighted in the chapter “Generational Memories of Care: Sites of Practice in New Mexico”). I sat in practice with spiritual practitioners Shash Yazhi Charley (Lead and Founder of Eagle Evolution Consulting) in his practice of healing circles; cultural icon, John O’Neal (who is now an ancestor) in his practice of story circles; and Sins Invalid, a tour de force ensemble of disabled artists and cultural workers debunking the roots of ableism and eugenics while uplifting eroticism and bodily autonomy in political performance.

Deeply intertwined with all of these sites of practice were the political frameworks of abolition, environmental justice, disability justice, transformative justice, harm reduction, and reproductive justice. They were counterresponses to state-run programs that were often punitive and curative models, or that were hyperindividualized without any engagement of chosen or blood family or communal support. Most importantly, never taking into account that in state responses rooted in carceral strategies, our people are never safe. We will always be surveilled, policed, or even worse, dependent on the state for our own healing. We needed a new vision and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita would be monumental in revealing the necessity for community-led political strategies for collective care and safety in the South.

After the Storm

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, and one month later, Hurricane Rita landed on September 24 between the Texas and Louisiana border; both causing catastrophic damage. After the hurricanes, organizers across the Southeast were preparing for the inevitable as community organizers and family arrived seeking shelter. Some people came with only what they were wearing on their backs, fleeing not the storm, but the aftermath of state violence that ensued. Between the National Guard shooting at people and the cops taking over homes, it was a frenzy of emotion as the whole country witnessed the violence used to control Black, migrant, and Indigenous communities along the Gulf Coast. Hearing about the appalling conditions in the New Orleans Superdome and watching the state commit live lynchings of Black people on national TV was enraging. As survivors from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast arrived to take refuge throughout the region, we saw the level of grief and trauma on their faces and realized this would take a toll on our families and movements far and wide. No one could have prepared Black, Indigenous, People of Color, elders, im/migrant, disabled, Queer and Trans communities for how the state would systematically take over communities and neighborhoods with brute force.

The physical and emotional damage was devastating, but we knew the communities of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were powerfully resilient. During this time I noticed a national focus on post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS) through media. What emerged from this was a national conversation on trauma from natural disasters, one that I had never heard or seen outside of a global war context. The media was rushing to ask experts about PTSS experienced by survivors of natural disasters, and I noticed Black youth and organizers I had been working with start to use this term in response to how they were feeling. It also opened the floodgates to a regional (and national) conversation on collective trauma from state violence, which was not isolated from but very much rooted in a generational response to racism, militarization, and war on our people in the US and Global South.

Some of the elders I had spoken to about grieving and building care strategies inside of movement and communities of color reached out and said they were witnessing a rise in depression or disconnection within themselves or with survivors of the storm that they hadn’t witnessed since the civil rights movement. This experience, overlayed with the media’s racist narrative and the US government’s blaming and shaming of BIPOC communities in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast for the aftermath of the storms, impacted many of us as we witnessed the chaos. Practitioners from outside the region parachuted in, including healers and therapists who had never been to the Southern Bible Belt nor understood the cultural nuances of the Gulf Coast and quickly retraumatized communities with their “saviorhood” mentality and assumptions. Healing outside of knowing context and place to bring one monolithic idea of healing are inadequate responses to the critical conditions of that place, because it is not rooted in the memory, power, or traditions of that place nor honors the resiliency of the people who have lived there for generations. These lessons became invaluable and foundational to the values of the healing justice framework and rooted us in the political and spiritual imperative of the work.

Notes

¹ “Story Circle Methodology,” Junebug Productions, accessed January 17, 2022, www.junebugproductions.org/story-circle.

² Martha Henriques, “Can the Legacy of Trauma Be Passed Down the Generations?,” March 26, 2019, BBC, www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics.

³ “About Us,” National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, n.d., accessed February 12, 2022, boardingschoolhealing.org.

⁴ “Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart,” Wikipedia, accessed February 13, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Yellow_Horse_Brave_Heart.

⁵ Nora Chavez, “Shouldering Grief: Validating Native American Historical Trauma,” New Mexico Cares Health Disparities Center, n.d., https://hsc.unm.edu/programs/nmcareshd/docs/story_heart.pdf.

⁶ Ibid.

Conjuring the Roots of Healing Justice in the Southeast

Tamika Middleton and Cara Page

Place.

Have you ever touched the red clay earth of Georgia?

Smelled the swelling of the riverbanks of the Chattahoochee River in Georgia or the Eno River of North Carolina after a deep rain?

Crossed Southern bridges with Indigenous ancestral names, and after white colonizers names like Lynches River, to mark stolen terrains?

Memory work is in these trees

and bloodlines,

fault lines right below the roots of trees that know secrets of this South

and the old South.

Our ancestors came by way of these rivers from Florida, to Georgia, to North and South Carolina

touched the same soil

and seeded

abolition and freedom.

This chapter is a love letter lifting up the legacies of healing traditions toward the next generation of Southern practitioners and healers who are holding the knowledge, intuition, and memory to understand collective care and safety in our blood, bones, and memory. More than our survival strategies, these are our roux and recipes for political liberation. We carry forth, like water from Southern rivers, the freedom fighters (healers in their own right), from Ella Baker to Harriet Tubman to Fannie Lou Hamer. Those who understand the fight for freedom must include our traditions for collective mental, physical, emotional, psychic, environmental, and spiritual well-being. To those of us who know that holding and transforming our trauma was and remains inseparable from our fight to resist colonization, slavery, prisons, and unending war.

The Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective answered the call and asked our elders—including Jerome Scott, Mary Anne Adams, Shafia Monroe, Sarahn Henderson, and those who have now become ancestors, including Ms. Mary Davis, Mama Nayo Watkins, and Charity Hicks—to remind us what is possible. In this chapter we gather key Southern voices from movement formations that hold and shape, weave and weft, the tools and traditions of healing as liberatory practices as old as the roots of Southern trees.

Southern Conditions: Legacies of Violence and Resistance

The South was built on a legacy of strong grassroots movements responding to and resisting conditions of violence and oppression. Organizing in the South is known for its lineage of movements such as the civil rights movement, labor organizing, and economic and environmental justice movements, which lay claim to the Black and Indigenous radical traditions of Southern organizing. Two such institutions are the Highlander Research and Education Center (1932) in New Market, Tennessee and the Penn Center (1862) on St. Helena Island in South Carolina, which are foundational to grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South. The Penn Center was the first school for formerly enslaved people in the South and has remained a Black educational and cultural institution for over 150 years, preserving the legacy of St. Helena Island’s Gullah community.

From the 1980s onward, there were newer political institutions that would become foundational to the twenty-first-century Southern movement political landscape through a feminist, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Two Spirit and Intersex+ (LGBTQTSI+) liberation lens, centering economic, gender, and racial justice. Some of them include the Women’s Project (1980) in Little Rock, Arkansas; the National Black Women’s Health Project (1984, now known as the Black Women’s Health Imperative), responding to health conditions and advocating for reproductive rights for African American women; SisterLove (1989) in Atlanta, Georgia, the first Black women–led HIV/AIDS organization in the US; Project South, “founded as the Institute to Eliminate Poverty & Genocide in 1986, rooted in the legacy of the Southern Freedom Movement to cultivate stronger social movements in the South to contend with social, economic and political injustice”;¹ Southerners on New Ground (SONG), founded in 1993, which continiues to build “a multiracial, multiclass, multigendered, cross-regional movement-building organization led for, by, and about LGBTQGNCI+ in the US Southeast”;² and SisterSong (1997), founded by sixteen Women of Color– and Indigenous-led organizations to create the seminal political framework and movement of reproductive justice.

These institutions and many others would go on to contribute to the changing political landscape of the twenty-first century for the Southern left and global progressive movements in the US. Together they would build movements toward abolition and collective power across class, gender, im/migrant and refugee communities, race/ethnicity, sexualities, abilities, and geographical regions to respond to, interrupt, and dismantle institutional oppression rooted in slavery and colonization.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, white supremacist violence was on the rise and activated our collective nervous system as a country manifesting in grief, suicide, and burnout in our movements. It showed up in the legislative onslaughts and the criminalization of BIPOC in the Southeast with a rise in the building of private prisons and detention centers. But even more palpable was the racist violence, including incidences such as the murder of James Byrd on June 7, 1998, brutally murdered by three white supremacists, and the wrongful conviction of six Black youth in Jena, Louisiana in 2006, known as the “Jena Six,” for assaulting a white student in response to anti-Black violence at their local high school sparked by white students hanging rope nooses in the school courtyard.³

It was a time for setting a new course for liberatory strategies.

Healing Justice Is Conjured

In the early 2000s the questions that the movement needed to answer were: How do we embrace ways to heal and grieve within our Southern communities rooted in our ancestral traditions? We understood that not all traditions are meant to be brought forward, but what did we want to restore and maintain from our freedom fighter strategies for our survival? How do we transcend colonialist ideas that do not serve nor preserve our cultural ways of knowing and being?

A lot of our people were really struggling with depression, really struggling with suicide ideation, or seeing a lot of people lose their lives to HIV and AIDS. For SONG during that time, it was really important to take space and talk about what brought them into movement, what actually activated them, including unpacking our own collective and historical trauma to know what we were bringing into movement spaces.

—Paulina Helm-Hernandez, Chicanx Southern Organizer and former Co-Director of SONG

In 2005, the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (also known as Kindred Collective) was conceived, naming and shaping a vision to build communal healing traditions as a political strategy that seeks to intervene and respond to collective trauma, burnout, and violence in our lives and our movements. Our mission is to build a network of grassroots healers based in energy-, body-, and earth-based work; health practitioners including nurses, doctors, and social workers; and birth workers, cultural workers, and organizers in the Southeast seeking to create mechanisms for wellness and safety that respond, intervene, and transform conditions of generational trauma and violence in our communities and movements.

In the beginning, Kindred Collective was in conversation with several Southern-based organizations holding cultural, political, and spiritual work that deepened and widened our practices and traditions, including Project South, SONG, Alternate Roots, Highlander Center, and Spirit House. In the early 2000s, faced with so many harsh conditions and the losses aforementioned in the past section of this book, there was a turning point in our movements wherein a newer generation of Southern organizers began asking the question, “Where do we heal and honor the change, struggle, loss, and joys of our political work?”

We were reflecting on all of these practices of [the]Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee women, who were doing all of this intersectional organizing, multi-issue organizing, that never stopped from the voting rights movement, and seeing how they were—some of them were dying, some of them were just not well or not being held well, and these were our only options? . . .

—Wendi Moore-O’Neal, Co-Director of Southerners on New Ground

During this time, Kindred Collective began holding strategic conversations with spiritual and healing practitioners to imagine ways we could build communal response to grief, loss, burnout, and generational trauma rooted in Southern traditions. We began to surface what those traditions were: healing circles, song circles, quilting, the creation of natural roux and remedies from plants used for calming energy and anxiety, and creating rituals and sacred spaces for grief, loss, reflection and release to replenish our movements. There was also a new swell of political work from the burgeoning movements of reproductive justice and disability justice at the time that pushed for deeper analyses and adaptive strategies to address state violence and carceral systems, particular to the South within the history of sterilization abuse and eugenic policies. Many of us had been dreaming about ways to draw on ancestral traditions or create new ones to include in our new Southern movement formations and political-organizing campaigns. Our liberatory practices responded to the pains and harms of loss, grief, and burnout as well as uplift joy and resistance. We could see the need and desire, but we still needed a catalyst to break open political dialogue about why this was critical to our liberation.

A Turning Point: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

In 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, bringing with them a visibly horrific state response. The storms, the attention to trauma on a national scale, and witnessing the state’s massive forced displacement of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color survivors created a catalyst moment. We had to ask ourselves how movement held space for healing our grief and trauma as we lived it in real time. That moment also revealed to us that we were experiencing the cumulative impact of hundreds of years of state violence. We had more questions to ask ourselves: What is the toll trauma takes on us if we continue to ignore the greater impact on our cellular, psychic, emotional, and physical well-being? How will this hold back or change our movement’s fronts of struggle?

After witnessing the aftermath of the state’s violent and neglectful response to the hurricanes, this solidified for Kindred Collective a central concern of the moment: How can we responsibly care for organizers collective grief, isolation, and burnout as integral to political liberation? If organizers are being asked to hold these things privately or separately, where are they receiving care that roots in understanding generational trauma from structural oppression, slavery, and genocide? If care models are not serving us, what do we need to change?

Kindred Collective’s response was a needs statement that named our lived experience of resisting and healing from generational trauma in the South;⁴ elevated healers as strategists; remembered our spiritual and cultural practices as integral to our political liberation; and centered disability, environmental, reproductive, and transformative justice, and harm-reduction frameworks as critical to healing work.

Meanwhile, we were learning from the models community organizers in the Gulf were building after the storm, such as the Black women–led New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic,⁵ that built care and reproductive justice strategies to confront the reproductive violence and population control ideology that blamed and shamed Women of Color’s fertility as the root cause of the hurricanes. Or Louisiana native Colette Pichon Battle,⁶ who returned to her Gulf South community with environmental strategies and resources to rebuild her parish. These were some of the many resilient and powerful stories rooted in community.

Organizers began to see collective practices for grief, replenishment, and well-being as integral to dreaming our futures. Kindred Collective took up the charge to consider how to develop healing strategies within movement spaces in the South. In 2006 we attended the Southeast Social Forum, a gathering of regional organizations to assess conditions, strategies, and our fronts of struggles, in Durham, North Carolina. There we built an altar to fallen freedom fighters and a healing space co-designed with local healers and artists. In 2007 Project South became one of the anchor organizations in Atlanta, Georgia, to host the first US Social Forum (USSF), a national gathering of grassroots movements, as an extension to the World Social Forum.⁷ This would be yet another seminal moment, bringing thousands of political organizers to the South to build political left and cross-movement-building strategies across the US and globally. This would create fertile ground for new frameworks including healing justice and disability justice (See “Healing Justice: Movements and Political Frameworks”) to become meaningful for movements. The Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective officially launched at the USSF in Atlanta, Georgia. At the invitation of Project South, we cohosted a Healing and Spiritual Practice Space in partnership with stone circles and founder Claudia Horwitz, and collaborated with local and national practitioners. These spaces taught us the necessity of rooting our traditions within context responsibly, including asking permission to hold certain ceremonies from Indigenous elders in the region.

This gathering was a pivotal moment for movements, as Shash Yazhi Charley (Lead and Founder of Eagle Evolution Consulting), an organizer of the Indigenous Forum at the USSF and a spiritual practitioner at the Healing and Spiritual Practice Space, poignantly reflected of that time:

In gathering folks together there was something in the air around us. I feel like the Earth was shifting. At that moment people were taking more of a consciousness of shielding and protecting. And there was a lot of ability to bring different modalities there to cleanse and clear because all the information was just so heavy that I do feel like during that time it was wonderful to have a place where people could just kind of come in and check themselves. The areas that we created there, I just felt like that was a powerful part of the gathering; it anchored and it grounded us on so many levels.

In 2010 Kindred Collective co-created, with local healing and health practitioners in Detroit and across the US, the Health, Healing Justice, and Liberation Practice Space and People’s Movement Assembly (PMA) at the second US Social Forum in Detroit. The PMA gathered over one hundred healing and health practitioners and organizers, introducing them to the working definition of healing justice and beginning to map ways to build collective care and safety in our respective regions. We began building strategies that centered on using BIPOC traditions of care to transform multiple layers of trauma caused by oppressive systems in our communities. This work laid the foundation for healing justice in the South.

Principles of Healing Justice

Healing justice develops mechanisms to transform the trauma that is uncovered as movements evaluate the contexts in which they are operating. This work is done through a variety of methods; however, there are three basic principles that must be understood:

Principle #1: Collective trauma is transformed collectively.

Principle #2: There is no single model of care.

Principle #3: Healing strategies are rooted in place and ancestral technologies.

The first principle is one that is easily overlooked. The impetus is to hold your own self care and create space to transform trauma. This is important and necessary work. However, when we use healing justice as a political strategy, we are seeking to build collective traditions where healing shapes the culture in which we do our organizing work. Healing justice seeks to address the ways events or conditions impact entire communities and movements, and envision ways for us to hold each other together. Caitlin Breedlove, Deputy Director of the Women’s March and Board Member and former Co-Director of SONG reflected, “There’s something about how collective care, healing and relationship, and being in relationship, our commitment to breaking isolation, and creating liberation in our lifetime—I continue to feel like those are actually commitments that are really about collective care, safety, and healing justice.”

The second principle is to remember there is no one model of care. Collective care strategies and healing justice should be grounded in the specific memory, resiliency, culture, and traditions of the community in which it is being employed. Our collective histories are filled with practices and traditions used to heal our people and ensure our survival. Omisade Burney-Scott, Founder and Principal of Ananse Consulting, refers to these as “subversive technologies.” In speaking of the origins to SpiritHouse,⁸ Omisade says:

Culture is a tool, culture is a disruptor, culture is a protector, like all the different ways that we use culture in our community to protect ourselves. And also how culture is subversive and how you can use culture, whether it’s drumming or dancing or capoeira or a play, and people think, “Oh look! Look at the people entertaining us!” and have no idea what was really happening was subversive technology that’s being used to communicate with each other that we know, right? That we know that we’ve seen before.

A focus on collective memory also seeks to uncover and reclaim these practices and traditions. In most cases, we have been intentionally displaced from land and our natural resources and severed from these traditions as a tactic of oppression, colonialist violence, and white supremacy. Reclamation of our ancestral resiliency practices is, in and of itself, an act of resistance. “We’ve had to hide underground and keep this stuff a secret,” says Aesha Rasheed, Co-Director of Southerners on New Ground, “and be like, ‘You don’t need to know everything, you just need to see the part that you see. Sweep your floor every day; we don’t need to talk about why, just do it.’ And so I think that we’re coming to a time where we need to be able to talk about [it] and we need to be braver about that.”

This is not to say new methodologies cannot be introduced but rather that they should be in relationship to the community’s own context, and not used instead of the practices that the community holds and honors. Citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Vivette Jeffries-Logan, discussed the importance of this in her tradition:

To visit another nation, I must ask permission and/or be invited. When visiting another nation, I understand that I don’t have that relationship with the ecosphere, who are also considered relatives, so I ask for permission to visit. I am fortunate to have been given permission and worked side by side with my relatives from other nations and what happens is cultural exchange. [We say] “Oh! Well, we use this. This is what we use. Oh! Same purpose.” So it is about being mindful and humble—it’s not superiority. “We are going to do this like this.” Because the medicines that are needed are already right there.

Which is to say, let’s not parachute into communities that are not ours with models and tools without considering and acknowledging that folks already have their own. This can do more harm than good, continuing to disconnect communities from their traditions and practices.

The third principle is that we must be rooted in place and ancestral technologies.

Just as healing technologies and methodologies are best employed when rooted in the ancestral lineage of a community, so too are the tools and methods of healers. The politicization of healers and health practitioners necessitates a call for healers to exhibit the same kinds of political discipline and rigor we ask for all others in our movement.

1) Where is your practice from and how are you rooted in its history? We often ask healers and health practitioners how long they have been in practice. How have the institutions they have been a part of contributed to and/or co-opted community-led strategies for wellness and safety? We ask them to interrogate the histories of the medicines and practices they utilize, to understand their own personal and communal relationship to those medicines and practices, and the impact of using traditions from outside of their own ancestral legacies. It is important to understand what is lost when a tradition is removed from its context. As Aesha Rasheed explains:

It’s why [in] oral traditions—that’s why practices come first. But let’s not get lost . . . not focus on the practice and lose the reasons why, because that is a dangerous place that we’re in right now as healing justice becomes more popular—well I mean, honestly continues to be commodified. What we are doing is not new; it’s part of a lineage, but now it is being used out of context. So many use this while taking it from us . . . They are building altars to something that they don’t believe in or don’t know how it works. It’s just being put to work for things that we are not valuing.

2) To Whom Are You Accountable? In the South, when we enter into a community, it is common to lead by answering the question, “Who are your people?” Moving from the notion that wherever we go we are bringing our people with us, this question seeks to understand who you belong to and who you’re accountable to, giving a sense of your experiences and values. Practitioners should also be constantly asking themselves these kinds of questions: What is my lineage and the lineage of my practice? How am I being accountable to the people receiving my practice and the communities within which I am practicing? How am I holding my and my people’s values? Staying rigorous requires examining how we are showing up, and the impact of our practices in each space we enter.

3) How do you address political context and conditions in your practices? Kindred Collective has always intentionally created political mandates and practice by asking ourselves strategic questions. We cannot understand the trauma from which our people are trying to heal if we do not understand the context and conditions in which they live.

For instance, in preparation for the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, the Health, Healing, and Environmental Justice Committee spent a year of rigorous study in partnership with the late Charity Hicks, a Black leader, nurse, and healer deeply embedded in political organizing in Detroit. We learned about the health, social, and environmental conditions that had greatly impacted working-class Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in Detroit over decades of capitalist exploitation. This included understanding the long-term effect of the largest trash incinerator in the world that was located in Detroit before closing its doors in 2019. The practitioners that joined us in supporting the USSF Healing Justice Practice Space and People’s Movement Assembly were also grounded in the knowledge of this context and Principles of Environmental Justice.⁹

Organizing Strategy

A healing justice framework also has the capacity to shape and shift our organizing. Understanding the trauma and harm facing the communities in which we organize provides us with a different vantage point from which we develop strategies.

When Kindred began its work, we were at political tables organizing campaigns in Georgia for migrant justice and racial justice and anti-Islamophobia with local partners. At the same time, we were elevating the political role of healers and nurses on the front lines by advocating for strategies that included integrated care and wellness inside of movement spaces; first aid and security on-site as part of rapid response for incidences of violence and policing; and comfort aid stations on-site at rallies and mobilizations. In looking at Western-based medical models, we found that many nurses and health practitioners were seeking strategies to interrupt the complicity of medical institutions with the state and the use of these institutions to police and surveil those seeking care as an extension of state control and violence. Kindred offered them an analysis and entry point to resist and intervene.

SpiritHouse NC’s theory of change exemplifies healing justice as integral to strategy. According to Co-Executive Director and Tribe Member Mya Hunter, “The theory of change for us is around Culture, Practice, and Ritual, and we call it ‘CPR.’ And so everything has to be based in your personal culture. What are the practices that you’re in, that you’re willing to try and not practice as a form of getting better at something, but practice as an embodiment? And then we make that process sacred.”

Recipe for Healing Justice

In 2019 we were asked at the Urgent Action Fund (UAF) Sister Funds Healing Justice Convening,¹⁰ “If healing justice was a cake, what would be the ingredients?”

For us, healing justice is about how we cast into movements our traditions, tools, and strategies to keep our folks in the long struggle for justice. Healing Justice must be integral to building liberation and strategies to heal and transform generational trauma that conjure traditions of caring for one another.

These are the ingredients for our Southern Healing Justice recipe:

Healing justice must be integrated into movements and not siloed as something you do “over there.”

Healing justice holds multiple ways of healing and well-being and safety together without elevating one over the other.

Healers and health practitioners are embedded into the political sphere and their role politicized so that their work as healers is not separate from their organizing. Healing justice’s charge is to ask practitioners to resist and interrupt ways that their work is complicit with state harms and abuses in our communities.

Healing justice challenges and interrupts a Western and colonialist ideology of health, healing, wellness, and well-being as defined by white, wealthy, cis, heterosexual, abled men and Christian ideals that seeks to prioritize the “wellness” of bodies that can produce or reproduce solely for capitalism. Additionally HJ disrupts the notion and societal beliefs that bodies who are unable to produce and/or reproduce for the wealthy elite are expendable.

Healing justice incorporates cultural and spiritual traditions, employing multiple modalities and multiple frames rooted in place. Central to our strategy is our right relationship to land, work, body, and spirit.

Notes

¹ “About Us,” Project South, accessed January 7, 2022, https://projectsouth.org/about/.

² “Vision, Mission, History,” Southerners on New Ground, accessed January 7, 2022, https://southernersonnewground.org/.

³ Marian Wright Edelman, “Free the Jena Six,” Children’s Defense Fund, September 7, 2007; “Murder of James Byrd Jr.,” Wikipedia, last updated July 23, 2022, accessed July 26, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Byrd_Jr.

⁴ “Needs Statement,” Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, n.d., accessed March 14, 2022, http://kindredsouthernhjcollective.org/.

⁵ Shana Griffin, “The Politics of Reproductive Violence,” interview by Clyde Woods, American Quarterly 61, no. 3, (September 2009): 583–591, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/317257.

⁶ Colette Pichon Battle, “Meet the GCCLP Krewe,” Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, accessed February 11, 2022, www.gcclp.org/krewe.

⁷ “What is the WSFTE?” World Social Forum of Transformative Economies, accessed January 20, 2022, https://transformadora.org/en/about/principles.

⁸ “Mission, Vision, What We Believe,” SpiritHouse-NC, n.d., accessed January 19, 2022, https://www.spirithouse-nc.org/mission-vision-what-we-believe.

⁹ “Principles of Environmental Justice,” First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, accessed January 19, 2022, www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.

¹⁰ “Who We Are,” Urgent Action Fund, accessed January 23, 2022, https://urgentactionfund.org/who-we-are/uaf-sister-funds/.

Storytelling Practice
Our Land, Work, Bodies, and Spirit

Gather in a circle with comrades or do your own reflection on the following questions to map the conditions of your own community:

What are the conditions of the land in your community? What stories does the land hold that you want to remember to use for our collective survival and liberation?

What are the conditions of the economies in your community (e.g., street/survival economies, cooperative economies, etc.)? What do you want to uplift, and what do you want to change?

What are the conditions of the bodies in your community? Consider how individual and collective identities and experiences with state, interpersonal, and community violence affect the physical and emotional well-being of your community. What would you like to embrace for the safety and care of our collective bodies, and what do you want to let go of?

What are the conditions of the spirit (emotional, spiritual, and psychic well-being) of your community?

Adapted from the curriculum of the SONG Organizing School (2007), co-designed with Kindred Collective. This is a tool for mapping conditions by naming our relationship to land, economy/work, body, and spirit within a Southern context.

Alchemy: Theory + Praxis

Photograph by Margarita Corporan. Visual description: A full-body black-and-white photo of Cara and Erica standing shoulder to shoulder, standing on wooden panels leading up to a green lookout building at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Cambridge, MD. Cara is wearing a long dress, her hands are folded in front of her body, and she is looking fiercely at the camera. Erica stands next to her, staring directly into the camera. His arms are by his side, and he is wearing a dark shirt and white pants. They are surrounded by long, lush grass and a wide, clear sky.

alchemy:
transformation, transmutation, creation

The pillars of healing justice (HJ), rooted in abolition and anti-capitalism, are transformative justice, disability justice, reproductive justice, environmental justice, and harm reduction. These are our compass for political and spiritual alignment and should inform and shape our practice. This section of the book provides key foundational concepts (“Healing Justice: Movements and Political Frameworks”), followed by concrete examples and experiments of groups building out healing justice, collective care, and safety interventions. It includes a series of chapters on sites of practice,¹ highlighting organizations in New Mexico, the Midwest, California, and New York City that were integrating multiple political frameworks foundational to HJ in their work for collective care and safety. “Theory + Praxis” illuminates the alchemy and inextricable relationship between the development of these political frameworks and our collective care and safety praxis. The “Sites of Practice Timeline” and the organizations highlighted in the subsequent chapters are part of a larger ecosystem of work happening across the US between 2000 and 2021, the time in which healing justice emerged and gained visibility.

Note

¹ Sites of practice are regional or geographical place-based strategies of healing justice that map and respond to the environmental, psychic, physical, emotional, and spiritual conditions of our communities. Sites of practice are rooted in place and thereby in right relationship to the needs of our peoples. They must also be rooted in consent and self/community determination.

Healing Justice:
Movements and Political Frameworks

Illustration by Claudia Lopez. Visual description: A graphic illustration of the political frameworks that HJ is rooted in, which is written at the top (“Political Frameworks”). In the middle, “Healing Justice” is written in a black circle, surrounded by five rectangular shapes that read, “Reproductive Justice,” “Disability Justice,” “Environmental Justice,” “Harm Reduction,” and “Transformative Justice.” Each produces a single thread that is interwoven together with all the other threads, encircling the healing justice core. Text at the bottom reads, “Seeks to intervene on generational trauma to build collective power towards resistance.”

Illustration by Claudia Lopez. Visual description: In this illustrated graphic depicting the context and conditions in which healing justice emerged, bricks of soil lay a foundation at the bottom of the image, each reading in white text: eugenics, surveillance, prisons and policing, forced migration and displacement, war, systemic oppression, population control, violence, extraction, and criminalization. From the soil’s many cracks, seedlings emerge, each stem curving upward toward the sky and branching into leaves. The plants’ pistils each contain text that reads: Black liberation, bodily autonomy, abolition, Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, interdependence, sacred relationship to Earth, religious and spiritual freedom, Global South movements, and self-determination. Thin petals emerge from the flowers’ pistils, radiating upward.

Healing Justice

Over time healing justice (HJ) has evolved in its definition and will continue to evolve in the emergent design of integrating theory and practice in our collective care strategies:

HJ is a community-led response to interrupt, transform, and intervene on individual/collective trauma to sustain our emotional/physical/mental/spiritual/psychic/environmental well-being.

HJ is an emergent process to address trauma, grief, crisis, and violence (both historical and current).

HJ is a spiritual framework seeking to remember lineage and models of integrative and holistic care that are rooted in ancestral traditions of resiliency and survival.

HJ is a cultural strategy that seeks to create models of holistic care and safety that roots in creation, desire, transformation, and cultural design as a tool for building power and political strategy.

HJ is a political strategy to decriminalize communal practices and ancestral traditions, and seeks to end the persecution of practitioners who center community-led strategies and structures of care outside of the state and Western-based models.

HJ is challenging the medical industrial complex (MIC), intervening on the harms and abuses of the MIC and the pervasiveness of ableism, capitalism, and curative models in our health, healing, and spiritual care systems.¹

Environmental Justice

Environmental justice (EJ) is a grassroots movement that seeks to reconnect our relationship to the Earth and centers respect and integrity for “our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves,” as named in the EJ principles developed at the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.² These EJ principles are rooted in an economic and racial justice analysis toward the protection of all land and bodies to regenerate life, not for profit, but to sustain our own interconnection to each other and all beings (human and nonhuman). EJ is a pillar of healing justice because of its teachings that land, all animal, plant, and human life are sacred and deeply connected to each other outside of exploitation. EJ centers interdependence for our collective care, safety, and resilience. It is a global response to imperialism and the forced displacement and economic exploitation of our seeds, lands, traditions, and medicines, which deeply impact the generational trauma and survival of our communities.

EJ demands that we protect the Earth and all its inhabitants. Seminal fights of the EJ movement have included Black organizers in Warren County, North Carolina, blocking toxic dumps in their neighborhoods; farm workers fighting mass pesticides being sprayed on their fields; boycotting nuclear testing sites in Vieques, Puerto Rico; protecting the sacred lands of Mauna Kea in Hawaii; and the Lakota Nations’ fight for the Black Hills in South Dakota against uranium mining and the recent protests against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. EJ offers us models to create new generative economies as an alternative to capitalism that do not exploit or extract, including Just Transition (see the chapter “Our Land as Kin”), the Red Deal (see the chapter “Generational Memories of Care: Sites of Practice in New Mexico”), or the Gulf South Green New Deal.³

Reproductive Justice

Reproductive justice (RJ) centers bodily autonomy and self-determination for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities to choose how we want to conceive, birth, take care of, and protect our families and does not rely on our reproduction for slavery, labor, and racial capitalism. RJ is quintessential to healing justice because it is rooted in challenging the criminalization of our healing traditions, including birthing, and disrupts ideologies of eugenics and population control.

The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective was formed in 1997 by sixteen autonomous Women of Color organizations, introducing reproductive justice. There are now many organizations representing this critical political framework across the US and globally.

The reproductive justice framework, as defined by SisterSong, “is based on the United Nations’ internationally accepted Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a comprehensive body of law that details the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of government to protect those rights.”⁴

Reproductive violence and injustice continues to be pervasive as an extension of population control, eugenics, and structural oppression against our communities. RJ believes that all people deserve dignity, care, and respect for all bodies; that the myriad of ways we create and sustain our families are legitimate; and that all deserve quality care that does not shame, blame, or exploit us.

This also includes having safe and quality access to abortion care without criminalizing or stigmatizing our bodies based on gender, class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and religious/spiritual and cultural identities. RJ is about having “the economic, political, and cultural power and resources to make decisions over our own bodies, families, and communities for us all to thrive.”⁵

Harm Reduction

Harm reduction refers to a set of principles and strategies to address the health, social, political, legal, spiritual, and relational impacts of behaviors that are criminalized—substance use, sex, sex work/sex trade, and engaging in the street economy. While popular definitions focus on minimizing the harm associated with these behaviors and survival strategies, harm reduction has been practiced by our communities to focus on our survival and recovery from trauma and violence. It emerged in the late 1980s/early 1990s in direct response to the War on Drugs and the HIV/AIDS epidemic at a time when the dominant ideology was to blame, abandon, and punish those most impacted by these conditions.

Syringe exchanges, safe injection sites, medication-assisted treatment (such as methadone and buprenorphine), and safer-sex strategies are popular examples of harm reduction. As a philosophy, harm reduction challenges us to prioritize self-determination, liberation, and radical acceptance of the ways criminalized survivors navigate structural violence and intergenerational trauma. Harm reduction recognizes and honors the myriad of ways survivors cope, recover, and heal. It requires us to confront our discomfort and judgment of behaviors such as substance use, sex that is considered socially taboo, and other behaviors considered self-injurious.

Harm reduction forces us to consider the context and conditions survivors must navigate and directly implicates the harms associated with criminalization, stigmatization, the exile we put upon survivors, and ways survivors are forced to adopt a trajectory of healing that reinforces ableism, capitalism, white supremacy, misogyny, and queerphobia and transphobia. As a part of the root system of healing justice, harm reduction calls us to broaden how we think about healing by centering those in our communities who are considered most disposable, perceived as needing to be cured or fixed. Through harm reduction we understand the importance of centering the experience, leadership, and expertise of criminalized survivors in our work while fighting to disrupt the systems and practices that harm them.⁶

Disability Justice

Disability justice is a movement and political framework conceived in 2005 by BIPOC and Queer and Trans people with disabilities in response to the gains and limitations of the disability rights movement.⁷ Disability justice holds an explicit critique of ableism and its legacies of harm and violence, as opposed to a rights-based framework that seeks to give people with disabilities more access inside of ableist structures. In the context of ableism and capitalism, sick and disabled people do not have value and are considered a burden and unworthy of care and safety, as opposed to understanding disability as a beautiful and typical part of the fabric of human experience and heterogeneity.

As an intersectional and anti-capitalist framework, disability justice reminds us that all bodies are sacred and have needs, as well as reminding us of the impermanence of any experience of being nondisabled. Disability justice is rooted in interdependence and demands that systems, institutions, and our movements for liberation be accessible to all. Not from a place of charity, but from the recognition that people with disabilities hold a vision for our collective liberation that is often more nuanced and complete than many of us have. What healing justice draws from disability justice is the understanding that curative models of healing and health and the inaccessibility of our movement and care spaces replicates the harms of every other system of oppression and violence.⁸

Sins Invalid’s Ten Principles of Disability Justice:

Intersectionality

Leadership of Those Most Impacted

Anti-Capitalism

Cross-Movement Solidarity

Wholeness

Sustainability

Cross-Disability Solidarity

Interdependence

Collective Access

Collective Liberation⁹

Transformative Justice

Transformative justice (TJ) is an abolitionist framework that seeks to address harm, violence, and abuse without relying on interventions based on carceral strategies—punishment, retaliation, policing, surveillance, and prisons. TJ is survivor centered and community led and considers the context and conditions that lead to harm and violence as a result of structural oppression and generational trauma.

The overall goal of TJ is to address the root causes of violence and to create the conditions for accountability, healing, and safety for victims/survivors as well as those who perpetrate harm. TJ only occurs outside of state systems and structures because these systems are the site of violence that our communities must be protected from. Community accountability processes, survivor support, and building up the skills and practices we need to address conflict before harm and violence occur are some of the interventions TJ offers. As a framework, it challenges the false dichotomy between victim/survivor and perpetrator by understanding that all people cause harm and we must provide collective interventions to support people to transform this harm. TJ requires healing for anyone who has been directly or indirectly affected by harm and violence, including bystanders and the broader community. This framework has significant overlap with healing justice in that it seeks to interrupt cycles of trauma and harm and centers strategies for collective care, healing, and safety for future generations.¹⁰

Notes

¹ “Healing Justice Definition,” contributed by Kindred Collective, Prentis Hemphill, Erica Woodland, and Adaku Utah. 2017.

² “Principles of Environmental Justice,” First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, accessed January 19, 2022, www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html.

³ “Policy-Platform,” Gulf South for a Green New Deal, accessed February 14, 2022, https://www.gulfsouth4gnd.org/policy-platform.

⁴ “Reproductive Justice,” SisterSong, accessed February 17, 2022, www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice.

⁵ “Building Power at the Intersections: Reproductive Justice, Transgender Justice, and Immigrant Justice,” Western States Center, Data Center, and Transgender Law Center, February 17, 2016, http://transgenderlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/2016-02-16-NextGEN-Webinar-slides-for-distribution.pdf.

⁶ Shira Hassan, Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022).

⁷ Disability justice framework was conceived by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Leroy Moore, Stacey Milbern, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret. Patty Berne, “What Is Disability Justice?” Sins Invalid, accessed March 1, 2022, www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2020/6/16/what-is-disability-justice.

⁸ Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Sins Invalid, 2019).

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Mia Mingus, “Transformative Justice: A Brief Description,” Leaving Evidence, January 9, 2019, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/01/09/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/.

Sites of Practice Timeline 2000–2021

This timeline maps some of the organizations that emerged leading healing justice, collective care, and safety interventions over the past two decades.

Year | Organization/Group
2000 | Communities Against Rape and Abuse
2000 | Generation FIVE
2000 | FIERCE
2000 | INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence (formerly INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence)
2001 | Bold Futures (formerly Young Women United)
2001 | Different Avenues
2001 | Movement Strategy Center
2002 | Young Women’s Empowerment Project
2002 | Fireweed Collective (formerly known as the Icarus Project)
2004 | Casa de Salud
2004 | Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project
2005 | Sins Invalid
2005 | Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative
2006 | Native Youth Sexual Health Network
2006 | Rock Dove Collective
2007 | H.O.L.L.A! (How Our Lives Link Altogether)
2007 | Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective
2007 | Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project
2008 | RYSE Center
2008 | Third Root Community Health Center
2008 | Positive Women’s Network—USA
2008 | Generative Somatics
2008 | Ancient Doula Song Services
2008 | Southern Birth Justice Network
2009 | Project NIA
2010 | EqualHealth
2011 | Sage Community Health Collective
2011 | 3rd Space of the Audre Lorde Project
2011 | Healing Clinic Collective
2011 | HEARD
2011 | Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity
2011 | Namu Farm
2011 | Streetwise and Safe
2012 | Dignity and Power Now
2013 | Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
2013 | Black Lives Matter
2014 | People’s Movement Center
2014 | Anti-Police Terror Project
2014 | Harriet’s Apothecary
2014 | Movement for Black Lives
2014 | Street Youth Rise Up!
2015 | Healing by Choice!
2015 | Second Generation Seeds
2015 | Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange
2015 | Vision Change Win
2016 | National Queer and Trans Therapist of Color Network
2016 | Harriet Tubman Collective
2016 | Trans Queer Pueblo
2016 | Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM)
2016 | Frontline Wellness Network
2016 | Health Justice Commons
2017 | Intersex Justice Project
2018 | Minneapolis Healing Justice Network
2019 | Latinx Therapists Action Network
2019 | La Cura podcast
2019 | Changing Frequencies
2019 | Aileen’s
2020 | Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Network of Indigenous Gardeners, People of the Sacred Medicine Trail
2020 | The Embodiment Institute
2020 | Mental Health First
2020 | REP (Relationships Evolving Possibilities)
2020 | Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW)
2020 | Alliance for Ecotherapy and Social Justice
2020 | Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Food Sovereignty Program
2021 | California Healers Network
2021 | Chisholm Legacy Project
2021 | Healing Histories Project
2004 | Creative Interventions
2005 | Safe OUTside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project
2011 | Healing Justice Practice Space at the Allied Media Conference
2014 | TransLifeline

Generational Memories of Care:
Sites of Practice in New Mexico

Francisca Porchas Coronado

As a Mexicana and Chicana with Indigenous roots on both sides of the Mexican border, New Mexico represents blood memory in practice. As a former climate justice organizer, all the roads of healing justice (HJ) lead to the struggle against capitalism, an extension of the colonial project.¹ The HJ work highlighted here is part of a broader Indigenous worldview. One that calls for the complete restructuring of society based on a new set of relationships with each other, land, and all nonhuman species based on life, reciprocity, and care. The collectives highlighted were shaped by the legacy of Indigenous cultural and healing traditions, which can ultimately guide us in building a future free from exploitation and violence.

Caretaking

Healing the planet is ultimately about creating infrastructures of caretaking that will replace infrastructures of capitalism. Capitalism is contrary to life. Caretaking promotes life.²

“Decolonization or Extinction?” posed by the book The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Mother Earth, refers to rapid ecological destruction, but is also a question that oppressed Indigenous nations within the US have faced for hundreds of years due to colonial violence. To decolonize means to completely liberate ourselves from hegemonic settlers and their culture, socially, spiritually, economically, and physically. To be free and empowered to practice our traditions, eat our foods, tend to land, speak our languages, have power and voice, believe and put into practice our worldviews. Healing justice is part of the long trajectory of decolonization, intervening on the trauma weaponized against us and instead centering life and transformation through structures of taking care of one another.

Tewa Women United: Remembering Generations into the Future

Tewa Women United (TWU) have been caretakers of the land, each other, and the Northern New Mexican Pueblo communities since 1989. The founders created a space for themselves to heal from the effects of colonization, religious inquisition, and militarization that lead to issues of alcoholism, suicide, and domestic, sexual, and environmental violence.³ TWU has been one of the frontline organizations educating and activating the community against environmental violence and sees this work as part of shifting toward decolonization. “The militarization of the southwest has been ongoing for five hundred–plus years and now it has turned into a form of nuclear colonialism,” shares Beata Tsosie Peña, TWU’s former Environmental Health and Justice Program Coordinator.⁴ TWU’s vision is the dismantling of the nuclear war industrial complex, including weapons.

For TWU, native seed preservation and protecting Indigenous pregnant people and families from toxic contamination are critical in preserving generational memory. Birthing parents have become the main priority of TWU’s health advocacy efforts. TWU is reclaiming the traditions of ceremonial birth at home with traditional medicine, midwives, and doulas,⁵ who “[tend] the seeds, carefully and slowly, from which more and more memory can grow . . . It hasn’t been forgotten, but we need help with this process of gaining back what has been pushed aside.”⁶

For the Tewa who remain in their homeland, legacy is all around them, in plants, water, mountains, and especially the native seeds that have nourished them. “Seeds have cultural connotations related to birth, belonging to a place, and ceremonies around how we claim our kin. Food is quite literally medicine and a cultural foundation for a community to thrive.”⁷

Kalpulli Izkalli: Lessons from the Elders

As we heal ourselves, we heal Mother Earth.⁸

Kalpulli Izkalli (KI),⁹ founded in 1996, is a grassroots, intergenerational, action, and resource center formed to transform the health and the environment of the community in the South Valley. Started by a group of women working to keep ceremonial and medicinal knowledge, including Mexicanas, Chicanas, Pueblo, and Nahuatl, one of the inspirations for KI, as articulated by founding member Sylvia Ledesma, “was to create the space to do our healing, learn, support each other, and to support community organizers . . . It was meant for organizers to have space for their healing. As organizers we do the work for everyone and we are always last.”¹⁰

Since its inception, KI has orchestrated hundreds of healing clinics across Albuquerque and surrounding communities. As a vessel for resilience building, they have held temazkali (sweat lodge spaces), offered reiki, given limpias (spiritual cleanses), and provided love and guidance for many activists. Resilience is a key healing justice practice; it’s not only surviving or bouncing back from the harms caused by our current socioeconomic systems. Resilience is about taking the time and committing ourselves in our work to the project of building enough bandwidth to feel what bleak possibilities are in front of us, without withering our relationship to joy, possibility, and purpose and to making meaning.¹¹

Eldership is a direct contradiction to a capitalist culture that inherently devalues wisdom and support outside of commercial economic transactions. Colonization has wounded our communities so deeply that the concept of eldership often evokes memories of abuse, manipulation, and competition with our elders. It is difficult to live by our HJ values and reclaim our ancestral ways of being without elders guiding us. KI reminds us that we should be in healthy relationships with grounded, trusted elders who can pass their knowledge and skills on to us. KI continuously brings prominent elders to New Mexico from Mexico to educate and participate in community ceremonies, for example, Oaxacan curandera Doña Enriqueta Contreras, as well as local traditional healers, such as the late Doña Pedricanda Perea.

Building New Systems of Care: Casa de Salud

Kalpulli Izkalli, with a Western medical doctor and a nurse practitioner, birthed the Topahkal Health and Healing Center, which would later become Casa de Salud (“Topahkal” in Nahuatl, or “house of medicine” in English) in 2004.¹² KI and Casa de Salud (CS) were originally spaces on Sylvia Ledesma’s land next to her home. Today CS stands as a fully operating community clinic providing high-quality reiki, acupuncture, harm reduction, and primary care. The intention was to “provide traditional and Western medicine in the same space to low-income communities who had lacked access to affordable and equitable health care.”¹³ Though several KI members remained as service providers of CS for years to come, KI decided to focus solely on working with Indigenous medicine and work directly with communities across Albuquerque and movement builders outside of a clinic model.

CS has integrated harm reduction into their community health and healing work, building care infrastructures that center active and former substance users to determine their path to healing and recovery. The Freedom to Heal Program (FTH), created in 2007 by Lorraine Cordova, a family nurse practitioner, traditional healer, and member of KI used non-Western traditional modalities for healing to address substance use and addiction. CS’s harm-reduction work includes syringe exchange, the distribution of naloxone and buprenorphine, traditional healing practices, and primary care, providing holistic and culturally rooted support for the community.

Healing justice invites us to experiment with models that challenge and can replace the medical industrial complex. Blending traditional Indigenous and Western medicine requires giving equal priority, time, and resources to both. Western-medicine practitioners who work within the blended model must not only respect traditional medicine but also allow themselves to experience it as recipients. In a culture that values Western medicine and medical school over ancestral medicine, CS inspires us to dream of what new health institutions we can build. A new model of health care must integrate Western medicine into an Indigenous worldview, not the other way around.

Envisioning a Bold New Future

Bold Futures (BF), formerly known as Young Women United (YWU), was founded in 1999 by a group of Asian American, Native American, Black, Latinx, and Chicanx women coming from racial justice work longing for a space by and for Women of Color. BF leads policy change, research, place-based organizing, and culture shift in New Mexico.¹⁴ BF’s work has prioritized campaigns that ensure the state’s structures and policies in practice are those that can support people’s well-being, especially that of People of Color.¹⁵

Efforts to sterilize substance-using women in New Mexico prompted some of the first organizing by YWU leaders who advocated for the end of this practice and for reproductive justice (RJ) through an anti-criminalization lens. Since then, BF has advocated for access to care and dignity for people in cycles of trauma, substance use, and often incarceration. They defend the right of parenting even when the state’s first assumptions and actions are to take away the children of substance-using people instead of offering support. Denicia Cadena, former Policy Director at Bold Futures shares:

In collaboration with three local artists and with women and people who had been substance using and pregnant, we created and ran three full-size city bus ads on Mother’s Day and throughout the month of May to “complicate the narrative about who is deserving of being a mother. Even if the state has taken your child, you still get to be a parent.¹⁶

In alignment with healing justice, BF’s reproductive justice efforts often connect back to caretaking and social support. Organizing with young families, teachers, and other advocates, BF took the lead in establishing a New Mexico Day in Recognition of Young Families and then later passed policy to create the nation’s first statewide excused absence policy for expectant and parenting students.¹⁷

BF creates spaces for staff and leaders to receive care from spiritual elders during emotionally taxing legislative efforts. During the height of recent advocacy efforts with the New Mexico State Legislature, community leaders were supported with individual consultations to talk or receive spiritual work from elders. Denicia Cadena shares, “People deserve to be shown up for and taken care of the same way they are showing up for social justice.”

New Mexico and the US Southwest are important hubs where intergenerational healers and organizers, rooted in Indigenous communities, have led the way in healing lands and bodies from colonization-induced trauma. The organizations in this chapter invite us to engage in the task of using our ancestral teachings, creativity, resourcefulness, and collective power to decolonize ourselves. Healing justice is a lens through which we can analyze current times and chart a better path forward. HJ is a discipline and a key tactic in our roles as organizers, health and healing practitioners, community leaders, and caretakers. May we hold on tightly to the values that the stories in this chapter share: regaining generational memory, commitment to power building while cultivating belonging, centering those most impacted by oppression, destigmatization of healing, valuing eldership and apprenticeship, and the daily grind of embodying one’s own liberation in real time. All these are key elements of an HJ future we want and so desperately need.

Reflective Practice

How are you embodying healing justice in your practice? How are you and yours reclaiming your ancestral traditions?

What are ways that we can honor and cherish our elders?

What healing can occur when we have nourishing intergenerational experiences?

Notes

1 The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021); Andrew S. Zimbalist, Howard J. Sherman, and Stuart Brown, Comparing Economic Systems: A Political-Economic Approach, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988).

2 The Red Nation, The Red Deal, 160.

3 “About Tewa Women United,” Tewa Women United, n.d., accessed February 11, 2022, https://tewawomenunited.org/about-us.

4 Peoples Progressive Media, “Three Centuries of Pueblo Resistance—Beata Tsosie-Peña—8/14/2019,” interview with Beata Tsosie-Peña, YouTube, August 14, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl9KMzige0c.

5 Peoples Progressive Media, “Three Centuries of Pueblo Resistance”; “Yiya Vi Kagingdi Doula Project,” Tewa Women United, accessed February 11, 2022, https://tewawomenunited.org/yiya-vi-kagingdi-doula-project.

6 Hope Logghe, former Project Coordinator for the Yiya Vi Kangindi Doula Project (“Helper of the mother” in the Tewa language) at Tewa Women United. “Indigenous Women’s Health and Reproductive Justice Program,” accessed February 11, 2022, https://tewawomenunited.org/programs/indigenous-womens-health-and-reproductive-justice-program.

7 The Red Nation, The Red Deal, 164.

8 “Kalpulli Izkalli—Celebrating Cultura, Healing, & Justice,” Kalpulli Izkalli Facebook page, accessed February 11, 2022, www.facebook.com/KalpulliIzkalliNewMexico/.

9 Kalpulli means the “Community” in the Nahuatl language, also referred to as “Aztec.” Izkalli means “House of Light/Resurgence,” and it is the last day of the Mexica/Aztec calendar.

1⁰ Sylvia Ledesma, interview with author, personal interview via Zoom, August 31, 2021.

1¹ Francisca P. Coronado, Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, Prentis Hemphill, “Redefining Resilience,” Resilient Strategies.

1² “History,” Casa de Salud, accessed February 12, 2022, www.casadesaludnm.org/history.

1³ “Home,” Casa de Salud, accessed February 11, 2022, www.casadesaludnm.org.

1⁴ “Who we are,” Bold Futures, accessed February 10, 2022, www.boldfuturesnm.org/who-we-are.

1⁵ Bold Futures, “Boldly Celebrating 20 Years,” January 12, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AYIMlb6f-M.

16 For more information about the campaign, check out “Mothers Fight Stigma of Drug Addiction,” www.kunm.org/public-health-new-mexico/2014-08-28/mothers-fight-stigma-of-drug-addiction and “A New View of Drug-Addicted Moms,” www.colorlines.com/articles/new-view-drug-addicted-moms.

17 Gina Desiderio, “Celebrating Young Parents: How New Mexico and California Established a Day of Recognition,” Healthy Teen Network, accessed February 15, 2022, https://www.healthyteennetwork.org/resources/celebrating-young-parents/; Esperanza Dodge and Susy Chávez Herrera, “Respect Is an Everyday Thing: Why Young Parents Need Support,” Medium, August 25, 2016, https://nmlegis.gov/Sessions/13%20Regular/final/HB0300.pdf https://medium.com/@EsperanzaDodge/respect-is-an-everyday-thing-why-young-parents-need-support-7a6c807fac.

We Move in Relationship:
Sites of Practice in the Midwest

Susan Raffo

The organizations and collectives in the Midwest that were the earliest expressions of the healing justice (HJ) framework were all founded by or included people who built the HJ work at the 2010 US Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit. Some of the people who created these organizations were doing care work before 2010. Between the US Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007 and then in Detroit in 2010, we deepened our relationships with each other, with the HJ framework, and we built protocols and practices that also shaped our understanding of this work. Out of this, new organizations and deepened commitments emerged.

Since 2010, these relationships have continued. Everyone interviewed for this piece is still, in some way, connected to each other. We still follow and inform each other’s work, even as the work has shifted and changed. Our commitment to lifting up collective care and wellness while also intervening on the violence of racist and ableist care-for-profit still connects us. This chapter looks at these relationships, tracing the ripples of action that emerged out of that first US Social Forum in Atlanta. The Midwest has been shaped directly by the origins of the healing justice framework.

Healing justice at its core has been about reconnecting us back to the things that have very intentionally been taken from us and separated out into pieces. Or, as my people, the Tainos, remind us: always go back to the Daka, the “I am.” I am of the land, of spirit, of heart and of each other. It is impossible to transform anything with the idea that only one small piece of a whole ecosystem matters. Land cannot thrive without water; the body cannot function without the heart and justice does not exist without spirit.

—Adela Nieves Martinez, Founder of Healing by Choice!

Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) Chicago (2002–2013)

The Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) was a member-based social justice organizing project led by and for young People of Color with current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. YWEP’s work, organized within the framework of harm reduction, focused on building and supporting the community’s capacity to resist state harm and to care for each other while doing it.

The young people who made up YWEP expanded the understanding and practice of healing justice in Chicago and nationally. YWEP co-organized the Depo Diaries Campaign and the Anti-Gardasil Campaign with the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment. These campaigns would impact strategy for healing justice by drawing connection between HJ and reproductive justice.¹ YWEP formed Healing in Action, which trained young people to use herbs and other items you can find in the corner store to identify and treat anxiety, depression, flu symptoms, and pelvic and bladder pain, and to self-assess and make remedies. Some of the healing practitioners with YWEP shifted to develop the Sage Community Health Collective as a sister project. While YWEP closed in 2013, many of the campaigns and projects have continued as free-standing projects, including the Street Youth Bill of Rights and Street Youth Rise Up.²

The frameworks of harm reduction and healing justice reflect and reinforce each other. Harm reduction honors the ways in which people live, survive, and resist oppression and violence by centering self-determination and supporting people to be where they are. Healing justice links arms with harm reduction, recognizing the truth of generational trauma and uplifting collective strategies that root us into land, body, and spirit.

It has always been important for us to say that healing justice work has always existed, whether or not it calls itself by that name. The young people at YWEP were always clear that care for each other and mutual accountability was part of the work of pushing back against state violence and control. Healing justice happens at McDonald’s, it happens at the dollar store. It doesn’t only happen because one person is an acupuncturist or runs a clinic.

—Shira Hassan, Former Executive Director of Young Women’s Empowerment Project

East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), Detroit (2010–Present)

EMEAC began in the 1960s as a response to environmental concerns in Southeast Michigan. EMEAC builds community power, working to fight environmental racism while building relationships and resilience. When the second US Social Forum was held in Detroit in 2010, EMEAC provided local leadership in multiple spaces, including health and healing justice work.³ Charity Hicks⁴ and Owólabi Aboyade,⁵ local leads for the Health, Healing, and Environmental Justice Working Group at the USSF in 2010, joined with Kindred Collective and Project South to build an integrative team of healers, nurses, doctors, and wellness practitioners that could rapidly respond to moments of crisis, conflict, and exhaustion. Charity grounded this work in the legacy of Southern healing traditions that had traveled to Detroit during the Great Migration. One of the projects at EMEAC that helped root healing justice into Detroit communities focused on food justice pop-ups. This was a time for eating together and sharing stories and also a time to practice different healing modalities. For many, this was their first encounter with this kind of care work.

Allied Media Conference—Healing Track and Practice Space, Detroit (2011–Present)

The Allied Media Conference (AMC), founded in 1999 and moved to Detroit in 2007, is a collaboratively designed movement space that explores the intersections of media and communications, art, technology, education, and social justice. It is where many have first encountered the framework of healing justice. While a national space, the healing justice track at the AMC has always been held and shaped by Detroit community members in alliance with national folks.

The healing justice practice space was developed, building on many hours of conversation and sharing between and across the organizers of the US Social Forum and the AMC. The Health and Healing Justice Track was designed by organizers of the AMC healing justice practice space. As Autumn Brown, one of the organizers who coordinated the first track reflected:

There was a political education and healing justice education component to the way we ran the space. We coordinated directly with the safety team, and sometimes had overlapping members; staying abreast of the challenging dynamics, overnight crises, and potential circumstances for people’s trauma.

Sage Community Health Collective, Chicago (2011–2016)

Sage Community Health (also known as Sage) provided affordable, accessible, trauma-informed and harm-reductionist healing services including acupuncture, herbs, bodywork, and nutritional counseling while also providing education and support through workshops and skillshares. Sage emerged from YWEP and co-created the healing justice work at the USSF in Detroit in 2010.

Sage also provided significant leadership for many of the emerging spaces looking to do their work within a healing justice framework. As a collective of non-Chinese practitioners offering care through Chinese medicine, they released a statement on cultural appropriation and care work that helped many spaces more deeply understand their own work. Part of the healing justice framework includes recognizing how culturally grounded systems of care have been separated from their lineage and then packaged and sold. Sage’s reflection on the contradictions and choices embedded in their practice offered both political clarity and tenderness in a way that shaped many practitioners in the region and beyond.

During this time period, there were few resources interested in supporting healing work, with or without a political frame. Healing was still often seen as separate from the work of movement. This impacted the kind of work that those who were part of this early period of healing justice could build and sustain. As is true with all resource-tight periods, other tensions arose that impacted how the work could and couldn’t flourish. Tanuja Jagernauth, a founding member of Sage, reflected on the ways that internalized white supremacy culture and capitalism impacted Sage’s operations with its mix of perfectionism, work-before-relationship, and isolation. As the sole remaining collective member, she saw the exhaustion and overwork that defined this last period. Tanuja reflected, “I felt like I was working 24/7 to create community for others, while I had very little community myself.”

Stacy Erenberg, a founding member of Sage, also reflected on witnessing a change of the broader strategies of healing justice that she felt began to focus almost entirely on healing justice practice spaces. She said, “Practitioners were brought in and paid only to hold beautiful and powerful spaces, but it was a space that was separate from the organizing element of the gathering.”

People’s Movement Center, Minneapolis (2014–2019)

The People’s Movement Center (PMC) was a practice space in South Minneapolis/Mnisota Makoce that centered People of Color, immigrants, and Queer and Trans people; our commitment was to the healing in justice and the justice in healing. We lived this commitment through a practice space, community workshops, and showing up to provide care and support at occupation sites.

The PMC opened with “Healing Justice for Black Lives Matters” in 2014, co-organized with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha and Adaku Utah. On this day, healing practitioners around the country donated the money they made to Black Lives Matter or provided free sessions to Black organizers. This was a moment when many hundreds of practitioners across the country first encountered the healing justice framework.

The PMC spent a lot of time thinking about how to support care literacy, knowing that many of our people had not experienced bodywork or trauma work before and the not knowing could be its own barrier. We organized a People’s Fund to make care work accessible for people without cash while also supporting practitioners with decent pay. We incubated projects like the Youth Healing Justice Network—a collective of youth workers, young people, and educators of color working together to support young People of Color in peer networks learning about nervous system settling and coregulation. We also worked with racial, environmental, and gender justice spaces interested in integrating care work into their strategies.

In 2018 a respected community leader shared noticing more spaces that were liberatory because they were BIPOC or Trans spaces for BIPOC and Trans people, but they weren’t necessarily integrating work around disability justice and ableism, awareness of cultural appropriation and collective organizing alongside their individual care and teaching. They shared that the PMC was one of the few remaining centers holding this commitment to political change. Sadly, the PMC closed within a year from that conversation for many of the same reasons that Sage closed.

Ayo Clemons of the People’s Movement Center reflected:

We are trying to be in our own integrity in this work and navigating the wounds and the work can make it hard to sustain ourselves. We tried and tried to sustain what we believed in and while it doesn’t mean that the vision was not sustainable or was impossible, it is still true that there is tension that comes up for anyone who is trying to work in deep integrity in a system that really doesn’t want them to be.

Healing by Choice!, Detroit (2015–Present)

In 2015 Adela Nieves Martinez was invited by an environmental justice organization in Detroit, working on housing insecurity, to help weave healing justice into their nine-month fellowship. She invited seven other healing justice practitioners to support the group and Healing by Choice! was conceived. Healing by Choice! is a circle of women and gender-nonconforming People of Color health and healing practitioners based in Waawiijatanong/Detroit, Michigan. They call themselves Healing by Choice! because they are grounded in consent and agency, believing that all get to make their own choices about how and when healing happens, recognizing that everyone is an expert on their own experience. They have grown to twenty-one practitioners and continue to grow and provide healing justice practice spaces and care for movement groups and gatherings.

Healing by Choice! also partners with herbalists to develop the Friends of Friends Herbal Solidarity Program for the distribution of herbal care kits for COVID prevention, management, and stress relief and is currently in the process of creating a community-visioned mobile healing clinic.

Closing

Every person interviewed named how this framework and its practices have completely shifted the trajectory of their work. Not everyone interviewed is still working as a practitioner. Everyone is still involved in some kind of change work. Each of them focus on mutual or collective care as part of their work, whether they are working in schools or hospitals or farming the land.

After the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, folks involved with the USSF had at least two conversations about organizing a Midwestern healing justice gathering to build on what we had done together in Detroit. In 2014, three years after the US Social Forum, one of the leaders in our region, Charity Hicks, died unexpectedly. Charity had been part of building, conceiving, and supporting how healing justice continued to evolve after the US Social Forum. Her death greatly impacted people—especially in Detroit, also in our region and nationally—who were involved in this work. After her death, the conversations about building a regional gathering slowed down and stopped.

This is about waging love; we love ourselves, we love our children, we love the Earth, we love all of life. So this is not a protest. This is actually an act of waging love. The love we are talking about is the love of life not the love of death.⁶

—Charity Hicks

With gratitude to those interviewed and remembered from Young Women’s Empowerment Project (Shira Hassan), the People’s Movement Center (Ayo Clemons, Alejandra Tobar Alatriz, Eiko Mizushima, Griffin Jeffries, and me), the healing justice work at the Allied Media Conference (Autumn Brown, Owólabi Aboyade, Tanuja Jagernauth, and Adela Nieves Martinez), Sage Community Health Collective (Stacy Erenberg and Tanuja Jagernauth), EMEAC and Detroit Disability Power (Owólabi Aboyade), Healing by Choice! (Adela Nieves Martinez). With gratitude to Relationships Evolving Possibilities (REP) in Minneapolis where I get to continue to practice this work . . . and to every beloved of Charity Hicks who has found ways to keep her words and impact visible in Detroit and beyond.

Visioning Practice

Imagine where we would be if all of those collectives and organizations that had begun in 2010 had been supported to deeply root.

Imagine what it would look like in the Midwest, or in your region, if we had a decade plus of teaching and skillshares, of youth support and mentorship. What if we were integrating and deepening all of our collective care work to be wise in the ways of anti-eugenics and disability justice work, nongendered body teachings, Indigenous and land centering, Black love and liberation, ancestral knowing, safety and security practices, and more?

Seriously, pause here and take a moment to imagine it.

Over these last two years in Minneapolis, since the pandemic began and after George Floyd was murdered, those of us from the PMC have wondered, What would it be like if we had been able to stay strong and powerful and ready to meet what arose in 2020?

Imagine if we truly had the time and support to evolve eldership to help hold these tight moments of overwhelming violence within the spaciousness of time and possibility . . . just imagine.

What would you build to prepare for twenty to fifty years from now?

Notes

¹ “Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment Depo Diaries records,” Archives for Research on Women and Gender. Special Collections and Archives Department, Georgia State University, Atlanta, accessed March 1, 2022, https://archivesspace.library.gsu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1393; “Gardasil Statement,” Young Women Empowerment Project, accessed March 1, 2022, https://ywepchicago.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/gardasil-statement.pdf.

² “Our Campaigns,” Young Women’s Empowerment Project, accessed March 1, 2022, https://youarepriceless.org/our-work/our-campaign/.

³ Owólabi Aboyade named in interview that East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC) began integrating healing justice and disability justice in 2010.

⁴ Charity Hicks was a nurse, a healing practitioner, and a spiritual and political leader in Detroit who worked with EMEAC and played a significant leadership role in how healing justice emerged within our region. Charity joined the ancestors in 2014 and is highly regarded as a Black freedom fighter and healer who touched the lives of many of us, deeply and forever.

⁵ Owólabi’s work in healing justice has continued through the lens of Detroit Disability Power, including organizing care circles for people with disabilities and their caregivers.

⁶ Halima Cassells, ill weaver, Lottie Spady, and Kate Levy, “Charity Hicks: Wage Love,” Emergence Media, produced in 2014, 5:45, https://vimeo.com/101035835.

Building the World We Want and Deserve:
Sites of Practice in California

Erica Woodland

California shapes much of the social, cultural, and economic typography of the country. With the country’s largest economy, the state provides food, technology, and other essential resources for the rest of the country, giving it a significant amount of political power. The legacy of colonization, attempted genocide of Indigenous tribes, Western expansion to steal land and gold, and multiple waves of migration of BIPOC, Queer, Trans, and other communities speaks to the many contradictions this land holds. The tech boom in San Francisco/Silicon Valley, which began in the 1990s, caused the rapid and violent displacement of poor and BIPOC communities that have lived in this area for generations and have directly contributed to the economic growth. These conditions have profoundly shaped the rich legacy of organizing and activism that continues today. Labor, anti-war, Black liberation, farm worker, migrant justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and LGBTQTSI+ justice movements from California set precedent for this work across the country. California is often held up as a model in various sectors for legitimate and at times problematic reasons. This chapter will focus on several sites of practice in the Bay Area and Los Angeles to share clear and diverse examples of what is possible when we commit to healing justice as a set of values, strategies, and practice.

Our Survival Depends on Us: Sins Invalid and Disability Justice

Our work really insists that we be seen in our dignity and our power.

—Patty Berne, Co-Founder and Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid

Sins Invalid, founded in 2005, is a disability justice movement building and performance project led by BIPOC, Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary people with disabilities. Their work has been pivotal in the development of disability justice as a political framework and articulates the inextricable relationship between disability justice and healing justice. Sins’ work seeks to resist eugenic ideologies, the foundation of the medical industrial complex, being used to justify the elimination of people with disabilities by creating spaces to reclaim and assert the dignity, beauty, and humanity of people with disabilities.

Sins Invalid’s groundbreaking cultural work focuses on sexuality, embodiment, and self-expression and transforms dominant notions of beauty and what is considered normative. The documentary An Unshamed Claim to Beauty (2013) showcases their performance work since 2006 and their contribution to a groundswell of work to dismantle eugenics and abled supremacy. They have produced a number of performances featuring disabled artists, including We Love Like Barnacles: Crip Lives in Climate Chaos (2020), which explores the impacts of climate catastrophe on disabled, BIPOC, Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary people, and Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom (2016), addressing disability, embodiment, and gender. Patty Berne describes Sins’ work around disabled embodiment as resistance and healing:

I feel like that’s really a political imperative right now that we focus on embodiment because it is our Brown, Black, Indigenous crip bodies that are not being visioned into the future and we need to be visioned into the future.

Their movement-building work involves long-term, cross-movement partnerships, training, and shifting the narrative to center disability justice in our liberation work. Sins Invalid developed the 10 Principles of Disability Justice and Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People, a Disability Justice Primer, which clearly names ableism and its intersections with other forms of systemic oppression and lays out the values, political analysis, and practice of disability justice. Sins’ work is rooted in intersectional organizing and serves as an intervention to fight abled supremacy while using cultural work as a strategy to transform trauma.

Love and Power: RYSE Center

The RYSE Center, based in Richmond, California, is a space for young people to build power, heal, and transform the conditions of their community. I worked with RYSE as their Clinical Supervisor from 2015 to 2022 and have experienced the power of their work. RYSE believes that our organizing work requires strategies to address and transform trauma. While today, more youth organizations embrace this methodology, it was unpopular when RYSE opened in 2008. Their work confronts the disconnect between direct service and old-school youth development/organizing models.

One of the things that became really clear and was the impetus for how we thought about building power is too often, youth organizing has been just about the policy win. “Let’s create conditions where Black and Brown young people are fighting against these racist policies, doing the most work with the least resource, support, or power. Then, after we win, we can share that with funders, and we can pat ourselves on the back.” Yet at the same time, those young folks are getting no mental health support. They are struggling to be housed. They are dealing with persistent trauma.

—Kimberly Aceves-Iñiguez, Co-Founder and Executive Director of RYSE Center

In a world that devalues, harms, and neglects young People of Color, RYSE’s commitment to developing the leadership of young people to transform the conditions of violence they experience is powerful and necessary.

Richmond with its history of disinvestment, gentrification, police violence, unemployment, environmental racism, and a school system that is inadequate and dangerous for young people, does not have the same legacy of power building and organizing found in Oakland or Berkeley. It is also the home of the Chevron oil refinery, the largest employer and polluter in the city. RYSE was born to confront these conditions and knows that young people are the best equipped to articulate what they need.

RYSE’s programming is based on priorities identified by young people, and their work has expanded in direct response to listening to their needs.¹ Their Youth Organizing, Education and Justice, and Media, Arts, and Culture programs offer opportunities for young People of Color to build collective power and to use cultural work to heal and transform systems and relationships to become more liberatory. RYSE is a well-known community space that holds grief, conflict, and crisis for young people, families, and staff. Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, Co-Founder and Associate Director, describes her own transformation through her work with RYSE:

But grief is a politic. That’s what is important to lift up; it’s not fucking self-care. For me, it’s political and it’s embodied; it’s soul work and it’s systems work, and we get to and have to do it together. It helps [to] remind me. It keeps me accountable.

As Clinical Supervisor, I have been directly involved in building out their liberatory clinical model developing healing justice interventions to address trauma through counseling, therapy, and case management. Their liberatory model centers young people while challenging mainstream public health and mental health systems of care that are harmful and inaccessible.

Reclaiming Our Sacred Wholeness: Healing Clinic Collective

The Healing Clinic Collective (HCC) works to remember, recenter, and reclaim our sacred and ancestral healing ways. Their work creates spaces of care and healing outside of the medical industrial complex while bringing Spirit back to the core of our organizing work. The HCC was conceived in 2011 by Carla M. Pérez, longtime environmental justice organizer, spiritual practitioner, and Co-Director/Collective Member of Movement Generation. The HCC offers culturally relevant healing to survivors of violence and trauma as an alternative to harmful and inaccessible Western-based medicine.

The HCC is well known and loved in the Bay Area for its daylong healing clinics that offer traditional/ancestral healing to BIPOC, LGBTQTSI+, formerly incarcerated, and poor communities who do not have access to care. The clinics are offered at no cost and exemplify the HCC’s ceremonial organizing methodology—a practice rooted in “vicarious healing”² to “address intergenerational trauma by amplifying generational healing through creating access to ATI (ancestral, traditional, and Indigenous) healing sessions offered by local community practitioners.”³ Over the years, they have built strong and sacred relationships with a network of healers and movement organizations across the Bay Area who are part of the fabric of care, safety, and healing the HCC provides for the community. They offer a directory of healers who provide acupuncture, divination, bodywork, energy work, herbal medicine, birth/midwifery care, and other ATI medicine practices.

The HCC is committed to building the power and capacity of other communities to hold healing clinics based on their ceremonial organizing model. They offer Planting a Seed for a Return to the Sacred: An HCC Guide for Organizing a Healing Clinic, provide clinic consultation, and have inspired other healing clinics across the country. The HCC’s movement-building work includes political education, teach-ins, and trainings, illustrating their commitment to making healing accessible to communities that experience the most harm and least access to health and healing spaces. In 2021 they hosted Birthing Revolution, an educational series on birthing for Queer, Trans, Two Spirit, and Nonbinary people, and Divine and Deserving, a Trans, Gender-Nonconforming, Two Spirit (TGNCTS) Healing Clinic. The HCC embodies the integral relationship between the political and spiritual in our healing and organizing work.

Healing and Accountability: Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective

The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) is a community-based group that is working to build and support transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse (CSA). Their work, at the intersection of transformative justice and healing justice, seeks to directly intervene in incidents of CSA, support others to do so in their communities, and help to prevent CSA without relying on carceral strategies. The BATJC started in 2013,⁴ when there were few people trained in transformative justice or with experience leading interventions dealing with CSA. They have responded to this gap by providing community trainings on transformative justice, accountability, and practical skill building to address and prevent conflict and harm.

It is a giant failure that in 2021, we, as political movements, not only in this country but around the world, still don’t know how to respond to some of the most common forms of violence that the most vulnerable members of our communities experience. That we still don’t know how to do that, to me is a signal of failure and, almost like a compass, it points to where we need to do more work.

—Mia Mingus, BATJC Founding Member (2013–2020)

We know that uninterrupted patterns of trauma, abuse, and violence have significant harmful impacts on our relationships and movements. And yet, there is still very little conversation about CSA inside of our communities and groups. The silence around CSA in general, and the ways policies such as mandated reporting further reinforce this silence, make it difficult to engage medical, health, and mental health practitioners to care for survivors without fear of involving the state or causing more harm. In response to this, the BATJC created a provider network to organize and educate medical and mental health practitioners to address the needs of survivors without creating more harm.

BATJC offers strategies to build community infrastructure via tools like pod mapping, which provides a framework for developing relationships rooted in trust and accountability to respond to harm. Pod maps,⁵ initially developed to ensure people have community to rely upon if/when we’ve caused harm, have since become widespread and used for all types of interventions, including care and crisis planning more broadly. As more transformative justice formations emerge, groups like the BATJC serve as a model that is accessible and applicable for those who may never be connected to social justice movements or community-based organizations.

Weaving Abolition, Healing Justice, and Transformative Justice: Dignity and Power Now

Dignity and Power Now (DPN) is a grassroots abolitionist organization building power with incarcerated/formerly incarcerated people and their families to end police violence and mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Explicitly rooted in healing and transformative justice, DPN developed an organizing model that centers healing generational trauma for survivors of state violence while building noncarceral strategies to address harm and violence. Patrisse Cullors, whose organizing and cultural work at the time was exploring the experience of survivors of state violence, both in her family and in the community, co-founded DPN in 2012.⁶ DPN, the anchor organization for the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence, helped to win civilian oversight of the sheriff’s department in 2014.

Freedom Harvest, DPN’s pop-up community wellness clinics, provides holistic health, healing, and art activities outside of jails in LA to family and community members visiting their loved ones. These clinics have been running since DPN’s inception and offer healing to those visiting their loved ones in jail. They have developed a community of healing justice practitioners who participate in their wellness clinics and rapid-response interventions. The Healing Justice Toolkit, developed by DPN in collaboration with Justice Teams Network, details how to engage a healing justice rapid-response strategy to address the emotional and spiritual needs of communities impacted by police violence.

We were largely organizing incredibly traumatized people, including myself, and what I recognize in my years of organizing is that we didn’t focus on the really traumatized and also those folks often didn’t stay inside organizations, because it was too hard, it was too much. And we didn’t have the infrastructure to keep them there.

—Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder of Dignity and Power Now and Crenshaw Dairy Mart⁷

Healing justice is central to their organizing strategy as evidenced by their work mobilizing health practitioners as part of the Justice LA coalition, which successfully stopped a multibillion-dollar jail expansion project.⁸ This highlights DPN’s understanding of the power of health practitioners to collude with or disrupt state violence in the name of care. Finally, DPN integrates healing justice into the workplace by developing organizational infrastructure that prioritizes relationships rooted in care and safety, and provides resources to support staff wellness and healing to tend to the impact of stress, crisis, and trauma. DPN plays a central role in helping us imagine the possibilities of healing justice as core to our movement building and organizing.

Putting the Lessons into Practice

Healing justice must be a core part of our work for liberation. From explicitly centering HJ in our organizing strategy, to creating ecosystems of care that directly confront the violence of the medical industrial complex, to developing strategies to transform generational trauma and structural violence. The examples in this chapter demonstrate how to use healing justice as a framework inside of our work for movement building.

Take some time to reflect on the questions below intended to inspire us to imagine how to learn from the wisdom of the groups in this chapter.

What kind of relationships do we need to collectively build power and transform trauma?

What support do we need to confront our own healing in this work? What are our collective strategies for grief, joy, and celebration?

Notes

¹ In 2016 RYSE conducted a listening campaign to better understand the needs and wants of young people around trauma, violence, and healing. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58ece61644024383be911a95/t/593e57012e69cf4a3e12ec6d/1497257742081/RYSE+Listening+Report+2016.pdf.

² Angela R. Aguilar, “Envisioning ‘Loving Care’ in Impermanent Healing Spaces: Sacred and Political Organizing Towards Decolonial Health/Care in Oakland, California,” Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, ISSI Graduate Fellows Working Papers Series (2018–2019).

³ Ibid.

⁴ The initial iteration of the BATJC began in 2011 as a program of Generation FIVE (a TJ organization working to end CSA in five generations) and was named the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collaborative. When Generation FIVE closed, the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective became an autonomous group.

⁵ For more information about pod mapping, visit https://batjc.wordpress.com/resources/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/.

⁶ Patrisse’s performance piece, STAINED: An Intimate Portrayal of State Violence, was based on her brother’s experience of state violence and the experiences of other survivors who participated in a class action lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

⁷ Crenshaw Dairy Mart is an artist collective and art gallery committed to abolition and using cultural work to transform state violence and trauma in Los Angeles.

⁸ More about this campaign in the chapter “Why We Organize Practitioners.”

A Constellation of Healing Justice and Liberation:
Sites of Practice in New York City

Adaku Utah and Cara Page

We deserve love, and we deserve care in our bodies, in our changing bodies, in our stigmatized bodies.

—Geleni Fontaine, RN, LAc, former Collective Member/Owner and Acupuncturist, Third Root Community Health Center

In this chapter we honor the many stars in the healing justice constellation of New York City. We share a few pivotal stories of projects that have been critical to the mapping of collective care, safety, healing justice, and liberation, including Third Root Community Health Center, H.O.L.L.A!, Rock Dove Collective, Third Space, and Harriet’s Apothecary. Each has left an imprint on the lineage of healing justice, whether rooting in collective care and safety, harm reduction, mutual aid, abolition, and anti-capitalism they deeply impact our work for our futures.

Conditions

In the early 2000s in New York City, many community organizers and healers were responding to multiple fronts of struggle. Post 9/11 there was increased policing and surveillance of movement organizations and communities under the false guise of national security to ultimately track pro-Palestine and pro-abolitionist organizing. Mass incarceration and criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and Queer and Trans communities grew in New York City as a result of broken windows policing and stop-and-frisk policies.¹ These were but a few of the difficult conditions of this time, yet social justice organizations persevered, and collectives seeded powerful new projects centering safety, collective care, and harm-reduction strategies.

Formations

How Our Lives Link Altogether (H.O.L.L.A!) was started at the Otisville Correctional Facility in 2007 by seven young Black men who had all gone to prison before the age of twenty-one. H.O.L.L.A!’s strategy for social justice, created by Black abolitionists incarcerated at the Green Haven Correctional Facility after the Attica rebellion, used political education and consciousness raising to organize inside of prisons. Cory Greene, Healing Justice Organizer and Co-Founder of H.O.L.L.A! reflected:

We were all ushered in through the Resurrection Study Group developed by the elders who brought this to the young people with twenty to twenty-five year sentences. We needed to be “resurrected.” We had the space to meet, build, strategize, challenge each other to be better, and hold each other accountable while also dreaming of an organization that could help our communities. That was the spirit of H.O.L.L.A!. Our practice is learning about organizing, issues, and intersectionality, and learning from our elders and having people come in and teach us.

They have been offering free political education to young People of Color throughout New York City for fifteen years. They host four programs including the Healing Justice Workshop and Training Series, deeply rooted in abolition, Black feminist, and Black radical traditions of the South. They said of themselves, “As Healing Justice Organizers, we choose to resist against these violent forces by building trust, [and] spaces that encourage emotional wisdom and the capacity to resist by healing our communities.”²

The Rock Dove Collective, a radical community health exchange, was active in New York City from 2006 until 2012. As Autumn Brown, a Co-Founder of Rock Dove Collective recalls:

We crafted this wild, beautiful project that was very much from its inception focused on making health care accessible via mutual aid and barter. Our vision from the beginning was that we would build a system that would be available to any and all New Yorkers, but especially those without health insurance.

The collective was anti-capitalist and rooted in anarchist principles. They used the Social Worker Code of Ethics,³ which was central, as Alana Lopez, a Co-Founding Member named, “We used these as guiding principles to support how we organized ourselves and were accountable to each other and our community.” Strategies for Rock Dove Collective were abundant, from vetting practitioners on their protocol and treatment of communities to tip sheets on how to navigate state systems for survival. For example, they produced a survey to vet doctors for whether they were providing dignified care for our communities. As described by Danielle Sered, a Rock Dove Collective Member, “We asked people: What’s in the waiting room? How did they treat you? Did they ask you the kinds of questions you want to be asked? Did they ask you questions you didn’t want to be asked?” This was used to assess how they would create a space for care that was rooted in community responses, needs, and values of safety and care not mediated by the state.

Also invaluable to their work was building intentional and trustworthy relationships within the core team that were deeply invested in care, support, and safety for one another. They spoke about several experiences where the ecosystem of care they had created was able to hold immense loss, trauma, and grief that solidified them as a collective and deeply impacted the way they held their work.

Being at Rock Dove when I experienced violence as a sex worker that deeply put me the fuck out, [Rock Dove’s] support forever changed me. Thinking about the ways the web around us that we had built really helped to serve as a place for me to heal . . . I know that politically for me, that experience became something that really informed my organizing.

—Maryse Mitchell-Brody, longtime Rock Dove Collective Member, current Development Officer of Third Wave Fund

In 2010 they connected with Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and other projects around the country, and explored how their work was in relation to the political framework of healing justice. Some of the collective members participated in the co-creation and design of the first Healing Justice Practice Space at the Allied Media Conference in 2011. Members of the Rock Dove Collective, which is no longer in practice as a collective, are still deeply in relationship to each other, and have inspired many through their model and practices of care rooted in abolition, harm reduction, and anti-capitalism.

Third Root Community Health Center described themselves as a holistic health care center offering yoga, acupuncture, East Asian medicine, massage, herbal medicine, and wellness education in Brooklyn and the oldest collectively owned holistic health center in New York City.⁴ Julia Bennett, Third Root Co-Owner, Acupunturist, and Herbal Medicine Consultant recalls the beginning of their journey in 2008: “We were [seven] yoga practitioners, herbalists, acupuncturists, and massage therapists that created this vision and built Third Root from the ground up. We formed as a worker-owned cooperative because of our shared vision and goals to create a space that brought humanity, respect, and honored care to all folks, particularly the disenfranchised.”

Third Root recently closed in December 2021 after thirteen years of incredible service. This has been a tremendous loss for the Flatbush and New York City community that has benefited greatly from this powerful healing space. It is indicative of the heightened reality of gentrification privatizing spaces and impossible rents in large urban settings like New York City.

They learned a lot about how to hold a cooperative healing space. Geleni Fontaine, former Member/Co-Owner of Third Root Community Health Center shares, “It’s important to have really good discussions, at the outset, about what people’s needs are around their actual healing modality work versus being a business and also having a space and sharing leadership. Also creating space along the way to have evaluation and assessment. And owning that, that’s part of the process. Knowing that’s something that’s very often necessary in order to have longevity.”

In their closing statement they uplifted the challenges of holding the contradictions of running a business for, by, and about Indigenous and People of Color: “While working to streamline our business model in a rapidly-changing environment, we were continually confronted by how capitalism does not prioritize wellness for Black and Brown, Queer, Trans, dis/abled, formerly incarcerated, and working-class people.”⁵

Harriet’s Apothecary (HA) was conceived in 2014 from the belief that Black lives are inherently valuable rooted in principles of creative interdependence, healing justice, collective economics, abolition, and belonging. Their work grows from the legacy of Harriet Tubman and ancestral lineages that center healing for the sake of justice and justice for the sake of healing. They intentionally chose to gather as an all-Black collective across multiple identities because their existence and togetherness is fundamentally a form of resistance against the colonization and imperialism of their bodies and practices. Some of their values are reflected below by members of Harriet’s Apothecary:

There is nothing wrong with us . . . We are holding spaces reminding people of their power that they get to name what healing looks like for them without coercion.

—Erika Totten, Harriet’s Apothecary Healer

If we do not have safety as a foundation, and if we are not supporting one another, it all implodes, and it all starts looking like what we are trying to move away from because in a capitalist system, everything is transactional and everyone is expendable.

—Eva Renise Turner, Harriet’s Apothecary Leadership Team Member

Healing needs to happen on an energetic, mental, spiritual, physical level . . . and needs to always be front and center, so that we’re not replicating these systemic hierarchies.

—Nico Le Blanc, Harriet’s Apothecary Leadership Circle/Healer

Harriet’s Apothecary’s sacred work of loving and building power with Black people has taken the shape of cocreating local and national healing spaces modeled after the Mississippi Freedom Schools to bring resources and practices of wellness, safety, and care outside of the medical industrial complex. They currently support social justice organizations by integrating and embodying healing justice principles and practices inside of movement-building work. They also hold a fellowship program that supports politicized healers and leaders in creating more liberatory, sustainable, and pleasurable movements.

They continue to build out their vision and work through centering the collective capacity of organizers to be able to incorporate healing practices that can expand movement containers for building collective power. Aligned with healing justice, they believe inherent to the role of healers is to respond to the generational trauma from systemic oppression in our lives and to build futures free of policing, surveillance, violence, and punishment.

3rd Space (or 3rd Space Support) began as a staff- and member-led project in 2011 at the Audre Lorde Project (ALP).⁶

We wanted to think outside of the medical industrial complex, in the ways our communities have always taken care of each other for our health and wellness. We chose the name 3rd Space as we were trying to think differently about wellness and sustainability, in connection to the movement. Southerners on New Ground told us about the concept of 3rd Space, from Black revolutionary thought that it was “the space of creation, invention, innovation, and birth. It is the space where we dream of a new world.”⁷

—Kris Hayashi, Executive Director of Transgender Law Center, former Co-Director of the Audre Lorde Project

Foundational to 3rd Space Support are these principles:

We will be based in the core values of healing and wellness, justice thinkiNg, joy and imagination, collective culture, and decision-making.

We are a place to give and receive sustainable support, where creation, invention, and innovation will be practiced.

We will draw from our resilience to support ourselves.

They continue to call to action healers, health practitioners, social workers, and cultural workers within their base who are interested in providing different methodologies and traditions of care for Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Two Spirit, Trans, and Gender-Nonconforming of Color communities in New York City and in our movements.

The first iteration of 3rd Space used the model of support circles, asking members of the Audre Lorde Project to provide pro bono and sliding-scale services, including healing practices rooted in energy- and body-based traditions (e.g., reiki and acupuncture). They also partnered with social workers to help identify resources to navigate public health and social services in the city.

We wanted to be able to create a space where people who are coming to ALP could get what they needed to be able to literally survive every day and then also participate in changing the systems that were not supportive of them in their survival . . . We were able to provide pro bono massage, acupuncture, or a place where people could just sit. And we had MetroCards and food.

—Rebecca Wisotsky (she/her), former Project Coordinator, 3rd Space Support

3rd Space began hosting “Community Care Days,” which have offered clothing swaps, healing sessions, teas and tinctures, haircuts, makeup, and manicures. They also coordinate mobile teams of practitioners and organizers that bring wellness and care resources to rallies and marches. In more recent years 3rd Space has held training sessions on healing justice and the medical industrial complex for QTBIPOC healers and health providers to explore abolitionist and healing justice strategies that disrupt the medical industrial complex. As Gina George, 3rd Space Support Program Coordinator from 2014 to 2017, reflected, “It’s the ancestral knowledge of what we already know we need for ourselves that’s tied up in collective care. It’s like tapping back into that intuitive, sensory question of, what do [our communities] need to feel fully fulfilled in this lifetime?”

These are only some of the stars in the constellation of HJ lineage in New York City. All of these formations have taught us and continue to design a path toward collective liberation and care.

Reflective Practice: Dreaming toward Our Liberation

Draw, dance, or write something to tell us about what you imagine for an ecosystem of care using the following questions:

What does collective care look like outside of state systems?

What can we build for care and safety that can be adaptive and generative in the face of oppressive conditions?

Notes

¹ Jennifer Fratello, Andrés F. Rengifo, Jennifer Trone, and Brenda Velazquez, “Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk,” Vera Institute of Justice, September 2013, www.vera.org/publications/coming-of-age-with-stop-and-frisk-experiences-self-perceptions-and-public-safety-implications.

² H.O.L.L.A! healing justice movement, accessed February 25, 2022, https://healwithholla.com/about-the-movement.

³ “About/Ethics/Code,” National Association of Social Workers, accessed January 16, 2022, www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English.

⁴ “Statement of Closure from Third Root Community Health Center,” Third Root Community Health Center, accessed February 1, 2022, https://thirdroot.org/2021/09/03/statement-of-closure-third-root/.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ “About,” Audre Lorde Project, accessed July 1, 2021, https://alp.org/.

⁷ “3rd Space description,” personal interview between Cara Page and Kris Hayashi, September 10, 2021.

Political + Spiritual Imperatives for the Future

Photograph by Margarita Corporan. Visual description: A black-and-white landscape photo of a skyline of trees facing their reflection in the water, slightly distorted in its mirroring. Lush grass follows the edge of the water. Behind the trees are several layers of bushes and other foliage. Above, a mostly clear white sky.

Our Land as Kin

Cara Page

What our bodies . . . require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies. We need nourishment, equilibrium, water, connection, justice.¹

—Aurora Levins Morales, Kindling: Writings on the Body

Much of the healing justice political framework is rooted in responding to generational trauma from the abuses, violence, and irrevocable harm of slavery, colonization, and oppression in our lives. Integral to this is also healing the Earth from the generational trauma of war, extraction of plants and animal life, genocide, and forced removal from our geographies.

The social justice marches at the Glasgow Climate Summit (2021) brought the global crises of environmental injustices to the forefront again, but the impact of global warming has been insidiously impacting People of Color and Indigenous communities for centuries because of capitalism, ableism, and white supremacy. We have been organizing against harmful practices of deforestation, air pollution, pesticides, toxic waste dumping, mining devastating the landscape, oil and gas refineries’ pollution on land and sea, the extraction of sacred Indigenous lands, and the list goes on. The root of climate change is colonization, slavery, imperialism, war, and capitalism. Yet the mainstream environmental movement has often cared more about the preservation of land and wildlife for scenic views, not the survival of Indigenous lands and the generations of Black and Brown communities who live there.

The political and spiritual tapestries woven by environmental, land sovereignty, and environmental and climate justice movements are a long legacy. We sat down with a few of our comrades in these movements to be in conversation on key questions at the nexus of healing justice, climate and environmental justice, and land sovereignty. We had the honor to speak to Tammy Greer, the Director of the Southern Mississippi Center for American Indian Research Studies;² Monique Verdin, Director of the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange,³ and Coordinator of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Food Sovereignty Program,⁴ which supports the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Network of Indigenous Gardeners, People of the Sacred Medicine Trail;⁵ and Tré Vasquez, a Collective Member of Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.⁶ We also gathered in conversation with Kristyn Leach, Founder of Namu Farm and Second Generation Seeds, “a collaboration with Kitazawa Seed Company and grassroots community organizations designed to connect Asian Pacific Islander people with the plants of our respective ancestral lands”;⁷ Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Co-Executive Director of Climate Justice Alliance;⁸ and Jackie Patterson, Executive Director of the Chisholm Legacy Project, “a resource hub for Black frontline climate justice leadership.”⁹

There is a wide breadth of knowledge and praxis among all of these leaders, and many histories and ideologies woven between their stories. I took poetic license to curate this conversation in three rounds as if a song, psalm, or poem for the Earth. Each section begins with a guiding question or verse. The first round calls in the lessons we are learning from the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The second round is naming what we have lost from legacies of corporate and government greed and the consequences of war and extraction. The third round asks the question, “What can we imagine for our futures that brings forth wisdom from our past?”

Round I: Listening to the Elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire

Earth

My work involves mostly going out and talking about how these plants can teach us what they know and how watching them can teach us a lot about being human beings, who can live in relationship to Earth. We need to learn how to do that too, because the Earth is another being.

—Tammy Greer

Water

Following Indigenous leadership and understanding of relationship to place—historical understanding, a deep, generational understanding. How are we prepared for—and I don’t want to sound alarmist—the water crisis that’s already here and that it’s going to only intensify? I remember growing up as a youngster in ceremony and hearing grandmas talk about there’s wars for oil, there’s wars for these life sources, [which is what] we call them, not resources. But be ready, because there’s going to be wars for water someday soon.

—Tré Vasquez

Air

With the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Network of Indigenous Gardeners, People of the Sacred Medicine Trail, we’ve been really thinking about the fact that we’re in this kind of hurricane alley or just always kind of watching the cone of uncertainty sweep across the coast. We’ve been trying to strategize where is a safe place for not only the plants to go to, but for us to be able to be in community with each other in good times and in bad. Thinking about how migration is and has been a way of life for a really long, long time. And so, recognizing that we can have kind of hubs of safety. So Tammy Greer has a greenhouse that’s up in Hattiesburg. We have another greenhouse that’s over on the Alabama/Florida border, kind of just north of Destin, Florida. And then we have another greenhouse that’s in Houma . . . to be able to get the plants both from the bayous to propagate them and to get them to Northern locations, but also vice versa. For us [we must] continue to bring those plants that are important to us back down to the bayou as well, and to not turn our backs on those relationships with those places, but also recognizing their vulnerability.

—Monique Verdin

Fire

During the fires, literally the first clinic [of the Healing Clinic Collective] that we had was two days after the start of the fires¹⁰ . . . Fires are literally raging and we’re breathing in this smoke and people are fleeing their homes. The one thing that we knew how to do was come together in the way that our parents and grandparents would and say, “if there’s a need, we’re going to take care of each other . . .” It’s that simple. So these clinics came together and for me, it was one of the most powerful moments in my organizing work. We just created the space so spirit and healing could move. And that in and of itself will speak louder than any workshop, than any pedagogy, than anything . . . because you feel it—how powerful collective care is and look at how everything in the system that we’re navigating is completely contradictory to that. I feel like that’s our ancestral memory, right? So I want our organizing and our frameworks to be rooted in awakening and remembrance because I guess that’s the north star, right?

—Tré Vasquez

Round II: What Are Our Legacies of Sacrifice and Loss to Transform?

Colonization has disconnected us from our ancestral lands, our medicines, and traditions that have been critical to our survival and the Earth’s regeneration. In our own healing, we must replenish the Earth and ourselves from these atrocities.

Our plant relatives, our animal relatives, our water relatives . . . there’s so much to learn in how they function and their systems of interdependence and collective care. And how we as humans, some of us at extreme levels have gone so far away from that, that we’re just lost, right? [That is why] we’re in this literal ecological crisis that we are in today.

—Tammy Greer

We are losing the stories of blue indigo along the shoreline used for dyeing and medicines in South Carolina, or the brackish waters along the Underground Railroad coastal states that protected ancestors while running to freedom in tall grass and low tides.

Our loss of land, bodies, practices, traditions, and memories is deeply seeded in the bones of colonialism and the blood of wars. As Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, immigrants, refugees, enslaved, and forcibly displaced communities, it is a gift for those of us that still hold a direct relationship to the land of our ancestors that we now steward in their legacy.

Looking at the multigenerational realities of my own family, who are part of the Houma Nation and from the Terrebonne and Lafourche area, which is the territory between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers, where oil and gas was first found in our coastal territories. The legacy of land loss is what I’ve learned over the years, and I was shocked to learn about how south of Louisiana is losing land at one of the fastest rates in the world. That information is paired with the stories that my grandmother has always told me since I was a child about our land being stolen from us by the oil and gas companies in the early 1900s. But to even kind of expand out more and to recognize that the legacy of land loss for us really begins with colonization. The awareness and connection to the cycle of storms that we’re up against, while we remain in the heart of so-called cancer alley from petrochemical industrial facilities, extraction, and production.

—Monique Verdin

If we listen to our memories of survival, we can remember what feeds us and the sacrifices our people have made.

There are a lot of flashpoints around globalization and its impact on small-scale farmers and peasants during the 1990s. Just bringing together all of those threads of what people have gone through from Chiapas, Mexico, to Indigenous people here fighting the corporate hybridization of their seeds, to the Korean farmer who committed suicide at a World Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun . . .¹¹

—Kristyn Leach

The long-term effects of decisions, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),¹² would eventually wipe out small farming globally. This would be to the detriment of the Earth and the food and survival economies of poor Black and Brown people globally. As well as the long-term effects of government buyouts of the last vestiges of Black farmland harvested by descendants of ancestors who had stewarded the land since chattel slavery.

I work with a community called Sandbranch, Texas. This community is literally being driven off of their land. The community is an historically Black Freedmen Settlement. It was founded by people who were emancipated from slavery. Since emancipation, they only had well water. And since the ’80s, it has been contaminated and undrinkable. They have no trash pickup. The area has been declared a floodplain, even though they’ve never had a flood in their two hundred–plus years of existence. And now [the] Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] is buying out their properties. They assess the properties as having scant value, and then they subtract the amount that it will cost for them to demolish the homes that are on those properties. In the end, residents have been given checks for $350. In effect, their land is being stolen.

—Jackie Patterson

How do we hold the contradictions of Indigenous communities displaced from their ancestral lands needing to buy back land that should have never been stolen?

I am in this process of trying to purchase back the land that was my great-grandmother’s original allotment. So I’ve been in this process, and it’s exhausting, trying to work through deeds and tribal enrollment records. I mean, I don’t believe in land ownership, and so it’s a constant tension for me around thinking about owning land while decolonizing the systems that control land.

And even in the context of owning land, ultimately we don’t own the land. The land is held by the US, by the state, right? The land is the property of the state, even in the context of Indigenous sovereign nations, their land is held in trust by the state.

So here I am trying to regain this access to land that wasn’t even my grandma’s or even our original people’s. My people are from Tennessee, Alabama, and the Carolinas. But when she (grandma) got moved to Oklahoma, [she] was given an allotment of land, and now I’m trying to get that back . . .¹³

—Ozawa Bineshi Albert

The loss of being caught within systems of laws and jurisdictions that control our relationship to lands are deeply rooted in bloodshed, domination, and colonization. As Tammy Greer, an elder of the Houma Nation, reminds us, “Because of colonization we brought in a domination paradigm that’s led to an unsustainable relationship with the Earth and with the other creatures here. Because in the domination paradigm, if we want it and you’ve got to blow something up for it, we blow it up and we dig deep holes and we flood the deserts and also drain the swamps.” We are out of balance in our relationships to the Earth and therefore out of balance in relationship to each other.

Round III: What Can We Build toward Transforming Our Futures?

In this round our conversations grew lively when imagining and dreaming what needs to come next to change the direction of climate and environmental justice and land sovereignty strategies. Tré, from Movement Generation, explained Just Transition as one possible model to build collective power through regenerative economies and structures that do not extract and deplete people or land.¹⁴

Just Transition and core frameworks, as it relates to working with communities across the states and beyond [to the Global South], is about building powerful shifts away from extraction and exploitation towards place-based regenerative economies that are in right relationship with one another and this Earth. It’s learning what it takes to practice collective governance as we contest for political power; equitably redistribute resources to the people; and center healing and transformative justice—this has to be critically woven into this work.

Right now, we are building with campaigns like Reclaim Our Power,¹⁵ where we’re working to call out PG&E’s [Pacific Gas and Electric Company] direct hand in hundreds of wildfires across California alone. We know we need to build a utility [company] that is community and worker owned, and through our work we are going to stop these harmful, deadly energy systems in place now that are investor owned by Wall Street, where there’s just no justice or repercussions. Their false solutions will never be in the interest of the community or the environment. They’re essentially killing our communities and making us pay for it.

—Tré Vasquez

Another vision of rebalancing our power and relationships is the “paradigm of co-creation” deeply rooted in the work that Tammy and Monique are building on the Gulf Coast and Mississippi Delta with other Indigenous communities, allies, Queer/Trans, and Nonbinary folk.

I think in another paradigm of cocreation, where we consider the plants and the animals and the other beings, the other races of beings, the other nationalities of beings, the other types of beings, the plants and the rocks and the trees. And we consider their state [of being] . . . Understanding everything has its place and it has its ways and it has its usefulness and it has its value . . . it’s a value because it exists. Obviously, if we don’t know why it’s there or what its value is, it’s our ignorance.

—Tammy Greer

We have to recognize our relationships to all the living beings and to do that in a here and now, but also to think about what that means two years from now, twenty years from now, and two hundred years from now . . . to be committed to trying to restore balance and to hold space that is safe and respected. It’s like, we need a place to go to, to run to, to be able to grow food at, but also that land won’t always be a place that I’ll occupy . . . I’m finite here, but that medicine can keep growing long after I am gone.

—Monique Verdin

We are building collective power, care, and safety by transforming our kinship to our lands, bodies, spirits, and economies. These economies value interdependence between all life that do not rely on extraction as Just Transition envisions, or in co-creation that Tammy and Monique speak to. It will require us to learn new ways of being outside of capitalism and colonization—which we have never seen in our lifetime before—so it will require something radically new and unimagined for our futures.

Critical to these futures is knowing how we will be in relationship to a continuum of life and survival by bringing forward ancestral traditions of seeds and plants.

Because of the tension of what has caused displacement particularly to the US, a lot of people don’t really know where their ancestral land even is . . . So what has been really healing for my communities is to have these crops [connected to Korean ancestry] and these plants and relationships to our food and traditions to be the way that we can have some sense of reconciliation with our ancestral land . . . That’s been the most powerful thing to me is to just get to see intergenerational conversations, and people who have different relationships to a sense of what it even means to be Korean. Just to know that those plants can travel with us . . . And know that we were the type of ancestors we wanted to be.

—Kristyn Leach

Foundational to environmental justice is to center and value interconnectedness of all that is.

It’s important to understand our positionality when participating in bold and visionary strategies towards land rematriation and reparations . . . I also feel that we have to learn and center the principles of disability justice. Shout out Sins Invalid! Because it is not just about how we’re preparing for the future, but how we act right now. How do we take care of one another and consider what different needs are going to be across this spectrum?¹⁶ How are we remembering to not leave anybody behind?

—TRÉ VAsQUEZ

It is environmental racism, capitalism, and neglect that leaves our communities susceptible to the forced displacement of our people and continued overdevelopment, extraction, and contamination of the Indigenous lands we live on. What we have learned from natural disasters, like Hurricanes Katrina and Maria, is that after the storm comes the real disaster of corporate land grabs, state violence, and policing that will increase exponentially at the expense of our survival. While climate change will exacerbate the disparities of access to green space, contaminated food and waters, and disproportionately expose us to pollution, flooding, fires, and extreme weather temperatures, our communities have already experienced many environmental inequities for generations and have persevered.

The environmental justice/climate justice and land sovereignty movements being led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color organizers are holding the frontlines for all of us, building power, and healing and recovering the planet, our land, and our traditions. These movements are fighting for our freedoms at the intersections of racial justice, reproductive and gender justice, and economic and healing justice. Healing justice as a political strategy has always framed our relationship to the Earth as integral to building and understanding transformative systems of care that are inseparable from our breath, our medicines, traditions, and lands.

Notes

¹ Aurora Levins Morales, Kindling: Writings on the Body (Palabrera Press, 2013), 10.

² Center for American Indian Research and Studies (CAIRS), University of Southern Mississippi, accessed December 5, 2021, www.usm.edu/interdisciplinary-studies-professional-development/cairs.php.

³ “Land Memory Bank,” The Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange Facebook page, accessed February 9, 2022, https://www.facebook.com/landmemorybank/.

⁴ “Women for Food Sovereignty and Food Security,” Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network (WECAN), accessed February 4, 2022, https://www.wecaninternational.org/foodsovereignty.

⁵ “Food Sovereignty,” Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network (WECAN), accessed February 9, 2022, https://www.wecaninternational.org/food-sovereignty-ohih.

⁶ “About Our Work,” Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project, accessed July 15, 2022, https://movementgeneration.org/our-work/.

⁷ “Namu Farm,” Truelove Seeds, accessed February 19, 2022, https://trueloveseeds.com/collections/namu-farm.

⁸ “Just Transition,” Climate Justice Alliance, accessed February 9, 2022, https://climatejusticealliance.org/just-transition/.

⁹ “About Us,” The Chisholm Legacy Project, accessed December 14, 2021, https://thechisholmlegacyproject.org/about-us/.

¹⁰ Julie Cart, “California’s 2020 Fire Siege: Wildfires by the Numbers,” Cal Matters, July 30, 2021, https://calmatters.org/environment/2021/07/california-fires-2020/; See also the chapter “Building the World We Want and Deserve: Sites of Practice in California.”

¹¹ Peter Tinti, “In 2003 a Farmer (Lee Kyung Hae) Killed Himself to Protest Globalization, Not Much Has Changed,” Vice, September 12, 2019, www.vice.com/en/article/j5ygx8/in-2003-a-farmer-killed-himself-to-protest-globalization-little-has-changed.

¹² “North American Free Trade Agreement,” Wikipedia, accessed November 17, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement.

¹³ This quote references the Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears in 1830 and the Dawes Act of 1887 (see the chapter “We Are Our History: Transforming the Legacy of Criminalization”).

¹⁴ “Movement Generation Just Transition Framework Resources,” Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project, accessed July 15, 2022, https://movementgeneration.org/movement-generation-just-transition-framework-resources/.

¹⁵ “About Us,” Reclaim Our Power! Utility Justice Campaign, accessed July 5, 2022, https://reclaimourpowerca.org/about/.

¹⁶ See “Disability Justice” in the chapter “Healing Justice: Movements and Political Frameworks.”

We

Tré Vasquez

What will be possible because we remembered?

Even in a world rapidly working to disconnect us from being human

We remembered

That even if someday we can no longer grow what we need from the soil

That we are still the soil

That we are made from the earth, water, and air

And so we protect them with our lives the way we protect each other

We are seed savers

Storytellers

Living libraries

Foreseers of the future and portals to the past

The students of pollinators

Organizers

Campesinxs

Yerberas

Sacred clowns

Brown and down computer hackers

Song keepers

We are lovers

Doctors

Birth workers birthing new worlds

Transcending smoking ashes unfurled

Messengers airdropping seeds of resistance

On a world collapsing into herself

We are a prayer of Remembrance

We learn to move like underground rivers

Hiding to preserve our force and medicine

Emerging as springs to sustain Life

Reminding the people to only use what they need

And so I’m reminding you to Never forget the ones that are coming

To reciprocate now, while there is time

Make yourselves into waterways

Trusting where you are going

Slowly eroding pathways into the future:

Our molecules in perpetual cycles of life (never death)

Only evaporating to return as monsoons

Flash flooding their borders

their prisons

their wars

their haunting monuments

white houses

capital

and binaries

We are the thunder awakening sleeping giants

Blood red like sequoia

Our roots underground communication systems:

Interconnected-Intelligence-Intergalactic

Beyond Jedi mind tricks: ancestral memory

We are a slight of the hand

Night visioned to sense points of intervention

Manifested by our matriarchs who couldn’t see us

But prayed we would live the day to embody lightning

Striking this beast to its knees

colonialism

capitalism

extractivism

imperialism

This beast

We will bring to its burial

Allowing its bones to compost into building blocks of regeneration

An old way reincarnated

Into the new world we are birthing

We are still here

Because we refused to forget

That we, too,

Are a part of this living, breathing world

Beautiful Miracles of Resistance:
Creating Abolitionist Systems of Care

Erica Woodland

Abolition holds both the rigor and possibility to create the world we want if we commit to learning and practicing it in our everyday lives. The movement to abolish the prison industrial complex emerged in response to the War on Drugs and the rise of mass incarceration, but mainstream reformists at the time viewed abolitionist theory and praxis as extremist. Twenty years ago abolition was considered fringe and outlandish. However, since that time, due to organizing when this ideology was completely unpopular, more activists, organizers, and community members are ready to meaningfully engage with abolition as a real alternative to the carceral system. After the uprisings following the state-sponsored murder of George Floyd in 2020, more of us are down to take the risk to demand more than just reforms for a carceral system that does not work, is costly, and exists to perpetuate itself, leading to more violence and harm. We can learn from the wisdom of generations of abolitionist movement work to birth the world we want: one without policing and prisons.

As we imagine and build this future, we must prepare our communities for the inevitable threats we will endure as we collectively divest from carceral models. To do this, we must center the vision and strategies that Harriet Tubman, and others who worked to abolish slavery, have transmitted to us.

What Is Abolition?

The roots of the prison abolition movement in the United States began with the movement to abolish slavery, another institution that those who held power (and even some of us who didn’t) could not imagine a world without it. If one system of violence is eliminated, we know that the state will find a way to transform it into a new one, which is illustrated by the expansion of the prison system just as slavery was ending.

To disrupt carceral resurrection, it is imperative to understand that abolition is not just about what we want to eliminate (the entire carceral system of surveillance, policing, jails, prisons, detention centers, etc.) but also transforming the very conditions that proliferate harm and violence in our society.

Prison-industrial complex abolition is a political vision, a structural analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy . . . a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.¹

—Mariame Kaba

The MIC Is a Carceral System

The medical industrial complex (MIC) is not separate from the prison industrial complex.² In fact, it is often the preferred carceral strategy as it functions under the guise and illusion of care. Psychiatric facilities, hospitals, and all forms of forced treatment and surveillance connected to the medical industrial complex run counter to abolition. Shifting funding from police and prisons to social workers and treatment facilities is an old strategy. History has shown this: replacing one system of violence with a seemingly more kind and gentle one. But that system still targets and seeks to eliminate the most vulnerable—the disabled, neurodivergent, and survivors of trauma. When we fall for these types of solutions, we will lose in the long run.

The medical industrial complex is inaccessible, harmful, and violent, but we still need systems in place to tend to our physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological needs. As a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, I have done work in a number of carceral settings—schools, jails, prisons, group homes, and psychiatric facilities—and have struggled to hold the contradiction between my abolitionist values and my role as a practitioner. We absolutely need more of us moving abolition overtly and covertly inside the system, but don’t have enough spaces to experiment with how to put our values into practice or to be accountable to them.

I founded the National and Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network in 2016 to build a space to politicize and organize mental health practitioners. To imagine a world where instead of colluding with the state to criminalize, incarcerate, and institutionalize our people, we intervene and disrupt the state’s abuse while creating alternative systems of care rooted in abolition. If we do not create our own systems, we will continue to lose people and waste our energy reforming the MIC instead of supporting the alternatives that are growing on the ground.

Lessons from the Ground: Building Long-Term Infrastructure

As abolitionists, a core tension that we must grapple with is how to create alternative models while living in the reality that at times we need to depend on the current carceral systems for our survival. Any crisis response that involves law enforcement introduces the risk of arrest or the use of deadly force. Seeking care from health and mental health providers, who are mandated reporters, can lead to surveillance and family disruption as a result of child protective services. We know the state will not save us. So we rely on each other—an interdependent ecosystem of care created and sustained by BIPOC, Queer, Trans, sick, disabled, undocumented, and poor folks, sex workers, and drug users showing up for each other. We must remember, because it is part of the colonialist project not to, that we have so much to draw from as we imagine care and safety without policing and surveillance. We need long-term infrastructure rooted in healing justice made of the material, relational, and spiritual systems and networks to weave an ecosystem of care based in abolition.

It is important to document what we are learning so we are prepared for the next uprising, incidence of mass violence, or climate catastrophe. We know they are coming and must be ready. Some of that infrastructure work is already happening as abolitionist groups, like the ones explored in this chapter, are creating alternatives to carceral care strategies that ground us in real-world examples of how to get free and take care of each other.

The Anti-Police Terror Project created the Mental Health First Programs (MH First) in Oakland and Sacramento in December 2019 and August 2020. These programs are the only non-911 responses to mental health crises in these cities. MH First works to decriminalize and destigmatize emotional and mental health crises while addressing their root causes.³ They are building a network of first responders committed to abolitionist practice, organizing (and winning) campaigns to divest from law enforcement and reinvest in community-led strategies, supporting families who are survivors of state violence, and running a free crisis hotline. Fireweed Collective, a mutual aid organization committed to the principles of healing justice, offers another powerful abolitionist model to learn from. Fireweed Collective (formerly known as the Icarus Project) offers peer support groups, webinars, and tools to support the emotional wellness of all people while disrupting harm and violence perpetuated by the mental health system.⁴ Interrupting Criminalization (IC) works to end the criminalization of women and LGBTQTSI+ People of Color by providing capacity building and tools for communities to develop abolitionist responses to violence, harm, and crisis. From toolkits and trainings on nonpolice responses to crises, to a help desk that supports people to build transformative justice interventions, IC offers real-time support for community-based experiments in care and safety.⁵

Agustina Vidal, Fireweed Collective member, sharing about her work in Argentina to end asylums, reminds us that as we move to dismantle one system we must be vigilant about unintended harmful consequences in our abolition work:

We need to acknowledge the asylums are a failure, that we have let people down. We have failed people. But no matter the conditions, people create joy and abolition has to protect that joy. Our principles cannot destroy lives.

It takes risk, rigor, and resources to build alternatives to carceral strategies at the scale we need to collectively survive the immediate and long-term impacts of the next disaster (climate change, state violence, pandemic, etc.). The soil of this infrastructure must be made up of relationships, trust, and the kind of intimacy only forged through rupture and repair, from struggling together to get free. The task is to build models rooted in abolition that call us into right relationship with ourselves and each other. Agustina Vidal, reflects, “It’s hard for me to think in terms of infrastructure. I think in terms of relationships and humanity. What humanity have we lost, and do we need to recover so that we can do abolition? What bonding have we been robbed of and we need to focus on?”

Andrea Ritchie (Co-Founder of Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network) explains the importance of building ecosystems of care based on understanding the unique relationships and conditions we are responding to instead of replicating one single model.

I think many people who run those programs [mental health crisis response, transformative justice, violence prevention, etc.] that are being lifted up as models would be the first to say these programs are unique to the relationships, the conditions, the circumstances, the people involved in them. And so that’s the scale at which we have to build—at the scale of relationship, at the scale of trust, at the scale of local conditions. And so I think we’re all kind of grappling with how we weave that together into an infrastructure that seamlessly meets people’s needs and not just those of us who are connected to a community, or who are aware of the things that are available, or who can access them from where we are in spite of a whole host of barriers.

Organizers, healers, and health practitioners must be willing to transform ways of being that undermine healing justice and abolitionist models. Experienced abolitionists will remind us that even if we abolish the PIC and the MIC, we still need to do the work to abolish the police in our hearts and minds.⁶ But how do we do this? According to Agustina, first we must decolonize our feelings and expand our capacity to hold more of our individual and collective emotional and mental realities from altered states (i.e., hearing voices), to suicidality, to conflict and harm. Speaking of the spaces Fireweed Collective creates, she shares, “There is no exile. We are the last stop. When everything comes crashing, there’s nowhere else to go. So we’re going to have to make it work.”

In order to “make it work,” we must be willing to confront the culture of organizing itself, which often moves at the speed of capitalism, white supremacy, and ableism. Despite our best efforts to transform these forces in ourselves and our organizing, it can feel impossible to pause, slow down, and tend to our own suffering given the level of crisis in our communities. Furthermore, these patterns are deeply entrenched because of what it takes to survive structural violence day to day. But these patterns are also harder to identify because they exist inside of us, our relationships, and our communities, as opposed to an external threat. Even as more and more organizers embrace healing justice, these dynamics make it difficult to change.

I guess what I just really wanted to emphasize and why I’m so excited about this book is that we’re not going to get to abolition without healing justice. We’re not going to get to the world we want without healing, not just privately in our therapist’s office, but healing collectively, healing ancestrally, healing our relationship to land, to our own labor, to our own bodies, to each other’s bodies, to the future, to dreaming, to everything.

—Andrea Ritchie

Divesting from carceral strategies puts the responsibility, ownership, and emotional, spiritual, and physical labor on us to build something we’ve never experienced and that is difficult to imagine. This process is an experiment that includes failure, making mistakes, evaluating, and learning as we go. This can feel terrifying, but it is by moving toward uncertainty that we will create the world we are radically imagining. Andrea goes on to elaborate in the following:

Anything we try and experiment and learn from, we want to do it the best we can. But when something happens, and that’s inevitable, we have to kind of inoculate ourselves against it and mourn it, learn from it, but then not give up on the experiment, because the experiment of policing has been failing for decades. We have to give new experiments time to breathe, to try, to fail, to learn, and just try and minimize the harm along the way . . . I think people are really afraid to try things because failures are so harshly policed and punished . . . The thing that needs to shift there is to really see failures as lessons, which doesn’t mean that we just write off any harm that happened in the failure. Our goal is to minimize [harm] and our goal is to be accountable, but it’s also to love each other through the failures, and to not make failure come at such a cost that no one wants to risk it.

Survivors, specifically BIPOC survivors, deserve access to care and healing rooted in abolition, as well as movements equipped to address generational trauma in our work. The culture of organizing is transforming because we are reclaiming healing as our birthright. As we create survivor-centered and community-led spaces for collective care, we need to consider how to design the systems, find the resources, and nurture the relationships we need for long-term infrastructure.

The Future: Context, Conditions, and Possibilities

Much of what we need to prepare for in regard to the future political, social, environmental, and cultural context has already been set in motion. Backlash in response to growing support to divest from carceral models, climate disasters, rise of fascism, and right-wing organizing, as well as violence—state violence, vigilantism, and community violence—will escalate. There will be more illness, disease, and death for BIPOC, Queer, Trans, sick, disabled, undocumented, and poor/working-class communities, and the state will continue to co-opt the language of our movements and radical work in order to maintain control and power.

Simultaneously, we will continue to witness a growing movement toward healing justice and abolition, and more of us building new models to care for our people. If we hold tight to our radical imagination, we will live to experience more campaigns that demand what we deserve, not just what’s possible, and more wins.

I think the elimination of police departments exists. I think defunding the police department by 50 percent exists. I think the ability to redefine public safety and implement it differently, exists. I think there’s fertile ground for the creation of people-led community response models for community crises.

—Cat Brooks, Co-Founder, Anti-Police Terror Project, and Executive Director, Justice Teams Network

The way to prepare for these futures with their contradictions and uncertainties is to strategically address risk, individual and collective, and sacrifice by asking ourselves: What are we willing to give up to birth the world we need and deserve? We must be clear what’s at stake when we confront state violence and its legacies.

We Cannot Forget Our North Star

As we let go of what is comfortable and familiar to be present in the space between what is crumbling and what is being birthed, we must call forth our inherent worth to demand what our peoples actually need, even as we make strategic decisions at times rooted in incremental reforms or harm reduction.

We must take full ownership and responsibility for our futures. It has always been up to us to create the world we long for and know is possible. Our ancestors have been fighting for abolition since the founding of this country. It is our duty to honor this lineage and get clear about our specific contribution to this fight. Cat Brooks calls on us to consider how we hold the long-term work of organizing, between the flash points of protest and mobilization; the work in between.

We can anticipate passing these practices down right to the next generation and it being part of the actual leadership development and not just an afterthought . . . we need to anticipate that there’ll be an ebb, but that doesn’t mean that we stop. The ebbs don’t mean we stop working. That’s actually when we work the hardest, because the work that happens inside of the ebbs are what make the flows possible.

This moment requires us to consider the relationship between risk and safety for our dignity and humanity. What stability or security are we willing to forgo in order to gain collective liberation? This asks us to practice with more rigor and discipline. It asks us to study the histories of movements so we are informed about abolitionist work. It requires us to simultaneously hold the past and present horrors of the state, along with the sacrifices of those who came before us, with the radical possibilities that we can build the liberated systems of care we need.

The title for this chapter (“Beautiful Miracles of Resistance”) was inspired by an interview and conversation with Andrea Ritchie.

Notes

¹ Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 2.

² For more information on the medical industrial complex, read the chapter “Roots of the Medical Industrial Complex.”

³ “Mental Health First Oakland,” Anti-Police Terror Project, accessed December 18, 2021, www.antipoliceterrorproject.org/mh-first-oakland.

⁴ Fireweed Collective, https://fireweedcollective.org/.

⁵ Interrupting Criminalization, https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/.

⁶ Paula X. Rojas, “Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts?,” Scholar and Feminist Online, accessed on November 8, 2021, https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/paula-rojas-are-the-cops-in-our-heads-and-hearts/.

Dismantling the Medical Industrial Complex: Building Power for Collective Care

Cara Page

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.¹

—Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights activist (1964)

To dismantle the medical industrial complex (MIC) will require a partnership and alliance with some of us on the inside of these systems and some of us outside of it, all imagining care rooted in dignity and interdependence to one another that does not prescribe notions of care as anecdotal or separate from a response to structural oppression and systemic violence. As practitioners we need to understand the historical ramifications of medical models of care in this country and to explore ways we have been complicit with the machinations of state and public health based on old ideas of who is perceived as “diseased, dangerous, and unfit” or who must be preserved and protected from “society’s social ills.” We must question our role as agents of the state when being asked to control or surveil bodies, families, and communities under the guise of “safety” or “for the public good or well-being,” when it oftentimes can lead to irrevocable harm.

In this era of COVID-19, questions like this proliferate: Is the state really going to take care of us when for many of us it never has before? If we could define our own systems of care and healing, or define collective safety, what would it look like in a pandemic or outside of one? Many of our people were shut in and on lockdown in their homes, institutions (e.g., prisons, detention centers) or in the streets during the pandemic. Many of us asked ourselves and each other, “How will we survive in this moment? And do we have the agency to survive?”

It has been normalized for us to rely on the government, medical systems including schools, psychiatric wards, and prisons to define health and wellness. They tell us who is diseased and who is not, who is fit and who is unfit. We are measured by categorization and elimination. Imagine if we explore outside these lines of confinement—in our bones, blood, and memory. Or as my comrade Susan Raffo says, “Sinking into our cells and into our fascia how do we want to imagine and embody care?” What would we create for and with each other, outside of the state and outside of ideas of white supremacist, capitalist, ableist notions of “healthy”? But we cannot transform “healthy” unless we address the pervasive violence of the US health care system that has used scientific racism to perpetuate these norms of health that are rooted in racial capitalism.

This is how healing justice came to be in 2005 in a Southern context, because as healers, health practitioners, and organizers in the South, we had the audacity to say these models of “health” are not enough, because they lead to scarcity, isolation, and killing us for being unhealthy. We instead believed we had to root ourselves in a model of collective care, wellness, and safety that drew from the Southern Black and Indigenous radical traditions of our ancestors who had survived attempted genocide and a slave-labor economy by creating their own systems of care and safety. We drew from Southern Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, feminist, and liberatory radical traditions. We remembered the lineage of practitioners, healers, and organizers in the Global South that have fought for dignity and access to care rooted deeply in our ancestral relationships to land, generative economies, body, and spirit. We dared to reimagine how to keep our people well while surviving, escaping, and setting forth a new path for freedom. There are new liberatory projects reckoning with these systems and dreaming of new possibilities that debunk the pathologizing of our communities and instead value those of us who are seen as unhealthy, dangerous, and less than.

Remedies and Recipes for Collective Care and Safety

As part of healing justice, we have always vied for the most unlikely alliances to transform our relationship to collective care. The dream has always been to see care strategies that are without walls or borders or prescribed definitions of “healthy.” What can we imagine when we lay claim to our understanding of interconnectivity between plants, bodies, medicines, and healing remedies? That salt water from the ocean is as powerful as scalpels and lasers to bone.

In 2010 at the US Social Forum, I teamed up with a Black nurse, organizer, and healer, Charity Hicks, who has since passed away, to try and build partnerships with Detroit doctors and healers. Not everyone understood what we were trying to do. A white doctor who had been invited to this potential collaboration retorted: “What are you talking about? You can’t replace a heart surgeon with an herbalist.” We pushed back: “Right. But the value in having a heart surgeon working with an herbalist would be powerful medicine, and we would all be changed by the alchemy of this.” That doctor walked out on our collaboration and threatened to report any doctors we worked with to the medical board, but we proceeded onward and built out mobile wellness teams with Western-based practitioners connected to a hospital or clinic, and healers of energy-, earth-, and body-based traditions.

For Charity, me, and the practitioners, there was power in this collective design of an integrative model within a political context that many of us had not participated in. This was a new shape that we had never seen before. Like the doctor that walked out, there were many others who could not conceive what we were trying to do—integrate holistic care simultaneously with emergency rapid response—until they experienced it and deeply appreciated the possibilities of receiving tinctures and herbs alongside getting their blood pressure taken. Or getting local resources for asthma as one of the leading concerns in Detroit for poor Black and Brown communities as a result of having one of the largest trash incinerators in the world that had been poisoning the air for decades.²

What if well-being or care were truly rooted in relationships, self-determination, abolition and transformation, or ways of being that do not prescribe notions of being fixed or cured? Healing justice’s central praxis is to organize with healers and health practitioners who understand our relationship to wellness as deeply connected to healing generational trauma, and to deepen the integration of justice and transformation in our collective bodies. To dismantle the MIC, we will need to wrestle with how we are building power by developing community-care structures that don’t rely on models of exploitation, extraction, and control. Instead, we root collective care or healing—not to cure or fix—but instead to create something that can integrate, transmute, or adapt to pain and disease, not seek to control it, as in the tradition of harm reduction (see the chapter “Holding Our Beautiful Mess: Liberatory Harm Reduction and Our Right to Heal”).

A New Formation

We need to connect science to the collective values of our bodies and lives. That is healing justice! How do we take what’s valuable for our survival, care, and safety and discard the harms and abuses of the medical industrial complex towards a new future?

—Rita Valenti, an abolitionist and retired nurse, Founding Member of Project South and Kindred Collective

It will take a new formation to reimagine and dream institutions of healing and health that both hold health institutions accountable for their harm while building new models that do not extract or exploit our bodies. This new formation will need to outlast climate change and war. We need to build community/survivor-led strategies to transform the harm of the MIC both inside and outside of the state and multinational corporations. We need to define safety and well-being inside of community-care models that do not restimulate eugenic science and practices of categorization, sorting, experimentation, and exploitation of BIPOC, Queer, Trans, and Intersex, disabled, fat, femme, poor, im/migrant and refugee, and incarcerated bodies. It’s the alchemy of many organizations, both in the US and globally, that will need to hold private medical and state health institutions accountable toward imagining new ecosystems of care. Here are some of the organizations doing just that.

EqualHealth, is a chapter-based transnational collective of health workers and activists seeking to interrupt racial capitalism in order to advance global health equity. They are building a global movement of social medicine educators and practitioners who tackle health inequities in their institutions and in broader society. Dr. Michelle Morse, healer, and founding Co-Director of EqualHealth, poignantly names what it will take to engage health practitioners to activate both inside/outside strategies of care. Interventions that do not delineate between patient and provider, but rather develop collaborative ecosystems of care that rely on the interdependence, safety, and dignity for each other:

My own organization, EqualHealth, the only reason we’ve ever been successful is because we were building relationships with people who see care differently. People who might be a nurse, or a doctor, or a social worker, but are so profoundly dissatisfied with the system as it is. And I feel conflicted about working inside it. And yet I also know how powerful the inside work is because we do save lives. But we’ve only ever won on the inside, any of our projects, because of those relationships on the outside and the relationships that come from a shared analysis and a belief that consciousness building is fundamental to any change.

EqualHealth is leading a powerful Campaign Against Racism (CAR), a global campaign to uncover the historical connections between racism and capitalism that will radically imagine a future in which sociocultural, political, and economic systems work toward health equity rather than against it.³ They have been building political dialogue and peer exchange with organizations such as, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, the National Queer and Trans Therapist of Color Network, Harriet’s Apothecary, and Changing Frequencies to build alliances with politicized healers and health practitioners around healing justice strategies. They seek to imagine how to navigate and intervene on generational trauma within and from the medical industrial complex and global racial capitalism. As Courtni Andrews, a practitioner and organizer with Campaign Against Racism/EqualHealth reflects:

The medical system is built the way it is because of its infrastructure and history being biased, disenfranchising BIPOC folk, queer folk, disabled folks. In a way it’s like a funhouse with people looking in so many mirrors . . . with no connectivity to see the whole person. It tries to diagnose people, push them out, and leave them where they’re at . . . and really convinces people they’re broken when they’re not. Our medical systems often don’t have a frame of reference, or the full context, or the cultural/social understanding to deal with mental health or disability in a manner that makes people be able to see the tapestry of who they are, their lineages, their culture, or their ancestry [as part of their care].

EqualHealth chapters have been building shared consciousness around movement building and health equity within global communities. Both during the pandemic and heightened moments of war and natural disaster, they are also activating political dialogue in their respective regions to challenge health inequities are from the root causes of globalization and racial capitalism. Their commitment to healing justice as a political strategy within the CAR campaign has been thought-provoking. It is inspiring new ways to imagine collective care infrastructure across geographical borders and ideological divides between health practitioners and healers.

Intersex Justice Project is another powerful organization intervening on abuses and harms of the medical industrial complex by holding institutions accountable for pathologizing and committing acts of violence on Intersex communities. The Intersex Justice Project “works to end invasive and unnecessary surgeries on intersex youth by empowering intersex People of Color as change-makers.”⁴ Their mission is to transform harm and abuse against Intersex people through a three-pronged organizing approach:

Ending surgeries to change the bodies of unconsenting young people, such as clitoral, vaginal, and testicular surgeries on infants.

Center Black and Brown liberation to organize against the history and contemporary practices of medicine that objectifies and exploits Black and Brown Intersex people.

Form alliances and coalitions with other Intersex People of Color and global/national organizing partners.⁵

The Intersex Justice Project elevates the critical need for cultural and political interventions that interrupt the violence of the MIC by holding the practitioners and institutions accountable who are complicit with these dangerous and exploitive practices. They are currently co-organizing a campaign to end Intersex genital mutilation at Weill Cornell Medicine, specifically targeting health care providers like Dr. Dix Poppa to hold them accountable for “causing severe physical and psychological pain and trauma” through unnecessary surgeries on Intersex children.⁶

The Intersex Justice Project Co-Founding Director, Sean Saifa Wall, reflects that “the healing intervention is storytelling, collective action, and protest. To actually protest these centers of harm. To go where the harm is happening. And to actually keep telling our stories to whoever will listen . . . Hoping that people will take up the charge.” Their work is visionary and holds the intersections of the MIC and collective care strategies through survivor-centered work that seeks to transform the violence of these surgeries while also uplifting stories of power and transformation of Intersex youth and People of Color as changemakers.

Changing Frequencies (CF) is a Black Queer Feminist–led abolitionist organizing project that designs work for cultural memory (the collective memory and expression of a people and/or community) to disrupt the violence of the MIC. We amplify and honor communal stories toward organizing healing justice and transformative futures. We believe recovering cultural memory is essential to knowing our traditions of healing and care, survival, creation, and liberation. The attempted erasure of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s cultural and ancestral practices as part of colonization and genocide, has impacted our communities’ psychic, spiritual, cultural, and physical survival for generations. CF’s practice is rooted in reclaiming our traditions and cultural memory to interrupt and heal this erasure through production of multimedia installations and experiences that are rooted in reclamation of memory, transformation, and healing.

Currently we are co-designing: the Healing Histories Project (HHP), a political project seeking to interrupt eugenics and the MIC through catalyzing community research, action, and movement-building strategies. By generating trainings and popular education tools, we will deepen and widen the relationship between energy-, earth-, and body-based healers with health practitioners who are seeking to dismantle eugenic practices, harms, and abuses of the MIC. HHP builds interventions to abolish and disrupt the experimentation and exploitation by the MIC in our communities as an extension of state control and racial capitalism.

Another strategy is to co-create and co-design cultural memory installations and political action that will transform sites of harm and abuse by the MIC into places of disruption, memorials, and healing. We will work in partnership with cultural workers, organizers, and media makers to gather the stories of powerful interventions of abolition and disruption that are transforming the MIC. An example of this was the Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit, a multimedia installation produced at the Barnard Center for Research on Women at the forty-third annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence,”⁷ in collaboration with choreodirector Ebony Noelle Golden and the ensemble cast of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative.⁸ This was an installation for Black women who have been tested on, experimented on, and sterilized; whose bodies have been and continue to be vilified and pathologized by white supremacy, scientific racism, and the medical industrial complex. It also pays homage to the role of Black birth workers, healers, midwives, doulas, and root workers who hold the crossroads of life and death for Black folks to birth generations during slavery to ensure our people could survive.

Reveling toward Our Futures

It has been powerful to witness the evolution of reproductive justice, environmental justice, disability justice, harm reduction, and transformative justice as abolitionist strategies to confront the carceral systems. It has been humbling to watch healing justice become more integral to movement conversations and rooted in political imperatives on what is needed to transform generational trauma from policing, colonization, and carceral systems like the MIC and PIC. It will be necessary in the wake of climate change, white supremacy, and a population control resurgence, to be a part of a new wave of anti-eugenic organizers and scholars seeking accountability from the cultural and medical institutions that have relied on the ideology and violence of eugenics to build empires.⁹ We are in a moment of transformation where these narratives and systems must and can be disrupted.

It will take our radical imagination, coordinated strategy, and grounding in powerful vision to confront the root causes of racist and capitalist health systems as EqualHealth seeks out to do. It will take tenacity and the collective power of organizing projects like the Intersex Justice Project to end violent medical procedures and experimentation and recenter the dignity, safety, stories, and visibility of Intersex communities that have been marginalized and criminalized. It will take the sacred work of remembering and honoring the generations of ancestors who have been subjected to the harms and abuses of the MIC that Changing Frequencies is committed to uplifting through memorial and cultural memory installations. It will take these strategies and more to transcend these tropes of illness and disease that have been pathologizing and exploiting our communities for centuries.

We ask health practitioners to confront old-school ideas in medical schools and institutions about bodies, race/ethnicity, gender, disability, sexuality, immigrants, and class and to no longer allow pervasive abuses and harms rooted in ableist, white supremacist, and capitalist ideas of who is dangerous, animalistic, perverse, and expendable. To healers, we ask: how can we transcend co-optation and ableist, capitalist, misogynist, and racist notions of healing in our practices? How will we fight for our traditions and no longer be criminalized for our practices? How will we build insider and outsider strategies with health practitioners to build an ecosystem of care that is consensual and collectively determined by our communities?

For healers and health practitioners, this is a call to action on how we build systems of care that center community-led strategies rooted in determination and dignity. It is a demand that we honor the integration of healing and cultural practices, and understand that a collective response to generational trauma needs to be intrinsically a part of our political work. We have to remember and assert that there is no single model or right way of care, and the Western-based medical model of care is not the only way. How can we integrate multiple traditions that do not prescribe one “healthy body” or one way to heal? How will we take care of our communities most impacted by oppression and genocide for the long term that is rooted in liberation?

For our communities, how do we build relationships that center care—not just for individuals, but collectively and in relationship to all beings—that will honor our origins, our geographical places, and our spiritual and survival traditions? These are the questions that our political liberation depends on.

This asks of us a new blueprint for our collective survival, care, and safety.

Notes

¹ Jerry DeMuth, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” The Nation, June 1, 1964, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/fannie-lou-hamer-tired-being-sick-and-tired/.

² David Watson, “Detroit Incinerator Closes—Eco-Apocalypse Continues,” Deceleration, September 2019, 30.

³ “Campaign Against Racism,” EqualHealth, accessed January 14, 2022, www.equalhealth.org/campaign-against-racism.

⁴ Intersex Justice Project, accessed February 17, 2022, www.intersexjusticeproject.org/.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Intersex Justice Project, "NY State Senator Julia Salazar, NYC Council Members, Tiffany Cabán, Cecilia Gentili (from Pose on FX) and More Will Rally to End Intersex Genital Mutilation," press release, July 22, 2021, www.intersexjusticeproject.org/uploads/1/1/7/4/117454019/press-release-protest-weill-cornell-nyc-by-intersex-justice-project-2021.pdf.

⁷ “Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence,” Barnard Center for Research on Women, accessed January 29, 2022, https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/sfsurveillance/.

⁸ “About BDAC,” Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, accessed February 19, 2022, www.bettysdaughterarts.com/about-bdac.

⁹ “About,” Anti-Eugenics Project, accessed January 14, 2022, https://antieugenicsproject.org/about/.

Why We Organize Practitioners

Erica Woodland

Health and healing practitioners occupy a unique role in relationship to community, the state, and movement, giving them a radical opportunity to interrupt and transform systems and structures of violence, including the medical industrial complex and the prison industrial complex. Whether working inside or outside of these institutions, our communities have relied upon radical practitioners willing to provide care that is rooted in abolition and liberation. Politicized practitioners working inside our movements tend to the trauma and violence that organizers experience as a result of being in direct confrontation with the carceral state. We would be much stronger with an organized base of health and healing practitioners, ready to throw down on our campaigns and for rapid response to crisis.

Francisca Porchas Coronado, Founder and Director of the Latinx Therapists Action Network, articulates the intersection of healing, well-being, and winning campaigns:

After twenty years in this movement, I’ve come to the realization that how effective we are as movements, and how possible winning is, and creating new systems, and shifting conditions, really hinges upon how well we are. A big reason why I think practitioners must be organized, and radicalized is because we need to be well. We need to be well because both we are living in the legacy of colonization and all the ways in which that has impacted our lineages generations long. Liberation can actually happen in real time, and not wait for us to win. We can have it in real time when we heal collectively, individually.

Healing justice emerged in response to the physical, emotional, psychic, environmental, and spiritual crisis experienced by many movement leaders and organizations. Burnout; mental and physical health crises; surviving interpersonal, state, and community violence; and people leaving movement all together highlight the need to include health and healing practitioners in our organizing strategies.

Another major issue our movements struggle with is the ways trauma moves through and within our interpersonal and political relationships. Heightened conflict, ideological polarization, distrust, rigidity, public shaming, abuse, and violence erode our collective power and vision for liberation. Movement organizations suffer from burnout, staff turnover, and a proliferation of nongenerative conflict rooted in the activation of our individual and collective nervous systems. When we move from a place of trauma, our assessments of the context and conditions are not as accurate, which thereby affects our strategy. Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder of Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Black Lives Matter, and Dignity and Power Now echoes this point:

There’s a lot of trauma that we project on each other. And in that trauma projection, we become each other’s enemies, truly. And we fall short of being able to make assessments that are not grounded in our trauma. So I think that as I’ve been building out new teams, I’m consistently thinking about, “What does it take to resource all of us, so that we can be in this together?” Because oftentimes what I see is, we are all in it, but we’re not all in it together. And we all have a very different assessment of why we’re in it. And we have a different assessment of how to treat each other. And we forget about what our commitments are, we forget about why we’re doing this.

From history (e.g., COINTELPRO) to today, we know that the state will manipulate these tensions, conflicts, and dynamics rooted in trauma to keep us focused on each other as the enemy instead of the structures of violence that we came together to fight against in the first place.

Strategies to Heal and Win

In order to build power with health and healing practitioners, traditional modes of organizing need to be adapted. Practitioners must not only hold confidentiality and the literal weight of our movements’ crises, trauma, and violence, but they are also experiencing the same conditions of those they are caring for. Practitioners working within or directly connected to the medical industrial complex (MIC) must also navigate legal, ethical, licensing, and political considerations. For example, some could be targeted and lose their license to practice or employment if they are affiliated with or support public campaigns rooted in abolition.

Build Life-Affirming Infrastructures

To organize practitioners, we can examine practitioner networks that utilize healing justice as a political strategy. Frontline Wellness Network (FWN), founded by Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson in 2017, is a statewide network of health care providers working to end the public health crisis of incarceration in California. Through his work with FWN and Dignity and Power Now (DPN) as part of the JusticeLA Coalition (https://justicelanow.org/), Mark-Anthony describes the impact of organizing health practitioners to stop a $3.5 billion jail expansion in Los Angeles. After years of working to stop LA county from building a mental health jail and a women’s jail, using a public health framework and analysis, the coalition realized they wouldn’t win without organizing health workers to interrupt this narrative:

And that for me was just a deflating aha moment to say, “Look, I’m really clear that our healing is more likely to happen if our built environment and infrastructure changes in ways that affirms our lives.” And so if we’re going to win this, and if we’re going to create possibilities for healing, we have to defeat this jail plan, which means we have to organize health workers who work in that jail, also work in the communities, and essentially helping them understand that there’s not a health mission priority objective that you might have that isn’t impacted by incarceration, that isn’t undermined by millions and billions of dollars that could go into community-based wellness methods.

While the JusticeLA Coalition won this campaign, interrupting the plan for jail expansion, they are still fighting to ensure that hundreds of millions of dollars will be directed to community-based alternatives that do not rely on carceral strategies. Given that criminalization is the bedrock of the prison industrial complex (PIC) and MIC, their work seeks to ensure that these alternatives do not prop up or lead to the carceral system.

Shape Protagonists, Not Service Providers

The Latinx Therapist Network (LTAN) founded in 2019 by Francisca Porchas Coronado, is a network of Latinx mental health practitioners supporting the healing and liberation of migrant communities impacted by criminalization, detention, and deportation. As an organization rooted in healing justice, Francisca shares that LTAN is clear with its members that “actually, you’re joining a political organization and we are organizing you and we’re going to continue organizing you towards our worldview, our theory of change, and into actually being a protagonist and not somebody who sees themselves as a service provider.”

LTAN builds a membership of Latinx therapists committed to migrant justice, community healing for movement spaces, education and training focused on building resiliency for the migrant rights/justice movement, and solidarity with migrant justice campaigns. LTAN provides orientation for its members using political education and plays the role of flanking movements, campaigns, and actions versus leading campaigns themselves. This offers another powerful example of the role of practitioners in our work for liberation and healing.

Develop Alignment through Relationship and Political Education

Founded in 2016, the National Queer and Trans Therapist of Color Network (NQTTCN) is a healing justice organization that works to transform mental health for Queer and Trans People of Color. I started NQTTCN to address a gap in radical mental health support for organizers, activists, and movement leaders from our community. Our goal is to build relationships and create political alignment among QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) mental health practitioners to intervene and disrupt the violence of the MIC. We organize practitioners using healing justice as a strategy to establish our right role in movements for our collective liberation.

LTAN and NQTTCN, in collaboration with Project South, Changing Frequencies, and the Shut Down Irwin campaign,¹ led the Repair the Harm (RTH) pilot program to provide emotional support to survivors of the Irwin County Detention Center. Francisca and I worked to identify practitioners from our network to support the complex and acute needs of survivors of state violence and medical abuse. We worked to develop shared values and goals for the pilot, created a statement of politicized care, and provided an orientation to ensure practitioners were rooted in the goals of the campaign and the political values of the pilot. We connected with the survivors to assess needs and conducted an intentional process to pair them with practitioners. We also provided political education to practitioners throughout the pilot about how to integrate healing justice into their emotional-support work. Survivors had been recently released from detention and a few had been deported and were living outside of the United States. As a project rooted in abolition, RTH offers an example of how politicized networks of practitioners can be activated to respond to and transform trauma from state violence and abuse as integral to our organizing campaigns (see following chapter “Healing Justice as a Political Strategy: Case Study: Shut Down Irwin Campaign” for more information).

Organizing practitioners means utilizing and experimenting with political education, power analysis, and space to integrate theory and praxis. Furthermore, it is critical to consider their individual and collective risks, and assessing those risks must include providing various ways for practitioners to get involved in movement work, especially for those who fear losing employment, licensure, or credentials.

Building the Infrastructure We Need to Scale

As we see more and more networks of practitioners being born in response to the growing support for abolition, the question we need to keep asking is, How do we build a long-term infrastructure of care to scale that is rooted in healing justice?

In my conversations with Patrisse, Francisca, and Mark-Anthony, some clear themes emerged around the need for resources, building up the skills and capacity of practitioners and organizers, political education about healing justice for practitioners and movement organizations, and finally relationships and coordination.

We Need Coins

Following the uprisings in 2020 in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, there has been an enormous increase in money moving through our organizations and communities from individual grassroots and major donors, businesses, corporations, and philanthropy. Even before the uprisings, many of us were floored by the amount of mutual aid funds our people mobilized when the pandemic started as BIPOC, sick and disabled, Queer, Trans, and poor people were literally abandoned by the state. There are contradictions inside of racial capitalism that we collectively hold, while our movements are deeply shaped by the nonprofit industrial complex and philanthropy.

Long-term financial investment is essential to develop infrastructure around healing justice. We can mobilize resources (money, time, skills, goods, services, etc.) from grassroots donors, socially conscious businesses, funders who are values aligned, and radical major donors seeking to make this vision a reality.

So if it takes a decade to train folks in it, to move people in it, to really push folks to embody something different, then we need money, we need resources. We need to flip how we understand what success is. We need to invest in the future. We need to invest in folks who are actually invested in the longevity of our future.

—Patrisse Cullors

We need to reckon with the tension around money for the purpose of moving toward our collective vision versus seeking to resolve these tensions. Doing so could give us greater collective access to the resources that have been stolen from our communities due to colonization and slavery. We need to organize practitioners also experiencing burnout and exhaustion due to the escalating crisis of these times.

We Need More of Us! Building Skills for Healing Justice Interventions

We can’t wait to win. We have to literally begin to build these systems as we go.

—Francisca Porchas Coronado

There is a huge gap between the number of practitioners we have with a strong knowledge and practice of healing justice and the number we need to survive and win. It takes many years to train, educate, and develop practitioners committed to healing justice as a political strategy, and at this point we don’t yet have the structures or support for this type of knowledge transfer. We need an organized base of practitioners, more practitioner networks, and more healing justice projects. What we don’t need more of are individual practitioners moving from a healing justice framework without being accountable to a base or movement. Patrisse reflects, “We don’t actually need to do a whole lot of new investments, we have to look at where the work has been happening, where it’s been effective, and we need to go in, and we need to build a lot of resources in that area so they can scale up, then train us to do that.” We have a rich lineage of healing justice to draw from as we consider building to scale.

Political Education and Values Alignment

Organizing practitioners is only possible when we bridge the gap between health and healing practitioners and organizers. Despite our movements moving to adopt healing justice as a strategy, there is still much work to do to get us in alignment.

I do believe that more and more our organizations and our movements need to understand trauma and healing. Politicized healing. It would make an enormous difference for how effective our movements are, the kind of impact that they can have in the world, and the kind of changes we want to make, but also the kind of human beings you want to be in the process.

—Francisca Porchas Coronado

Deepening our understanding of trauma, how it functions in our organizations and communities, and how the state criminalizes and weaponizes our trauma are essential as we work to build collective power to transform the conditions of our communities. Instead of building our collective capacity in this area, work around trauma and healing is often outsourced to health and healing practitioners who are expected to “fix it” when a crisis pops off instead of being at the table when an organization, project, or campaign is being developed.

We’re thinking about the ways in which our budgets, our built infrastructure, our social infrastructure is really organized and designed in a way so that we’re more likely to have a traumatic experience when harm happens than not. We’re less likely to have resources and factors and relationships in our lives that help us mitigate and metabolize trauma than not. And I think when we have that political analysis, we can design strategies and campaigns that are addressing that.

—Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson

The political and spiritual development of practitioners is equally important. In addition to building consciousness around healing justice, we also need to take seriously our sacred responsibility as practitioners to do this work with integrity. Health and healing practitioners on the frontlines are expected to navigate complex dynamics when caring for survivors of violence and trauma. We must evaluate if this is the right use of our particular skills and brilliance, especially given that practitioners can and do cause harm when they work beyond their training and experience and without a council of elders (in age or experience) to build and grow within this work. The need for strong relationships and trust between practitioners and movement organizations is also a requirement to ensure we remain politically and spiritually aligned with healing justice.

Healing justice is a pathway towards a long future for humanity and for this planet.

—Patrisse Cullors

One important lesson healing justice teaches us is how important it is to proactively consider and address the future conditions we will be asked to respond to and the radical possibilities we can leverage for collective care and safety. If healing justice is a pathway to the future, then we have to learn to hold both the immediate dangers and interventions while simultaneously living into what’s coming.

While many of us were shocked when the COVID-19 pandemic began, there were scientists and researchers sounding the alarm about the rise of pandemics at least a decade ago.² As our communities continue to grapple with our survival inside of a global pandemic, we must consider how to prepare for crises like this in the future. Since there is a clear link between climate change—humans’ complete disregard for the Earth and all of its nonhuman inhabitants—and COVID-19,³ we can anticipate more challenges related to pandemics themselves and their long-term impacts globally.

Another reality that we must confront is the immense exhaustion and burnout healing and health practitioners are experiencing as the demand continues to increase exponentially. The shortage of health care workers will likely continue due to burnout, insufficient pay, poor working conditions,⁴ and all of the failures due to the inadequate response to COVID when the pandemic began. Many of our members at NQTTCN are full, with long waiting lists, or are not accepting new clients altogether due to the large number of people who began or resumed therapy to support their mental health following the crises of 2020.

Continued backlash and retaliation are also on the horizon with the increased polarization around COVID-19 across the country, more and more practitioners divesting from the MIC and moving toward abolition. We can expect for those who oppose us to double down on carceral strategies and unfortunately, recruit health and healing practitioners to join their side.

Despite these real challenges, we will continue to see more and more of us who refuse to collude with strategies that go against our people. And as more practitioners, organizers, and seekers of justice move away from carceral strategies and toward healing justice, we will have more numbers, more power, and more opportunities to build out the infrastructure we’ve been dreaming about. We will be coordinated, resourced, and strategic when we need to rapidly respond to crisis. We will develop the relationships we need to take risks together to take care of ourselves and each other in the ways we deserve.

The dream will be organized into a reality.

Notes

¹ More information about the campaign in the following: “Healing Justice as a Political Strategy: Case Study: Shut Down Irwin Campaign.”

² Robin Marantz Henig, “Experts warned of a pandemic decades ago. Why weren’t we ready?” National Geographic, April 8, 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus.

³ Robert M. Beyer, Andrea Manica, and Camilo Mora, “Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2,” Science of the Total Environment, 767 (May 2021), www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721004812.

⁴ Gaby Galvin, “Nearly 1 in 5 Health Care Workers Have Quit Their Jobs During the Pandemic,” Morning Consult, accessed December 18, 2021, https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-series-part-2-workforce/.

Healing Justice as a Political Strategy
Case Study: Shut Down Irwin Campaign

Erica Woodland

In September 2020, Georgia-based organizations Project South, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Georgia Detention Watch, South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, and the Detention Watch Network worked with whistleblower Dawn Wooten (a Southern Black nurse) to expose the egregious human rights abuses inside the Irwin County Detention Center. Abuses included medical neglect, lack of protection against COVID-19, and forced sterilization of immigrants detained at Irwin. This detention center is but one example of the horrors of the prison industrial complex, medical industrial complex, and the abuses rampant in private for-profit prisons. In May 2021 the Department of Homeland Security ordered that Irwin be closed, a major victory for the survivors who bravely shared their stories despite threats of retaliation, Dawn Wooten, and the broader coalition of organizations that have been organizing since 2016 to shut down this facility.¹

The Shut Down Irwin Campaign is a brilliant example of what is possible when we center healing justice as a political strategy in our movement work. Birth workers, organizers, scholars, and public health and healing practitioners organized to release the “Health, Healing Justice & Liberation Statement,” “condemning forced sterilizations at Irwin County Detention Center and calling for full transformation of health systems to repair the harm.”² This statement clearly names the ways health and public health workers can be complicit in state violence via the medical industrial complex and perpetuate dehumanizing ideologies about health rooted in eugenics and population control. The power of this statement is that it offers a tangible way for health and public health practitioners to take action to interrupt the harm and violence of both the medical and prison industrial complexes. The Repair the Harm (RTH) pilot program, discussed in the previous chapter, “Why We Organize Practitioners” was another strategy in partnership with this campaign, which was rooted in healing justice to provide politicized and transformative emotional and spiritual care to survivors of Irwin.

The Mechanics of Healing Justice: How to Engage HJ as a Strategy for Political Liberation

As authors, we wanted to share this tool developed with our comrades Adaku Utah and Jelena Djordjevic in our work with EqualHealth’s Campaign Against Racism. This tool provides a series of questions/considerations that can help you develop a healing justice strategy. We will use it to illustrate how we organized the RTH pilot program.

Mapping Conditions

What are the conditions of the land (environment)?

What are the conditions of our bodies (physical well-being)?

What are the conditions of our economies?

What are the conditions of our spirits (emotional, spiritual, psychic well-being)?

What are the political and social conditions?

Before you begin any campaign or intervention, you have to be intimately aware of the context and conditions. These shape your assessment of the problem and your understanding of what is possible in terms of strategy. Project South had been working in coalition with other Georgia-based organizations for years throughout the state, so the conditions were well understood prior to the development of RTH. Project South continuously shared the changing landscape and conditions related to the campaign with partner organizations for RTH (Changing Frequencies, the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network [NQTTCN] and the Latinx Therapist Action Network [LTAN]).

Mapping Relationships

How are you connected to others doing similar and divergent work?

How will you ensure you are moving with integrity?

Who are you accountable to? What systems of accountability do you need to establish to address harm or lack of alignment?

How will you make sure to center choice and consent throughout the process?

RTH rests upon many years of relationship forged through love and struggle—Project South moving in relationship to an entire ecosystem of work in Georgia and the Southeast, and Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and Project South working together for almost twenty years. Cara (Changing Frequencies) has been in relationship with Erica (NQTTCN) since 2015 and through this connection brought healing justice and the work of Kindred Collective to NQTTCN. NQTTCN and LTAN had already begun building as sibling projects committed to organizing mental health practitioners using a healing justice framework. RTH provided the opportunity for NQTTCN and LTAN to co-design and implement this pilot project while building trust and intimacy through a shared practice.

We were first and foremost accountable to the survivors of Irwin who participated in RTH and had many important conversations about how to engage survivors who had relationships with organizations in the coalition but not with NQTTCN and LTAN. Long-term relationships and trust were extended to us, and we made a commitment to remain trauma centered,³ always thinking about how to transform trauma in the container we were building—the limitations and radical possibilities. We grappled with the different considerations that came up when providing emotional support versus organizing survivors. Our organizations met monthly and engaged in political education with each other to strengthen the collaboration and pivot when needed based on what we were collectively learning.

Mapping Resources

What HJ resources do you have to support your intervention/campaign?

What HJ resources do you need? Who are the practitioners in your community?

NQTTCN and LTAN have been building bases of politicized practitioners to support movement building and liberation work. The political education we’ve been providing to QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and Latinx mental health practitioners laid the groundwork for a base of politically aligned practitioners to participate in RTH. We assessed the needs of our practitioners given the political and cultural distinctions between our networks, including political alignment around abolition, practice engaging with healing justice as a framework, and willingness to take risks collectively. Practitioners were invited to RTH based on relationship, expertise, experience, and readiness to experiment with healing justice as part of the larger political campaign. We provided an orientation for practitioners to ground them in healing justice and invited Project South to share the political context of detention and deportation, the goals of the campaign, and the abuses inside Irwin. We met with the team of practitioners throughout the pilot to provide space for co-learning and consultation. We engaged in real-time conversations about doing this work from an abolitionist framework while holding our proximity to the MIC and its harms and abuses.

Assessing Risk

What are the political, ethical, legal, and financial risks involved in your intervention? How can you proactively address them throughout the campaign/intervention?

What safety and security strategies can you use to intervene in surveillance and criminalization of your campaign/intervention?

What risks do we need to be prepared to address related to individual and collective safety?

How can you remain clear, flexible, and adaptive while navigating change and uncertainty?

As an abolitionist project to support survivors of state violence, RTH required ongoing conversations about risk for survivors, practitioners, and the organizations leading the pilot program. We assumed that surveillance was a very real risk given how visible the abuses at Irwin had become. We used a number of strategies to protect the confidentiality and anonymity of survivors and only communicated with them through encrypted platforms. Another consideration is that survivors returned to communities where they had little or no support. A few of the survivors had been deported, making this even more challenging. While RTH could not address the material needs of survivors, we worked with Project South and the broader coalition to identify resources on the ground in places where our organizations had relationships. However, this was not possible in places outside of the United States given that we did not have relationships in the Global South. Since emotional support was done virtually with survivors and practitioners in different parts of the country or world, we also had to consider what type of healing work is most appropriate in this container, in addition to the language and cultural needs of survivors.

Practitioners also faced a number of risks by participating in the project. As therapists, counselors, social workers, etc., we have been trained by the state to surveil and pathologize survivors. Participating in an explicitly abolitionist project opened up political risk as this is in direct conflict with our profession. We made it clear that the support being offered to survivors was not therapy but peer-based emotional support focused on collective care and safety. This allowed us to imagine beyond state models of care that are overly concerned with liability (mandated reporting, fear of losing licensure or employment) instead of the actual immediate needs of survivors. This was a tension that we held throughout the pilot program since we expected practitioners to experiment with a different approach to healing work that was part of a political campaign rooted in abolition.

Mapping conditions, relationships, and resources, and assessing risk are core parts of healing justice interventions in our political/movement-building work. Practitioners should be at the table when planning a campaign to have the time and space to develop strategies for collective care and safety. Through RTH we learned that we needed to be in relationship with the broader coalition, as some of the survivors in RTH had long-term connections to other organizations that LTAN and NQTTCN did not. We got to practice an intervention that was survivor centered, rooted in abolition, and worked to transform conditions of state violence. We hope to seed more interventions like this one, rooted in healing justice for our movements to end state violence.

Notes

¹ “Movement Victory,” Project South, accessed February 25, 2022, https://projectsouth.org/movement-victory/; José Olivares and John Washington, “‘He Just Empties You All Out’: Whistleblower Reports High Number of Hysterectomies at Ice Detention Facility,” The Intercept, September 15, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/09/15/hysterectomies-ice-irwin-whistleblower/.

² “Health, Healing Justice & Liberation Statement,” Project South, February 21, 2022, https://projectsouth.org/healing-justice-statement/.

³ As defined by Shira Hassan in Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction.

Illustration by Amir Khadar. Visual description: The image is a black-and-white illustration of a full-winged phoenix spreading its plumes. The phoenix’s body is different shades of black, white, and gray, its colors overlapping and bleeding into one another, giving the appearance of layered feathers. Its two wings fill up the upper quadrants of the image, the phoenix posing as if mid-flight. The phoenix’s tail fills the lower half of the image, the strokes appearing larger and longer and ending in three fiery clusters, splitting from one another. The background is a mildly textured gradient.

Return to Spirit: Lineage, Integrity, and Accountability

Erica Woodland

We are in the midst of an immense spiritual crisis, transformation, and shedding. Simultaneously we are becoming increasingly aware of how interconnected and interdependent we are. Technology, travel, and migration have given us greater access to spiritual traditions practiced throughout the world. And yet many of us do not actually know the spiritual practices of our ancestors due to the legacy of colonization, genocide, and enslavement. These ancestral traditions were instrumental guides for our people to address suffering as well as to help us individually and collectively connect with Spirit, our true nature, and our destiny on Earth. Part of the work of restoring sacred connection asks us to interrogate how we honor and practice spiritual traditions that are not a part of our lineage or that we were not born into. We are living in a time where we are culturally, politically, and spiritually shaped by a number of traditions but often do not have a direct connection to information about where these practices come from.

Mapping the lineage of healing justice (HJ) and restoring a more grounded and accurate understanding of this framework requires that we not only repoliticize HJ, but also recenter what it means to be connected to Spirit. Since the initiation of COVID-19, we have experienced more death, disease, and illness. Now more than ever, we need spiritual practitioners rooted in healing justice and savvy about movement building to help us navigate these portals between life, death, and rebirth. Our ancestors and descendants are counting on us. Health and healing practitioners—who are literally caring for our people day in and day out—are exhausted and burned out from holding the enormous suffering of this moment.

Whether it’s astrology, tarot, herbalism, or formal organized religious and spiritual traditions, when we are pushed to and beyond our limits, we need some way to keep on to ensure our survival. This urgency can be dangerous as more and more people seek spiritual guidance or decide to become a practitioner without adequate training, orientation, or grounding in healing justice. What will it take to restore our sacred connection to Spirit, ourselves, and each other? It will involve mapping the legacy of disconnection and displacement and how this keeps us from our collective liberation. We need strategies to recenter spirit in our movement-building work, but this requires experienced, aligned, and accountable spiritual practitioners to steward us through these times.

Disconnection as a Tool of Genocide

The spiritual traditions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are continually co-opted, commodified, demonized, criminalized, and erased. Christian supremacy in collusion with white supremacy and capitalism rendered our ancestral ways evil and illegal for the purpose of uprooting us from generations of ancestral knowledge. Colonization, genocide, and enslavement tried to eliminate the ways of our ancient ones and many of our peoples were forced to practice Christianity. We need to interrogate the generational consequences of this core wound. We can learn from the generations of resistance to the erasure of our practices.

Criminalization, co-optation, and commodification work together to convince BIPOC that our traditions are evil, while white people steal our practices and then sell them back to us. We live in a time where you can literally buy your way to becoming a teacher in a tradition, whereas in the past this process would have required lengthy study with masters and a series of rites of passage to prepare to teach. Even within BIPOC communities, there can be a lack of accountability to lineages we practice that are not our own. Spirit has literally become an object to be traded and sold to gain power, money, social capital, and followers on social media. With the rise of Yoga Beckies and Insta-gurus, there is no shortage of spiritual commodities on the internet. At this point, it feels like a requirement to have a robust spiritual practice to navigate these thresholds of life and death in our work. The danger is that as more and more of us rush toward spiritual practice to take care of ourselves and make collective meaning of this moment, we move without discernment and inadvertently become complicit in commodification.

What is lost when we have been systematically and strategically cut off from our spiritual traditions? Nia Wilson (Ade Toyesi Ibijoke Ade Banjo) of SpiritHouse shares some reflections on the impact of white supremacy on our traditions:¹

Not only by non–people of color or people who don’t practice any kind of Indigenous spiritual practices, but by our own people who have ingested capitalism and white supremacy, that then tells us that we don’t need, for instance, elders, or to be apprentices . . . This country and white supremacy and capitalism have taught us that, well we are easily discardable, right? We’re only worth what we can produce. And so we see older people or people, our cultural technology masters, as disposable because they are not current. They are not relevant, and so that seeps into our practices.

Mama Nia clearly describes the loss of the generational knowledge. This not only hurts our communities socially and spiritually, but it is also part of the political strategy of colonization. The consequences of this disconnection are numerous. One way this disconnection manifests is by ignoring or minimizing the role of spirit in our lives and movement work. We know who wins when we do not acknowledge the battle happening on the spiritual level—largely invisible and immaterial—with very real material consequences. In this context, the rush to reclaim and remember our ancestral traditions is a move to restore access to this wisdom.

Another way this separation manifests is through problematic attempts to connect or integrate the spiritual into our lives and work—for example, holding up one way to practice, or worse, one practitioner as the answer to all of our spiritual trauma. This is particularly dangerous given the legacy of Christian supremacy, which posits there is only one true way to know God/Creator/Source/the Divine. It is also ableist because it does not account for the varied bodies, minds, abilities, and lived experiences of those seeking spiritual connection. This encourages us to give our power away to something or someone external to ourselves instead of moving us toward traditions that bring us back to our innate spiritual knowledge and power, and values our complex lived experience. Adela Nieves Martinez (Tekina), Founder of Healing by Choice!,² illustrates how this can be used against us in the following: “There are some things we come in with that no one needs to tell us. That are given to us for a reason. They exist within us. And part of capitalism is disconnecting us from that. We are experts of nothing. Everyone else must tell us. And so we lose our connection to that inner wisdom.”

Spiritual performance is another issue we must confront as we work to reconnect to our traditions. Spiritual performance refers to practitioners who are publicly leading or teaching but are not adequately trained or grounded in the traditions they are sharing. Our people are so hungry for connection that without discernment, many of us (myself included) can and do fall for practitioners who are moving outside of their skill and depth and without accountability. Chanel Porchia-Albert (Mama Jasira), from Ancient Song Doula Services describes this phenomenon:³

There’s a lot of wanting to use these tools but not knowing how. You can’t just call on an ancestor and ask them to come, and then once they’re in the room you just go off about your business and forget that they were there. You know what I mean? Or to say that you are centering spirit and all that comes with it but then not understanding your obligations to that. You have to know the energy behind the work that you are doing.

When we lack discipline and rigor, especially when doing spiritual or healing work, we can open portals to the spirit world irresponsibly, which can literally lead to individual and collective crisis. I have been to a number of conferences, convenings, and gatherings where this has occurred, and I and other practitioners have had to intervene to restore safety and stability to the space.

Spiritual bypass is another consequence of the legacy of disconnection fueled by colonization and capitalism. Spiritual bypass occurs when we use spiritual concepts and theories to evade, avoid, or ignore negative, uncomfortable, or difficult emotions and experiences. Toxic positivity certainly falls in this category as well as spiritual concepts that elevate “light” over “dark” work and fail to engage with some of the more challenging aspects of the human experience. I have witnessed spiritual spaces where BIPOC and white folks believe we can send love and light to rise above white supremacy, or better yet, be untouched by it due to our level of enlightenment. This type of thinking keeps us unaccountable, disengaged from the grinding work we need to do to build power and to intervene in the very real violence we are living through. It also denies us our humanity, “our beautiful mess,”⁴ by expecting us to show up with our pain neatly packaged.

I see too many people who jump into spirituality as a shelter to hide from reality. It doesn’t work that way. If you can’t face adversity, you will get locked into a new age perception that everything is fine when it isn’t. That makes you vulnerable to being exploited by the person who comes along and says, "I am a psychic. I have studied with this guy or that guy, and I know what you should do.”⁵

—Malidoma Patrice Somé, West African healer, teacher, and writer

As Malidoma Somé clearly points out, spiritual bypass can become a tool of exploitation that keeps us further cut off from important spiritual resources we need to meet reality—which for many of us includes immense suffering, grief, violence, and harm across generations. We must be suspicious of any practice or practitioner that encourages us to deny any part of our experience. The role of spirit and spiritual practitioners is to help us find the medicine in those parts of us that are hardest to accept and integrate.

The cumulative impact of collective, historical, and intergenerational trauma leads many of us to seek ways to feel better or not feel at all. This is a completely understandable response to the amount of suffering our communities are holding. It also makes us susceptible to spiritual performance, spiritual bypass, or clinging to one practice or practitioner to save us. We need to have more nuanced conversations about the ways new age rhetoric rooted in co-optation and commodification have influenced us and shaped our relationship to Spirit. Healing justice and Liberatory Harm Reduction are anchors to remind us that we have permission to enter exactly as we are.

Healing Our Intergenerational Connections to Land and People

Sitting with spiritual practitioners, elders, and ancestors across traditions provides powerful teachings about how we collectively return to our spiritual traditions with respect, reverence, and responsibility. As BIPOC, we must be aware of the ways we have internalized white supremacy, ableism, and capitalism in our reclamation of spiritual traditions. This is hard work, but the path to Spirit is through sacred reconnection. This process opens up an infinite amount of knowledge and resources to bring us back into alignment with our purpose and the strategies we need to get free.

It is important to acknowledge that many of us, specifically Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, have experienced harm, abuse, and violence in religious and spiritual communities. Whether through outright exclusion from these spaces, or attempts to convert us to some white, able-body/mind, cisgender, heteronormative standard, these experiences are all too common. As we seek to assert our unique spiritual role and leadership in these times, there are numerous gatekeepers working to keep us out or eliminate our people altogether. This process of reconnection to the ancestors or their practices when they have been steeped in white, cisheteropatriarchal, ableist domination can be a very confusing and solitary experience. As more of us challenge these dynamics and become practitioners, we can create even more space for our people to practice, learn, and grow.

Building Intergenerational Relationships

We must commit to reestablishing our familial and community connections that have been stolen from us. Intergenerational relationships are a reciprocal exchange that allows us to remember, reimagine, and create practices to cultivate collective power and purpose. Many wisdom traditions have ceremonies to (re)connect people to their divine purpose and destiny—in other words, your unique and specific role, medicine, and contribution to the world in this historical moment. Without these rites of passage, we can feel a deep sense of alienation and may not come into the right context to use our gifts and wisdom. This is about more than our work—paid or unpaid. This is soul work.

To build intergenerational relationships rooted in reciprocity, respect, and humility—the antidotes for co-optation and commodification—we have to learn from each other, which takes time. Like any relationship, they must be built on trust and showing up for and with each other. It is important that we create the conditions for these types of relationships to unfold, which can be difficult with the level of urgency and how quickly things are shifting and moving. However, there are no shortcuts to this process.

Moving with humility means we honor the space between what we know, what we do not yet know, and what is unknowable. It requires decentering ourselves and our ego to be open to learning, regardless of years of training and so-called expertise. Humility means being open to instruction and direction and in ceremony, trusting that there are protocols and strategies to use when engaging the spirit world for our protection and integration. Humility means being accountable to our teachers, elders, and spiritual community to ensure we stay rooted in lineage and to avoid arrogance and isolation. Humility does not mean making ourselves small or negating our innate wisdom. When we move in a co-creative relationship with Spirit, then we can maximize our wisdom by learning over and over again.

So I’m very grateful for the ancestors and the elders that there are these practices and traditions. I don’t have to reinvent anything. I don’t have to create some new ceremony . . . That there are generations, thousands of years, where people have done these things in this certain way, that gets these results.

—Phoenix Smith (Ola Oton Adelele), Founder of the Alliance for Ecotherapy and Social Justice, Member of Healing Clinic Collective⁶

Working across Traditions, Time, and Space

We can learn to be in right relationship to our spiritual traditions. To avoid appropriation and co-optation, we can seek permission from lineage holders when necessary, do our research to understand the context and conditions that our traditions come from, and make offerings to those ancestors and elders who are responsible for the traditions we have access to today. It is also important to consider which traditions are most appropriate for us to engage in for our own spiritual development and purpose. To find out, we listen to our inner wisdom and are willing to risk doing our own thing in the face of the next spiritual trend. We are in the midst of a spiritual shift at the threshold of larger cycles in human history. It is a lot to integrate and make sense of, so we need to ensure we are doing what works best for us while being respectful. Not everything is for everybody.

Our spiritual practices are not stagnant and have been transformed across generations—shifting and adapting based on context and conditions and what our ancestors needed and had access to at the time. The traditions we practice are also deeply shaped by the land we are on and the communities to which we belong. So while it is important to honor lineage, elders, and protocol, we also need to be adaptive. The question is: How do we hold this flexibility with a deep understanding and respect for what we are practicing?

We grow and learn best together, but the colonial project wants us divided. We are informed by the land and the rhythm of the place we are in, each one of us expressing what is happening on our own ground. We might need to adjust our steps for the places we are in.

—Adela Nieves Martinez

Sacred Responsibility and Integrity: Considerations for Practitioners Holding Our People for the Long Haul

There is a growing interest in learning healing and spiritual traditions not just for our individual transformation but to hold spiritual space for others. While we need more of us committed to collective healing and spiritual development, we do not need everyone to become a healer or spiritual practitioner. This may be an unpopular opinion, but it goes back to why we are recentering Spirit, which is to bring us back into alignment with our purpose and right role.

Health, healing, and spiritual practitioners holding the physical, emotional, and spiritual conditions of our communities will tell you that this work is an enormous responsibility that requires sacrifice and a level of accountability that is hard to describe. When you hold a specialized set of skills and work with people often in crisis, there is a power dynamic that can lead to harm and even abuse. There are a number of other important considerations to reflect upon before making this decision to support others spiritually.

Do Your Own Work

The first thing is to focus on your healing and the healing of your ancestors. When you do that, it will definitely reverberate outwardly, and just imagine an entire community of people who are in the practice of healing.

—Nia Wilson

Just because someone has been initiated into a tradition or has studied with teachers and elders does not mean they should be working with others around their spiritual development. Many of us have encountered exploitative spiritual practitioners who are more interested in amassing power and money based on ego than actually helping anybody. Power can be abused in any context, and everything can be weaponized—even spirituality. To develop spiritual practitioners to hold our people through the escalating crises of these times requires that people do their own individual work—emotionally and spiritually. This may seem obvious, but I have encountered many unintegrated spiritual teachers who have a lot of knowledge and act as gatekeepers but do not have the skills to work with people interpersonally. Phoenix Smith shares that we need “therapy for spiritual practitioners. We need to be in therapy too. Right. Because a lot of the dysfunction that I see [and] have experienced from other elders and that I see in communities is this disconnect that people are not really dealing with their own issues and trying to cover it up with different titles or different beads or different ceremonies.”

When we focus on our personal and familial healing, we learn to practice what we preach, develop a balanced relationship to our ego, and combat the sense of superiority that can come when we gain knowledge and experience in a particular area.

Sometimes You Are NOT the One

Spiritual practitioners are human just like the rest of us and may have periods where it is best to take a break from working with others. Whether due to crisis, grief, or as a result of causing harm, we need to have more explicit discussions about when and how spiritual practitioners can tap out of the work. There are also times when a practitioner may not be a good fit for a particular person or there are certain dynamics that would be a barrier to working together. Chanel Porchia-Albert describes how she handles this in her work:

There’s often times when I’m like, “No, I’m not supposed to be working with you. I’m not the one for you. I’m not saying that you don’t need this. I’m just saying that I’m not supposed to be the one that’s supposed to do it.” And being able to be okay with that and to sit with it and then follow up on, “Did they have the things that they needed?”

This type of integrity requires that spiritual practitioners are in a broader community of wisdom keepers moving with integrity and accountability to ensure there are spaces to unpack these potential conflicts and to refer folks to trusted practitioners.

We Need Politicized Practitioners

There is no separation between our spirituality and political liberation; we must stay engaged with issues of social justice as that is our spiritual practice as well. And there are people that are really separated from these issues, and they either hide, or they just want to stay disconnected from the political realities of the system that we live in.

—Phoenix Smith

As we have named repeatedly in this book, politicized practitioners are essential as we move to center healing and spirit work in our movements for liberation. We do not need all spiritual practitioners to also be organizers per se, but it is essential that practitioners moving in alignment with healing justice have a strong understanding of the roots of healing justice, movement building, and the particular spiritual needs of movement. When we don’t have people with this perspective, spiritual practitioners can move at odds with strategies to build collective power or move in ways that are uncoordinated with broader political strategies. This is often occurring unintentionally, but there are also those who use healing justice language to advance individualistic and capitalist goals. While we also need movement organizations to include spiritual practitioners as they develop strategies to build power, healing and spiritual practitioners need to understand themselves as being part of and accountable to liberation movements and the communities they are working with.

We can direct the (re)emergence of energy and interest around spirit, to the rigor and discipline needed to recenter spirit in our lives. We can create more and more spiritual communities that are rooted in lineage, history, and healing justice as a framework for building power. Practitioners rooted in integrity, accountability, and reciprocity across traditions will train the next generations of spiritual warriors to steward us through this time of death and transformation.

Notes

¹ SpiritHouse is a community-based organization in Durham, North Carolina, led by Black cultural workers and organizers seeking to seed healing and transformation for those most impacted by structural violence. https://www.spirithouse-nc.org/.

² Healing by Choice! is a “circle of women and gender non-conforming people of color health and healing practitioners based in Detroit.” “Healing by Choice!,” Healing by Choice!, accessed on February 20, 2022, www.healingbychoicedetroit.com/. For more info on HbC!, see the chapter “We Move in Relationship: Sites of Practice in the Midwest.”

³ Ancient Song Doula Services is a national birth justice organization that offers doula services, training, and advocacy for People of Color and low-income communities. https://www.ancientsongdoulaservices.com/.

⁴ See the chapter “Holding Our Beautiful Mess: Liberatory Harm Reduction and Our Right to Heal” by Shira Hassan.

⁵ D. Patrick Miller, “Visions: Malidoma Somé,” Mother Jones, March/April 1995, www.motherjones.com/politics/1995/03/visions-malidoma-some/.

⁶ The Alliance for Ecotherapy and Social Justice is “an Intergenerational, Interdisciplinary, multi-cultural alliance that provides Ecotherapy education and leadership through an intersectional framework aligned with Social Justice and community care,” accessed February 20, 2022, https://theaesj.com/. For more information about the Healing Clinic Collective, see the chapter “Building the World We Want and Deserve: Sites of Practice in California.”

Creative Practice
When and Where Do I Enter?

The moment we choose to LOVE we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to LOVE we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.¹

—bell hooks

Take a moment to extend and stretch or expand your body from right to left, front and back. Feeling connected to the Earth beneath you and the sky above you.

Using crayons, markers, pens, colored pencils—whichever suits your fancy—draw a line down the center of the page. Follow the instructions below to map people and places where you feel the safest and open to Be in Your Power!

Write your name in full, big, juicy letters in the middle of the page.

On one side of the page, write the places and spaces that give you love, power, strength, and rejuvenation. It could be community spaces, gardens, coffee houses, movie houses, rivers, or bars. Whatever works! Do You!

On the other side of the page, write the people that regenerate you and love you and truly see you for who you are. Don’t be shy; write down the names of people who really embrace you!

Keep this as a memory of what holds you and grounds you in your power.

Notes

¹ bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge, 1994) 289–299.

Co-Optation, Critical Questions, and Contradictions:
The Future of Healing Justice

Erica Woodland

This anthology offers history, context, and values for those seeking to engage with healing justice as a framework and a set of strategies for liberation. This book offers interventions to disrupt the ways healing justice is being misused, misappropriated, and co-opted. Cara and I co-wrote and co-edited this anthology out of concern about what is happening in our movements and in our communities, as well as how the state and its myriad of institutions have positioned themselves to take our cultural and healing traditions to keep us distracted from the real work we need to be doing.

Our organizing strategies and healing practices have been trivialized and turned into products—shifting the focus to individual self-care and wellness while undermining the collective power building and care work required to realize the dreams of our ancestors. This has been happening for generations, but now it has never been more urgent to collectively intervene. When healing justice was conceived in the early 2000s, Southern organizers and healers dreamed of strategies to collectively hold our people physically, psychically, emotionally, environmentally, and spiritually drawing from BIPOC movements and healing lineages. Two decades later, we are just starting to build community-led infrastructure rooted in abolition to ensure our survival. Where do we want to be in twenty years?

Co-Optation as Currency

Co-optation is the process by which a group or system takes on the language, appearance, culture, and traditions of another group to erase, criminalize, and weaken its power. Co-optation is stealing. It is the strategic displacement of a people from the source of their wisdom and power. While the conversation about co-optation is growing, we must learn how to define and identify as it begins to move in more subtle ways. We all cringed during the uprisings of 2020 as multibilllion-dollar companies (e.g., Amazon) started using Black Lives Matter images and language to announce their very late and disingenuous arrival to the growing conversation about racial justice. These acts were not only embarrassing, they also revealed the danger of symbolism and performance of social justice while continuing to perpetuate violence and exploitation.

The obvious examples are easy to spot. But what happens when we realize that we are living in a culture of co-optation where we no longer know how to be in right relationship to lineage, traditions, and collective wisdom generated across time and space? Co-optation then becomes a problem that we all must contend with to make sure we are not complicit.

No idea, practice, or tradition belongs to an individual person. Everything is created through our sacred interconnections and interdependence. As our collective consciousness continues to evolve, we will see different groups of people iterating on the same idea or strategy in different spaces, making it difficult to identify one person or one gathering as the impetus or origin. Because we live in a culture of co-optation where our success and relevance are directly tied to how quickly you can hop onto the next trend—we have to be more rigorous in critically thinking about where things come from and how to honor them.

Much has been written and discussed about the topic of white people stealing and commodifying the cultural traditions and practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Whether it’s yoga, Buddhism, Hoodoo, or countless other traditions, white folks continue the legacy of colonization. What is important for BIPOC folks to consider is how we facilitate and participate in this process. Eesha Pandit breaks this down in her piece, “Devastation in the Wake: What Would It Take to ‘Decolonize’ Yoga?”:¹

It’s always felt like participating in the complicated tango of neo-colonial capitalism—a dance that happens on the edge of a sharp knife in which white folks take something from a place they have subjugated, tell a tale of cultural appreciation, so that appropriation looks like support, at least not violent theft, and then sell it back to any and all of us, changed, but validated.

We refuse to accept appropriation and co-optation. Instead, we need reparations and divestment from colonial ways of relating to each other and our traditions.

Philanthropy

One of the contradictions that has been named in this book is the very real need for long-term financial resources to build infrastructure for healing justice alongside the dangers and limitations of philanthropy and the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC). The power that funders and donors have to shape our analysis and what we prioritize in our movement work is a problem that many of us are working to change. We’ve seen funders start to adopt the language of healing justice with no real grounding in what it means as a political framework. We’ve had funders ask for trainings on healing justice when in fact what they wanted was self-care or a healing retreat for their staff or their grantees. Funders continue to tap healing justice practitioners to address harm and conflict inside their organizations. While each of these issues are real and need to be addressed, funders are often disconnected from healing justice as a collective strategy rooted in building power. The further we move from this, the more easily we perpetuate the focus on individualized care, which keeps us caught up in the same cycle, avoiding the root causes of oppression and violence.

Another concerning pattern we’ve noticed over the last few decades is funders getting really excited about one healing model or practice, investing heavily in it, and encouraging grantees to move toward a single model. This is in direct conflict with one of the core principles of healing justice, which is choice, consent, and the ability to determine when, how, and what healing is for ourselves. Funders will also work with the same crew of healing/healing justice practitioners over and over, overlooking other skilled practitioners or resources on the ground, rooted in the context of the communities they are working with. This is understandable given the need to develop long-term relationships with practitioners built on trust. While it may be cute to be a funder fave, it can keep us from training up more people and building the actual systems we need for infrastructure long term. These examples, combined with the tendency to only fund institutions or groups that are a part of the NPIC versus collectives and other formations, or the funder strategy to only focus on rapid-response/short-term interventions, make it extremely difficult to get ahead of the next crisis.

Nonprofit/Movement-Building Organizations

Capitalism, erasure, and co-optation have led to healing justice becoming synonymous with self-care. Unfortunately nonprofit organizations—especially those working to address conditions of violence and harm—who know their staff need support to address trauma and grief, believe self-care is the answer to this issue. We’ve known organizations to seek healing justice as a strategy to get increased productivity from staff instead of addressing worker conditions, exploitation, or even abuse. Burnout and vicarious trauma are very real and need to be addressed inside our organizations. But this requires a holistic investigation of an organization’s culture, strategy, and systems—not just an assortment of self-care tools and a yoga room in the office.

Beyond the needs of staff, many movement organizations are seriously struggling to address intergenerational and collective trauma in their base building and care work. As practitioners, we receive regular requests from organizations to find therapists or healers to come in and work with them before building relationships with local resources and practitioners. Kindred Collective taught us that this work must be rooted in place and is only as strong as our relationships. We believe much of the work of healing justice in this moment should focus on building long-term strategies for organizers and movement organizations that include health and healing practitioners as integral to the political strategy, not just when one of our members or staff are in crisis.

One of the harder questions we are wrestling with is whether or how healing justice can be a strategy inside of movement-building organizations given their complicated relationship to the NPIC. As more and more people get exposed to healing justice and self-care rhetoric and develop a critique of capitalism, we are concerned about the ways healing justice is being used to demand that our workplaces become a site for personal healing work at the expense of the larger vision and purpose of our movements that guide the work for collective liberation. It is dangerous to expect employers (the NPIC) to be responsible for our personal healing, because our organizations are not equipped or rightly positioned to do so. Unfortunately, healing justice in these situations can also be used to evade accountability. We are concerned about the ways a focus on individual healing at work undermines the very real struggle and disagreement that we need ideologically to grow and sharpen our political strategy. Healing justice and other political frameworks can become weaponized to sabotage entire organizations struggling to address trauma and the emotional needs of staff.

We now have greater access to the origin and history of healing justice. We can learn from folks like Kindred Healing Justice Collective and others featured in this anthology to learn how to best use healing justice for our liberation. It cannot be overstated that healing justice is a framework and a set of strategies to address very specific things. It is not the be-all and end-all, and it is not applicable in all situations. We resist and disrupt a culture of co-optation by getting curious about where things come from and the specificity of what words mean and critically engaging with how to apply healing justice to our work. There are times where it is the right tool, and other times where it is not.

Practitioners

Amid growing awareness about healing justice, individual health and healing practitioners have adopted this framework and its language. One of the more concerning patterns we’re noticing is people assuming that healing justice is simply putting together two separate, frequently used, and somewhat understood words: healing and justice. This is a common misconception and problem in a time where words have lost their specificity and meaning. We may be inundated with information but have little opportunity to deepen our understanding. While individual practitioners, specifically BIPOC practitioners, are not responsible for this dynamic, we can unintentionally get swept up in a one-dimensional view of healing justice neglecting its history, lineage, and political strategy.

To be clear, healing justice asks us to be in direct relationship with movements and movement building in real, tangible, and accountable ways. When individual practitioners absorb the language of healing justice as a marketing tool to build their brand and customer/fan base, it further distances us from what we need—which is practitioners who are a part of movement and accountable to a base for the purpose of building collective power.² At a time when healing justice is sexy and being used for social capital, we must be accountable for the ways we are complicit in this dynamic while naming and intervening in co-optation by the systems described above. We must resist the tendency to prop up individual healers in the name of healing justice. This takes us away from our personal and collective power for healing and transformation. We will not allow the self-care and wellness industries to feed us capitalism and tell us it is healing or liberation.

Our Medicines Are Not for Sale: Healing Justice and the MIC

Like many other sacred things that have been Columbused by colonizers, be it hip-hop, sage, or the very lands we live on, the act of taking ayahuasca is an attempt to flee toxic whiteness, to heal the splintering of the self that occurred when the project of white supremacy was set in motion through atrocities like genocide and chattel slavery.³

—Bani Amor

The medical industrial complex (MIC) is one of the most dominant and violent institutions in our lives. It literally influences how long and if we live, our quality of life, and shapes the choices we have access to regarding our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a revelation for many people who were previously protected by their relative privilege as a result of ableism, capitalism, and white supremacy. The MIC has a long history of erasure, criminalization, and co-optation of our healing ways.⁴ From the criminalization of birth workers and midwives that led to the regulation and requirement of licensure, to the ways mindfulness has been appropriated by the field of mental health while erasing the Buddhist tradition from which it comes, these examples are part of the larger project to keep us cut off from our ancestral healing ways while the state and corporations profit.

The growing enthusiasm around psychedelics is the next big site for co-optation and appropriation by the medical industrial complex. As corporations continue to gobble our medicines for profit, we must be critical and suspicious of this multimillion-dollar industry that seeks to own and advance the use of both plant and synthetic psychedelics. For generations our ancestors have been in sacred relationship with plants that facilitate moving through different states of consciousness. These medicines have historically been held in a spiritual container. But now big pharma and research institutions are seeking FDA approval to move these substances to a clinical container, and psychotherapists are being trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy. To be fair, there is a growing number of BIPOC demanding representation in this industry and advocating for the “decolonization” of psychedelics, but when has it ever worked in our favor for the MIC to have access to our spiritual technologies?

There are so many issues with this trend toward psychedelics. First, plant medicines ingested in a ceremonial and spiritual context facilitated and guided by priestesses/priests, shamanic practitioners, and initiated elders, such as psilocybin (mushrooms), peyote, and ayahuasca, are being lumped together with synthetic psychedelics like LSD,⁵ MDMA,⁶ and ketamine,⁷ all of which have sordid histories connected to militarism or experimentation on incarcerated people. Just take a moment to consider these very different origin stories and contexts for use. Few would argue about the benefits of plant-based or synthetic psychedelics—they are surely powerful and can transform human suffering such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, addiction, and more. Our ancestors knew this, which is why they developed respectful and intimate relationships with plants with this type of power and have spiritual protocols to ensure integration. The question is not whether or not humans should use psychedelics for healing. The problem is what happens when big pharma, biotech, government, and the spiritual tourism industry drive demand for and seek ownership over psychedelics.

The current fight around the use and cultivation of peyote reveals how some are co-opting the language and movement around decriminalization to appropriate and profit from our ancestral medicines. Peyote, a plant relative used ceremonially by members of the Native American Church (NAC), is considered a Schedule 1 substance that is illegal (federally) to use except by members of the NAC. This exception was hard won by the NAC by way of amendments in 1994 to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.⁸ The decriminalization fight is being led by Decriminalize Nature, an organization advocating for the use of plant medicines to be legalized. On a superficial level, this could be a compelling idea. However, given the current shortage of peyote, decriminalization would make peyote less accessible to NAC members and once again fuel the misuse by others outside of a ceremonial container. Steven Benally, Diné elder, leader in the NAC, and peyote preservationist, explains:

Peyote is sacred medicine crucial to our religious identity and the survival of our community. The spiritual healing power it offers is only attainable through Native American protocol. It is intended to nourish the soul in troubled times and inspire our children to become responsible men and women.⁹

For-profit institutions capitalize off of white and BIPOC people rushing to psychedelics for healing or enlightenment. In fact, biotech companies are currently working on synthetic versions of psilocybin and ibogaine while psychedelic companies are going public and leading clinical trials.¹⁰ So let’s take a moment to break this all the way down. First, our people and practices are demonized and criminalized. Then, they are appropriated and misused. The environment and our communities are ravaged through overconsumption. Next, corporations patent a synthetic version of our medicines and then deny us access to them. And finally we are supposed to say thank you when more BIPOC are invited to the table.

There are no simple answers or solutions to these issues, and that’s not the point. We need more conversations among psychotherapists and healers who are part of the psychedelics industry and seeking to engage with healing justice as a political and spiritual framework, to sit with the contradictions around capitalism, the medical industrial complex, abolition, and the extractive nature of this industry. Moreover, we need to consider the limitations and potential harms of doing work with psychedelics in a “therapeutic” container rooted in the MIC rather than a spiritual/ceremonial one that is often hundreds and thousands of years older than the Western, capitalist, medical model.

Colonial Constructs of Trauma: Healing Justice and Trauma-Informed Care

Our communities and movements now have greater access to information about trauma and its impacts on our individual and collective bodies. It is powerful to see more survivors—BIPOC, Queer, Trans, and disabled—define our experience of violence as collective and intergenerational trauma. We need to understand trauma because healing justice is a political strategy to help us collectively transform trauma. Unfortunately, like most things, definitions of and interventions for trauma that come from the medical industrial complex are limiting, inaccurate, and are weaponized against survivors. We need to critically consider the ways the dominant conversation around trauma-informed care can support and undermine our collective healing and liberation.

What Is Trauma-Informed Care?

Trauma-informed care is the MIC’s attempt to bring more dignity and humanity into systems of care. Trauma-informed care basically asks health practitioners to move with the assumption that patients have or are experiencing trauma instead of using models and practices that are retraumatizing or blaming individuals for the ways their trauma shows up physically, interpersonally, and psychologically. We owe survivors—of war, sexual and physical assault, racialized and gender-based violence—for the fact that our trauma is being considered at all. It is survivors who have organized and advocated for the medical industrial complex to take their experiences (symptoms) seriously, and demanded the resources to heal (treatment). So over the last five decades, we’ve seen different groups of survivors from war veterans to survivors of domestic and sexual assault and childhood abuse, and more recently, survivors of white supremacist violence, petition to have their trauma recognized by the state. Post-traumatic stress disorder became an official diagnosis in 1980, but at that time it was largely attributed to violence experienced, witnessed, and perpetuated by veterans of combat.

In the 1990s two things happened that would change the conversation around trauma and lay the foundation for trauma-informed care. First, in 1994 the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) hosted a conference that is noted as the first national gathering to address women who were survivors and their experiences navigating the MIC.¹¹ Then, in 1998 the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study conducted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente, substantiated something that BIPOC, disabled, Queer, Trans, and poor people already knew—childhood trauma can have lifetime consequences, including intergenerational patterns of trauma, shortened life span, and increased physical, emotional, and spiritual dis-ease. Way before ACEs and epigenetics, our peoples held wisdom about the generational consequences of violence, abuse, and grief. While the ACEs data is extremely important—politically and financially in a for-profit health care system—it has many limitations. The study surveyed seventeen thousand people in Southern California, and the overwhelming majority of those people were WHITE.¹²

Colonial constructs of trauma—the MIC becomes the arbiter of what is warranted as trauma and how to address it with all of its inherent subjugation of those most impacted by structural violence. The ACEs assessment seeks to quantify trauma, is pathologizing, and despite its best efforts, creates a profile where we remain focused on an individual’s experiences instead of the structures of violence in which we live. Today as a mental health or public health practitioner or teacher, you can’t have a conversation about trauma without discussing ACEs. So it’s in our best interest to get ahead of the intentional and unintentional harm it will continue to cause to our communities.

The ACEs Aware Initiative in California is something to pay attention to as it is the first national initiative to screen patients for ACEs. This effort is rooted in the belief that more screening will beget more resources and support for people with high ACE scores. Critics of this initiative are deeply concerned about how this screening will then lead to more opportunities for state surveillance and violence as a result of mandated reporting.¹³ Despite the initiative’s goals to develop a robust network of care, it is often extremely difficult for a doctor, nurse, or social worker to meet the material needs that are always connected to our experience of trauma. What good is a referral to a social worker who may call child protective services, which could lead to more trauma when what a person really needs is housing or employment or elder care that the state refuses to provide?

Another critical concern about ACEs Aware comes directly from one of the authors of the original study, epidemiologist Dr. Robert Anda:

The authors are concerned that ACE scores are being misappropriated as a screening or diagnostic tool to infer individual client risk and misapplied in treatment algorithms that inappropriately assign population-based risk for health outcomes from epidemiologic studies to individuals.¹⁴

Certification in ACEs Aware is now a requirement for Medi-Cal providers to be paid by the state for their services and the screenings have been monetized at $29 per screening.¹⁵ Despite the danger of these screenings as outlined above, there is a financial benefit for providers to use this tool. Over time, projects like these create data sets that inform local, regional, and even federal funding for health care and treatment. Because California often sets the standard nationally, we must disrupt strategies such as ACEs Aware, which will have our communities further entrenched in the surveillance, policing, and victim blaming that is at the heart of the medical industrial complex.

Critical Questions and Contradictions: Moving Forward

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.¹⁶

—Audre Lorde

This chapter outlines a few examples of the ways healing justice is misused and co-opted by systems and individuals. This is a natural consequence of the rise in popularity of healing justice. We hope this book compliments the increased visibility with a grounding in the broader vision, strategies, and examples of healing justice as a political framework. The only way to stay aligned with the principles and possibilities of healing justice is to collectively explore the critical questions and contradictions we encounter as we build the world we want while living in the world we got. No matter where you are positioned, in community as a healer, health practitioner, cultural worker, organizer, funder, and/or survivor in movement, here are some questions to consider:

What is the problem we want to address, and is healing justice the appropriate strategy?

How is our healing justice work in relationship to movements for economic, gender, racial, disability, migrant, climate/environmental and Queer and Trans justice?

How is our work in relationship to the movements and political frameworks that healing justice is founded on?

Who is the base we are accountable to and building power with while holding healing justice strategies?

How is our healing justice work rooted in abolitionist and anti-capitalism strategies?

What processes do we need to set up to interrupt co-optation and appropriation?

What resources will we need to implement healing justice as a movement-building strategy to build collective power?

What parts of our work need to exist outside of state systems and institutions?

When do we need outside versus inside strategies?

How/do we have the power and experience to strategically move change within the MIC?

How do we learn the lineage/history of the traditions we are practicing? Do we need permission to practice or teach?

Now is the time to assess where we are, what we have learned and move toward the opportunities and limitations of healing justice in this historical moment. Now is the time to let critical questions about how to move in alignment and integrity guide us toward the future. We cannot afford shortcuts or easy fixes. We always deserve more than what these structures of violence and domination dole out to us. We must commit to grappling with critical questions and contradictions in this work to keep us ahead of the state’s attempts to criminalize, demonize, and commodify our traditions.

Notes

¹ Eesha Pandit, “Devastation in the Wake: What Would It Take to ‘Decolonize’ Yoga?,” The Remix, April 12, 2021, https://theremix.substack.com/p/devastation-in-the-wake-what-would.

² For more information, see the following chapters: “Why We Organize Practitioners” and “Return to Spirit: Lineage, Integrity, and Accountability.”

³ Bani Amor, “The Heart of Whiteness: On Spiritual Tourism and the Colonization of Ayahuasca,” Bitch Media, June 5, 2019, www.bitchmedia.org/article/heart-of-whiteness-spiritual-tourism-colonization-ayahuasca.

⁴ For more information, see the following chapters: “Roots of the Medical Industrial Complex” and “We Are Our History: Transforming the Legacy of Criminalization.”

⁵ LSD, developed in the 1930s, was used by the CIA for mind control experiments. “LSD,” History.com, last updated August 21, 2018, www.history.com/topics/crime/history-of-lsd.

⁶ MDMA, synthesized in 1912, was used in experiments by the CIA and army as weapons of war. “MDMA,” History.com, last updated August 21, 2018, www.history.com/topics/crime/history-of-mdma#:~:text=During%20the%20Cold%20War%20both,psychoactive%20drugs%20on%20unwitting%20subjects.

⁷ Ketamine, synthesized in 1962 and used for anesthesia, was used to experiment on prisoners in the 1960s. Julaine Allan, “Weekly Dose: Anaesthetic and Recreational Drug Ketamine Could Be Used to Treat Depression,” The Conversation, August 2, 2017, https://theconversation.com/weekly-dose-anaesthetic-and-recreational-drug-ketamine-could-be-used-to-treat-depression-81468. Ketamine was also linked to murder of Elijah McClain by police. Josiah Hesse, “‘Weaponization of medicine’: Police Use of Ketamine Draws Scrutiny after Elijah McClain’s Death,” The Guardian, December 17, 2021, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/17/ketamine-law-enforcement-deaths-custody-elijah-mcclain.

⁸ Buddy T., “What to Know About Peyote Use,” Very Well Mind, February 11, 2022, www.verywellmind.com/how-long-does-peyote-stay-in-your-system-80310.

⁹ Louis Sahagún, “Why Are Some Native Americans Fighting Efforts to Decriminalize Peyote?,” LA Times, March 29, 2020, www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-03-29/native-americans-want-mind-bending-peyote-cactus-removed-from-efforts-to-decriminalize-psychedelic-plants.

¹⁰ Carolyn Gregoire, “Inside the Movement to Decolonize Psychedelic Pharma,” Neo.Life, updated January 11, 2021, https://neo.life/2020/10/inside-the-movement-to-decolonize-psychedelic-pharma/.

¹¹ Charles Wilson, Donna M. Pence, and Lisa Conradi, “Trauma-Informed Care,” Encyclopedia of Social Work, November 4, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.013.1063.

¹² “About the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study,” Center for Disease Control, accessed December 18, 2021, www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html.

¹³ Karen De Sá and Nadra Nittle, “Painful Questions: California Launches Widespread Screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences. Critics Question the Science, and the Consequences,” The Imprint, August 18, 2020, accessed December 18, 2021, https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/painful-questions-critics-question-california-universal-aces-screening/46670.

¹⁴ Robert F. Anda, Laura E. Porter, and David W. Brown, “Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 59, no. 2 (March 2020): 293–295, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009.

¹⁵ “Billing and Payment,” ACES Aware, accessed December 18, 2021, www.acesaware.org/learn-about-screening/billing-payment/.

¹⁶ Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984), 112.

Conclusion

Born through ceremony and

Listening

By honoring our ancestors,

Our relationships, and

Our deepest knowings.

In 2021 we began this journey with a ceremony at the crossroads of Harriet Tubman’s birthplace and the Underground Railroad on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. We made offerings at the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge to honor Harriet’s knowledge of that water that helped so many of our people get free.

We have continued the journey with ceremony throughout to uplift our ancestors and be a conduit to these teachings, memories, and tapestries we have woven in this anthology. We believe we are at the crossroads of something spiritually, and politically powerful and groundbreaking, and that is why we chose to share it with you. This book cannot tell you nothin’ though if you are not willing to listen to the echoes and imprints of ancestral traditions, ruminations, and guided messages from our past, present, and futures that we want to imagine. As we look back to look forward, we are clear our next horizon is at the nexus of care, healing, and liberation.

We have been here . . .

What is true is that healers, cultural workers, and health practitioners have always been at the frontlines, at the baobab trees, at the bridges between war and freedom. We know of the Harriet Tubmans, the Black Panther Clinics, and Young Lord’s detox centers, but we don’t know of the many root workers, energy healers, spiritual practitioners, birth workers, doctors, and nurses in liberation movements that were strategists and freedom fighters holding the line. During COVID-19 we saw doctors and nurses fighting health inequities to not be complicit with using public health as a weapon against our communities. We now know the nurses, like Dawn Wooten, who had the fortitude to stand up against an ICE detention center and say no to medical harms and abuses on immigrant women. We know there are many of us ready to fight systems that do not ensure our collective safety, care, and liberation and will fight against policing, surveillance of our bodies, and the criminalizing and erasure of our traditions that keep us alive. If this book does anything, it should catalyze support for the risk takers and rule breakers who want to build new concepts of collective care that transcend eugenic ideas that perpetuate that many of us should not exist or should be genetically removed.

Where are we going? What will we need?

What we are asking for from all of us is accountability and sacrifice to co-imagine this next blueprint together. To protect and care for BIPOC and undocumented communities, Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary folks, our people engaging in the street economy, sex workers, active/former drug users, our people who are unhoused, our sick and disabled people, people living with HIV/AIDS, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, organizers, activists, artists, cultural workers, birth workers, and our health, healing, and spiritual practitioners who refuse to collude with the prison and medical industrial complexes.

How will we build insider/outsider strategies to abolish medical and scientific practices that render our communities expendable? How will we be in relation to each other—and all beings—in ways that do not seek to extract, diminish, devalue, or objectify or kill us for the sake of racism, ableism, or capitalism? How will we build ecosystems of care that ensure mutual dignity, respect, and interdependence that center our collective spirit, lands, transformative economies, and lived experiences? How will we build power within ecosystems of care that does not police, criminalize, and control our bodies?

We need to build collective leadership that does not uplift one over many. We make folks icons so that we don’t have to do the work, the study, discipline, and rigor ourselves. We are not looking to be heralded as icons of healing justice; we are looking for co-conspirators that can do the work with intention, purpose, and integrity. This process is not static, nor completely designed. We have to constantly assess context and conditions to remain adaptive, flexible, and innovative to answer the call. This then will build out and expand our practices toward next generations.

We must hold firm to the pillars of healing justice, disability justice, environmental justice, reproductive justice, transformative justice, and harm reduction to integrate them into our practices for collective care and not leave anyone behind. We must also hold firm to the work of abolition, anti-capitalism, and to disrupting the medical industrial complex.

In 2022, we have witnessed an escalation of transphobia, war, anti-abortion legislation, climate disasters, and the resurgence of eugenics and population control inside of the COVID-19 pandemic. The war in Ukraine, Roe v. Wade being overturned as a first step in the rollback of more of our reproductive freedoms, the denial of medical care for Trans youth, and the criminalization of health practitioners providing gender-affirming care are all horrifying examples of what’s to come. Not to mention the record-breaking global heatwave and flooding, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with its eugenic and capitalistic responses—the abandonment of sick and disabled communities, including the many who have or will develop long COVID, or the enormous global disparities in vaccine access fueled by the greed of the state and the pharmaceutical industry. We are also deeply concerned about the ways big pharma is partnering with DNA databases like 23andMe to harvest our genetic material to create drug compounds for profit. We also want to name the rise of white supremacist vigilante violence and right-wing extremism, such as the hunting and killing of Ahmaud Arbery or the January 6th insurrection on the US Capitol, as threats which many of us have not seen before in this generation.

It will be necessary as organizers, cultural workers, healers, and health practitioners to reckon with how digital technologies are being used to extract and police our genetic and biological materials as an extension of colonization and social control. We will need to adapt and shape new formations to transcend emerging technologies that are an extension of racial capitalism, eugenics, and xenophobia. We can also use this opportunity to radically imagine using technology to build networks of liberatory practice and collective care to ensure the survival of all beings.

We are in a generative and opportune moment to build infrastructure for long-term care, safety, and protection of our communities globally. In the Global South, feminists and human rights defenders have been building with energy-, earth- and body-based healers to create what they call holistic security, which is deeply rooted in digital and physical safety strategies for organizers being targeted and killed by the state. It is aligned with the healing justice strategy as a political and spiritual imperative that started in the 2000s in response to heightened fascism and surveillance of their communities.

As a global pandemic has shown us, the false divide of borders keeps us from exploring the global ecosystems of care that will be necessary to procure the safety and well-being of our communities during heightened wars, conservative backlash, and the acceleration of climate change. Given forced global migration and the world’s economy, we will need to be more in relationship to each other globally to navigate genocide and racial capitalism. We know it will be critical to have infrastructure that centers the Global South as we build relationships between organizers, healers, and health practitioners across the global majority that are aligned in abolitionist and anti-capitalist values and thinking.

We also want to name the need to uplift language as integral to building a transformative global ecosystem of care. Language justice was just emerging as a political framework alongside the emergence of healing justice in the early 2000s. As defined by language justice organizers, including one of the architects, Roberto Tijerina, “language justice is an evolving framework that recognizes language can be a tool of oppression, as well as integral to equalizing power dynamics and exercising autonomy.” For our futures, we will need to center language justice as a political strategy to dismantle language divides that have intentionally separated us from sharing traditions of care and building infrastructure for global strategies. Central to care is being able to receive healing in our first language. In order for healing justice to expand in its knowledge and memory building, we must honor language as integral to the passing down of our cultural practices and medicines.

Call to Action

We need philanthropists to invest in the building of a robust global infrastructure of collective care, holistic security, and protection. This must be for the long haul and not just an ad hoc response to global crises. We need interventions around the ways white supremacist and ableist culture within philanthropy continues to divide and conquer community-led care, safety, and healing justice interventions. How do funders not substitute short-term healing practices for long-term strategies to build infrastructure around healing justice? How can funders resource and elevate collective care and safety strategies that are outside of the state and interrupt criminalization and policing of our communities? It’s not healing justice if it’s not building power toward our liberation. In order to respond to generational trauma and continued oppressive systems, we need funders that do not fear critiquing the public health system or using an abolitionist framework to disrupt harmful abuses and medical exploitation within the carceral state. How will you redistribute resources and build a reparations strategy that includes truly reckoning with and being accountable for the ways philanthropy perpetuates harm, violence, and undermines our movements?

Alongside the growing calls for “racial reckoning,” we know some funders are moving directives for racial healing strategies that are supporting generative and powerful work. Yet we ask that you do not conflate healing justice with “racial healing,” as HJ is a particular strategy that seeks to build power and collective care strategies while holding state and private institutions accountable for centuries of medical experimentation and using eugenic science to police our communities. Healing justice seeks to abolish the harms and abuses of medical and scientific racism and ableism as an extension of racial capitalism, colonization, eugenics, and state control. We hope you take risks to fund these kinds of strategies indefinitely, not just during a pandemic.

To our beloved movements, we ask that we prioritize healing justice in our liberatory strategies to build long-term infrastructure for the care and protection of our people and lands. As previously mentioned, this must include honoring our languages, our medicines, and our ancestral traditions. We need movements to center healing justice as a political framework and strategy from the beginning of political work, by engaging in long-term relationship building with practitioners and seeing us as strategists. What is the individual and collective healing that we need to do to truly reach liberation and be in right relationship to each other and the planet? To organizers, we ask that you not conflate self-care with healing justice. While self-care is invaluable, HJ is a strategy rooted in building power through transforming generational trauma by holding collective care for and with our communities as part of our liberation work.

We ask health and healing practitioners to transcend false divides of allopathic versus non-Western medicine and begin to innovate ways to hold multiple healing practices that do not create a hierarchy. How do we build across traditions of care that value all bodies, minds, and ways of being?

If we can begin to imagine a global ecosystem of care rooted in abolition and healing justice, we need healers and health practitioners to remember these tenets of our work to move us forward:

It will take discipline and rigor to be in practice together and deepen political alignment to build a global ecosystem of care that we have never seen before.

We need to be humble and in right relationship to the lineage and ancestral traditions of the places we are building care strategies for and with.

We must be conscious of the context and conditions of our communities and the specific strategies they have used to resist and survive.

We refuse to accept one single model of care, especially a Western-based medical model that has been steeped in white supremacist and ableist ideas of “healthy” as critiqued throughout this book.

It will require risk and sacrifice for practitioners to no longer be complicit with individual or institutional protocols or practices that uphold the carceral state.

At the nexus of care and liberation, we are being asked to pull forth traditions that center our collective power.

We believe this book will guide us toward the co-creation of something new, transformative, long lasting, and powerful. We hope you will consider the wisdom, memories, and stories in this anthology as a compass to guide us home toward freedom.

Cosmologies for Freedom

Cara Page

There was a map in the

quilt of stars,

from the skies of Palestine

to the blood/bones/skins of the Amerikkkas

that our ancestors wove.

How do we know that Harriet wasn’t trying

to take us all the way home?

Cross rivers and plantations,

Cross galaxies and universes.

How do we know that she was following the North Star

and not following

some other star/some other universe

that we’ve never even seen before.

And something stopped her at the universal crossroads

and told her to go back

and hold the form

for a planet that was already dying.

Go back and look for the places

where freedom is not a commodity

to be bought in different war zones.

We are forgetting how to make

our own maps

to get us home,

toward

cosmologies for freedom.

We are

the mapmakers.

We are

the star creators.

Harriet saw freedom in the constellations

of the stars.

What will you use for your compass?

What will you use for your stars?

What will we use for our maps?

What will we use for our resistance?

To map

our freedom

To map

our freedom

To map

our freedom

Home

Devocation

We thank Spirit and Divine Creator.

We thank the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

We give thanks to all the geographies and traditions we have called forth to honor the ancestral lineages of collective care.

We give our deepest gratitude for the medicines of protection, care, and safety that have surrounded us.

May we be guided by spirit and light toward our futures.

May we be guided on this journey with purpose and intention to honor our lineages.

May we be rooted in our truths and our convictions with humility and grace.

We honor the paths that will guide us to revolution and transformation.

And so another cycle closes as we return these words and incantations to the universe.

With love and gratitude to the ancestors and beings that have been on this journey with us, may you return to your sacred home.

We commit to using our ancestral memories and medicines as a compass for liberation.

Photograph by Margarita Corporan. Visual description: A black-and-white close-up of an altar for Harriet Tubman and ancestors alongside the Underground Railroad. A lit white offering candle with Harriet’s name and face sits on the forest floor. In the foreground, offerings of cornmeal, tobacco, and flowers in a large abalone shell sit on a geometric black-and-gold patterned Kuba cloth alongside a single feather, flowers, and citrine crystal.

Glossary

Able·ism (/ˈābəˌlizəm/ noun) “A system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This systemic oppression that leads to people and society determining people’s value based on their culture, age, language, appearance, religion, birth or living place, ‘health/wellness,’ and/or their ability to satisfactorily re/produce, ‘excel’ and ‘behave.’ You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.”¹

Abolition A collective practice, political analysis, and organizing strategy to transform the root conditions that proliferate harm and violence in society, including the elimination of prisons, police, and carceral systems of surveillance. It envisions and builds collective strategies that restructure society to provide basic human needs, such as safety, housing, food, education, etc., for communities.

Biological determinism The belief that human traits are due to genetic inheritance and therefore biologically predetermined (e.g., sexuality and poverty) as opposed to social, political, cultural, and environmental conditions or choices made by the individual or collective based on self-determination and autonomy.

Christian supremacy Foundational to the building of the US empire, this term describes the forced/coercive imposition of Christianity on people and communities, and centering of Christian practices and traditions as foremost to any other religion or spirituality. It involves the denunciation and criminalization of other spiritual and/or religious practices to assert that Christianity is the only true way to know God/Creator/Divinity.

COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) A covert and illegal operation started by J. Edgar Hoover (1956 and 1971) whose goal was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” revolutionary leaders and political organizations.

Colonization A political project wherein a nation subjugates and exploits other nations or peoples and their labor and land for control of their resources. It entails massive violence and domination of a nations’ or peoples’ political, economic, language, cultural, and religious systems.

Criminalization The process through which people, behaviors, and/or activities are designated as “illegal” or “criminal” and therefore persecuted by the state/authority. Through this process, the state/authority creates “crime” by imposing laws, policing, and punishment for “criminal activity.”

Decolonization A liberatory political process where former colonies and/or Indigenous peoples secure their sovereignty, land, and reparations from colonizers to disrupt historical colonial relationships. Decolonization necessitates the self-determination of colonies and/or Indigenous societies to control their own resources, political governance, language, spiritual/religious, economic, and cultural systems.

Eugenics First used in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, is predicated on the idea of genetic superiority and inferiority, creating a hierarchy of who is seen as “desirable and fit” to and who is seen as “undesirable and unfit.” It is used to create a sorting and categorization system to exterminate genetic materials of marginalized communities, including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, immigrants, people with disabilities, and incarcerated people to genetically improve the human race.

Generational/Intergenerational trauma Trauma transmitted across generations including historical trauma that continues to affect and compound within subsequent generations and communities. It can affect individuals, communities, or groups’ lifespans by its pervasive and complex impact on our psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being.

Global South This term is used to describe developing countries in the regions of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania (a geographic region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia).

Medical industrial complex Refers to the interconnected public health care institutions, private medical industries, state policies, and academic sciences structured and led by white supremacy, scientific racism, eugenics, and capitalism. Its primary function is to generate maximum profit by targeting, exploiting, policing, and eliminating specific people, conditions, and behaviors marked as medically unviable, undesirable, and/or unintelligible.

Movement (political or social movement) People, groups, and/or communities organized through political ideologies from which they challenge, resist, or change structural political, cultural, and/or social conditions to achieve outlined goals.

Nonprofit industrial complex “A system of relationships between the State (or local and federal governments), the owning class, foundations, and nonprofit/NGO social services and social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements.”²

Population control (Malthusian Theory of Population) An ideology created by Thomas Malthus in 1798 (in “An Essay on the Principle of Population”) connoting the root cause of environmental degradation as Women of Color's fertility. This theory suggests that People of Color are overpopulating the globe and draining natural resources which legitimizes reproductive violence and oppression (e.g., sterilization and experimentation) on People of Color, Indigenous, immigrant, and disabled communities while incentivizing reproduction for white abled people. This ideology ignores the real root cause of environmental degradation which is the production of war and militarization.

Prison industrial complex The interlocking systems, structures, and policies in federal, state, and local governments, public institutions, and private industries designed to perpetuate violence and extract profit, land, and labor via prisons, policing, military, and surveillance.

Racial capitalism Originally defined by Cedric J. Robinson via his work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition; it is a theory that articulates the inextricable link between capitalism and racism. This theory posits the origin of modern capitalism evolved from racialized Western European civilizations to become a global system fueled by slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide.

Safety Community-determined, survivor-centered process that does not rely on policing and punishment; refers to how we navigate our different needs and desires based on lived experience and individual and collective trauma while preventing, minimizing, and transforming harm, violence, and abuse.

Scientific racism (biological racism) Pseudoscience used to justify racist ideologies and white supremacy via science, academics, technology, and standardized medical protocols. It’s aim is to justify racial hierarchies wherein white people are superior and non-white people are “medically” and/or “biologically” inferior.

Settler colonialism A type of colonialism where the colonizing settlers intend to disappear, enslave, and destroy Indigenous peoples, societies, and their relationships to land via settlers’ occupation and claim that the land is their “home.” It is an ongoing, daily process fueled by structures aiming to inflict genocidal violence globally on Indigenous life for the control and extraction of resources (e.g., land, water, air, etc.).

Sites of practice Regional and/or geographical place-based strategies of healing justice that map and respond to the environmental, psychic, physical, emotional, and spiritual conditions of our communities. Sites of practice are rooted in place and thereby in right relationship to the needs of our peoples. They must also be rooted in consent and self/community determination.

State An organized, centralized political institution that creates and enforces rules to govern communities and maintains a monopoly over the use of violence and force to maintain power.

Street/Survival economy An economy where individuals exchange goods, services, etc. for cash money that is not reported to or regulated by the government.

Notes

¹ Working definition by @TalilaLewis, updated January 2022, developed in community with disabled Black/negatively racialized folk, especially @NotThreeFifths. Read more: bit.ly/ableisc20i022.

² “Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” INCITE!, accessed February 1, 2022, https://incite-national.org/beyond-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/.

Index

Please note that index links to approximate location of each term.

A

abolition movement

building long-term infrastructure, 203–207

definition of, 202

future of, 207–208

origins of, 201–202

abortion, 68, 70, 76, 77, 104–105. See also Roe v. Wade

Abortion Action Coalition, 28

Aboyade, Owólabi, 160, 166

ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), 260–261

ACEs Aware Initiative, 261

Aceves-Iñiguez, Kimberly, 169

Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, 69

ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 98

Acudetox protocol, 38

acupuncture, 37–38

Adams, Mary Anne, 120

AIDS. See HIV/AIDS epidemic

Aileen’s, 148

air, listening to, 189–190

Albert, Ozawa Bineshi, 188, 193

Alcatraz, occupation of, 33

Alexander VI, Pope, 67

Alig, Michael, 95

Alliance for Ecotherapy and Social Justice, 149, 248

Allied Media Conference, 147, 161, 179

Alternate Roots, 112, 123

Amazon, 252

American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 61

American Eugenics Society, 61, 62

American Indian Movement (AIM), 23, 33–35, 79

American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 77, 78, 82, 258

American Social Hygiene Association, 72

Amor, Bani, 256

Ananse Consulting, 127

ancestral patterns, reclaiming, 79

Ancient Doula Song Services, 147, 248

Anda, Robert, 261

Andrews, Courtni, 214–215

Anti-Drug Abuse Act, 77

anti-miscegenation laws, 68

Anti-Police Terror Project, 148, 204

Arbery, Ahmaud, 267

Arlington Cemetery, 34

Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS Community Health Center (APICHA CHC), 22

Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative, 147

Attica Prison Uprising, 24, 76

Audre Lorde Project, 25, 147, 181, 182

B

Baker, Ella, 28, 120

Baldwin, James, 78

Bambara, Toni Cade, 4

Banks, Dennis, 41

Barnard Center for Research on Women, 217

Battle, Colette Pichon, 124

Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC), 147, 172–173, 175

Bayonet Constitution, 71

beauty, concept of, 57

Bellecourt, Clyde, 33

Bellevue Hospital, 23

Benally, Steven, 258

Bennett, Julia, 179

Berne, Patty, 56, 58, 168–169

Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, 217

Black Codes, 70

Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM), 148

Black Hills, 36, 141

Black Lives Matter, 147, 163, 252

Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, 147

Black Panther Party, 23, 33, 36, 38–39, 43–48, 54, 79, 89

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, 102, 136, 265

Black Women’s Health Imperative, 121

boarding schools, 69

Bold Futures, 146, 154–155

Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement, 107

Bracero Agreement, 75

Bratton Group, 77

Brave Heart, Maria Yellow Horse, 114

Breedlove, Caitlin, 126–127

broken windows theory, 77

Brooks, Cat, 208

Brown, Autumn, 161, 178

Buck, Carrie, 74

Buck v. Bell, 62, 74

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 33, 34–35, 81–82

Burney-Scott, Omisade, 127

Bush, George W., 104–105, 108

Bush, Laura, 108

Byrd, James, 121

C

Cadena, Denicia, 154, 155

California, sites of practice in, 167–174

California Healers Network, 149

Campaign Against Racism, 214–215

Candomblé, 83

caretaking, creating infrastructures of, 150

Carnegie Foundation, 60

Casa de Salud, 115, 146, 153–154

Casa Ruby, 25

Center for Disease Control (CDC), 260

ceremonial organizing model, 171

Chamberlain-Kahn Act, 73

Chandler, Kerri, 97

Changing Frequencies, 148, 214, 216–217, 224, 232

Charley, Shash Yazhi, 115, 125

Chasnoff, Ira, 77

Chevron, 170

Chicago, 36, 159, 161

Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, 62–63

child sexual abuse, 172

Chinese Exclusion Act, 60, 71

Chisholm Legacy Project, 149, 188

Church Committee, 80

Church of the Lukumí Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 83

Clayton-Johnson, Mark-Anthony, 222–223, 225, 227

Clemons, Ayo, 163

climate change, 187–188, 196, 213, 218, 228, 268

Climate Justice Alliance, 188

Clinton, Bill, 106

clubs, 94–99

Coalition to End Sheriff Violence, 173

co-creation, paradigm of, 194–195

Code of Indian Offenses, 71, 81, 82

COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), 33, 38, 39, 47–48, 54, 75, 79–80, 222

collective care, remedies and recipes for, 212–213

colonization, effects of, 190, 193

Columbus, Christopher, 67

Comanche, 82

Combahee River Collective, 21, 26–28

Combahee uprising, 15, 16, 18

Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment, 159

Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, 28

Communities Against Rape and Abuse, 115, 146

Compton’s Cafeteria Uprising, 21, 76

Comstock Laws, 70

convict leasing, 70

Conway, Dominique, 5–6, 51, 54

Conway, Marshall “Eddie,” 5–6, 43–54

Cook, James, 68

co-optation, 251–258, 262

Cordova, Lorraine, 153

Coronado, Francisca Porchas, 150–155, 220–221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227

Corporan, Margarita, x, 14, 102, 136, 186, 274

“Cosmologies for Freedom,” 271–272

COVID-19 pandemic, 63, 108, 164, 211, 228, 230, 238, 257, 266, 267

crack baby myth, 77

Crawford, Robert, 93

Creative Interventions, 146

creative practice, 249–250

Crenshaw Dairy Mart, 174, 175

criminalization

generational consequences of, 79

historical overview of, 67–78

patterns of, 78–79, 84

political repression, 79–80

role of, 66–67

spiritual repression, 81–83

transforming legacy of, 66–67, 83

cross-dressing laws, 69

Cullors, Patrisse, 173, 174, 175, 221, 225, 228

D

Dakota Access pipeline, 141

dance music culture, 94–99

Dannemora Prison, 23

Davenport, Charles, 62

Davis, Angela, 55

Davis, Mary, 120

Dawes Act, 71

Dawson, Isabel, 89

Day, Inaya, 97

decolonization, definition of, 151

Decriminalize Nature, 258

Dee-Lite, 99

Defense of Marriage Act, 106

DeGruy, Joy, 113

dependence, construct of, 60–61

Detention Watch Network, 230

Detroit, 126, 129, 160, 161, 164, 212

Detroit Disability Power, 166

deviance, construct of, 60–61

Dhaliwal, Kanwarpal, 170

Different Avenues, 105, 146

Dignity and Power Now, 147, 173–174, 222

Dilulio, John, 78

disability justice, 143–144, 145, 168–169

disability rights movement, 143

disconnection, as tool of genocide, 238–242

Djordjevic, Jelena, 231

Dlugosch, Boris, 97

Doctrine of Discovery, 67, 81

Dole, Sanford, 71

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 69

Drug Enforcement Administration, 76

E

Eagle Evolution Consulting, 115, 125

Earth, listening to, 19, 189

East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC), 160–161, 166

Eighteenth Amendment, 73

eldership, 152–153

Emancipation Proclamation, 70

Embodiment Institute, 148

Emergency Quota Law, 74

Employment Division v. Smith, 78

environmental justice, 36, 140–141, 187–188, 195

Epstein, Jeffrey, 72

EqualHealth, 147, 214–215, 218

Erenberg, Stacy, 162

Espionage Act, 73

eugenics, 59–63, 72, 74, 76, 113

Eugenics Records Office, 61–62

Eugenics Research Association, 61

F

Farrow, Kenyon, 94–99

FBI, 33, 38, 39, 75, 79–80

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 192

FIERCE, 146

fire, listening to, 16–17, 190

Fireweed Collective, 146, 204, 206

Floyd, George, 28, 165, 201, 225

Fontaine, Geleni, 176, 179–180

Frazier, Demita, 28

Free Breakfast Program, 39

Freedom Harvest, 173

Freedom to Heal Program, 153

Friend of a Friend Program, 43, 51–52, 54

Friends of Friends Herbal Solidarity Program, 164

Frontline Wellness Network, 148, 222

Fugitive Slave Acts, 68, 69

Fullilove, Mindy Thompson, 113

Fullwood, Catlin, 89

future

envisioning, 29, 266–269

taking full ownership and responsibility for, 208–209

transforming, 193–196

G

Galton, Francis, 59–60

Generation FIVE, 115, 146, 175

Generative Somatics, 147

genocide

disconnection as tool of, 238–242

generational impacts of, 114–115

George, Gina, 182

Georgia Detention Watch, 230

Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, 230

Ghost Dance Movement, 81–82

Giuliani, Rudolph, 77, 95

Glasgow Climate Summit, 187

GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance, 22

Golden, Ebony Noelle, 112, 217

Gold Rush, 69

Great Migration, 160

Greene, Cory, 177

Green Haven Correctional Facility, 177

Greer, Tammy, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194

Griffin-Gracy, Miss Major. See Miss Major

Gulf South Green New Deal, 141

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, 15–19, 112

H

Hamer, Fannie Lou, 28, 120, 210

Hamer-Baker Plan, 28

Hampton, Fred, 36, 80

harm reduction

definition of, 142

evolution of, 89–90

examples of, 142, 159–160

healing justice and, 91–92, 142–143

liberatory, 88–90

origins of, 86–87

public health co-optation of, 86–87, 90

Harriet’s Apothecary, 148, 180–181, 214

Harriet Tubman Collective, 148

Harrison Narcotics Act, 72

Hassan, Shira, 86–93, 160

Hawaii, history of, 68, 71, 75

Hayashi, Kris, 181

Healing by Choice!, 148, 159, 164, 248

Healing Clinic Collective, 147, 170–171, 190

Healing Histories Project, 149, 217

Healing in Action, 159

healing justice. See also sites of practice

as call-and-response to ancestors, 1

as call to action, 269–271

context and conditions for emergence of, 139

critical questions for, 262–263

definition of, 139–140

future of, 251–263, 266–269

legacy of resistance and, 32–40

Liberatory Harm Reduction and, 91–92

lineage of, 6–7

as memory work, 4

misuse and co-optation of, 1–2, 251–259, 262

organizing strategy and, 130

origins of, 103–108, 110–117, 119–126, 211–212

political frameworks and, 138, 140–144

as political strategy, 230–235

principles of, 126–129

recipe for, 130–131

struggle and, 29

two approaches to, 8

wellness vs., 90

Healing Justice Practice Space, 147, 161, 179

healthism, 90–91, 93

Health Justice Commons, 148

Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, 37

HEARD, 147

Helm-Hernandez, Paulina, 122

Henderson, Sarahn, 120

Hialeah, Florida, 83

Hicks, Charity, 120, 129, 160, 164–165, 166, 212

Highlander Research and Education Center, 112, 120, 123

HIV/AIDS epidemic, 22, 63, 77, 86, 89, 94–99, 105, 142

H.O.L.L.A! (How Our Lives Link Altogether), 147, 177

Holmes, Barbara, 19

Homestead Act, 70

hooks, bell, 249

Hoover, J. Edgar, 75, 79

Horwitz, Claudia, 125

Houma Nation, 191, 193

house music spaces, 94–99

House of GG, 29

House Un-American Activities Committee, 74

Human Genome Diversity Project, 57

humility, 243

Hunter, Mya, 130

Hyde Amendment, 28, 77

I

Icarus Project, 146, 204

Immigration Acts, 71, 73

incarceration. See also abolition movement; prison industrial complex

medical industrial complex and, 202–203

rise in, 107–108

INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence, 146

Indian Citizenship Act, 74

Indian Health Board, 34

Indian Health Service, 76

Indian Removal Act, 59, 68

Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 35

Indian Termination Act, 40

Interrupting Criminalization, 204

Intersex Justice Project, 148, 215–216, 218

Irwin County Detention Center, 63, 224, 230–235

J

Jackson, Andrew, 59, 68

Jagernauth, Tanuja, 162

Jamestown, Virginia, 67

Japanese internment, 75

Jarvis, Arnold, 97

Jeffries-Logan, Vivette, 127–128

Jena Six, 121–122

Jennings, Billy X, 39

Jessup Correctional Institution, 43

Jim Crow era, 70

Jimenez, Jose Cha Cha, 36

Johnson, Jack, 72

Johnson, Marsha P., 21, 89

Johnson v. M’Intosh, 67

Junebug Productions, 112

JusticeLA Coalition, 222–223

Justice Teams Network, 173

Just Transition, 141, 193–194

K

Kaba, Mariame, 202

Kaiser Permanente, 260

Kalākaua, King, 71

Kalpulli Izkalli, 152–153

Katrina, Hurricane, 116–117, 124, 196

Kelling, George L., 77

Kellogg, John Harvey, 93

Keystone XL pipeline, 141

Khadar, Amir, 85, 236

Killing the Black Body, 113–114

Kindling: Writings on the Body, 113

Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (Kindred Collective), 5, 58, 115, 120, 122–126, 129, 130, 133, 147, 160, 179, 214, 232, 255

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 44, 80

King Philip’s War, 68

Kitazawa Seed Company, 188

Kitchen Table Press, 26

L

La Cura podcast, 148

LaGender Inc., 25

Lakota Nations, 81–82, 141

land

healing intergenerational connections to, 242

loss of, 190–193

Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, 148, 188

language justice, 268–269

lantern laws, 68

Latinx Therapists Action Network (LTAN), 148, 223, 224, 232–233, 235

Leach, Kristyn, 188, 192, 195

Le Blanc, Nico, 180

Ledesma, Sylvia, 153

Lewis, Talila “TL,” 60–61

Liberatory Harm Reduction

definition of, 88–89

origins of, 89–90

wellness and, 90–91

Lili‘uokalani, Queen, 71

Lincoln Detox, 37–38

Lincoln Hospital, 36–38, 89

lineage, 4–6, 237–238

listen, learning to, 15–19

Lopez, Alana, 178

Lopez, Claudia, 138, 139

Lorde, Audre, 262

Lorette Law, 69

Los Angeles, 173, 222–223

Loving v. Virginia, 68

Lucumí, 83

M

Malcolm X, 39, 44, 80

Malthus, Thomas, 59

Mann Act, 72

Maria, Hurricane, 196

Marijuana Tax Act, 74

Mauna Kea, 141

Maxwell, Ghislaine, 72

May Act, 74

McCloud, Janet, 35

McGowan, Kelly, 89

McKinley, William, 71

Means, Lorelei DeCora, 35

Medical Apartheid, 113

medical industrial complex (MIC)

as carceral system, 202–203

challenging, 8, 63–64, 140

characteristics of, 58

co-optation by, 256–259

dismantling, 210–219

dominance of, 256–257

roots of, 56–63

trauma-informed care and, 259–261

medication-assisted treatment (MAT), 87–88

Melendez, Angel, 95

Mental Health First, 148, 204

Metacomet’s Rebellion, 68

Middleton, Tamika, 119–131

Mingus, Mia, 172

Minneapolis, 162

Minneapolis Healing Justice Network, 148

Mintz, Laura Janine, 93

Miss Major, 22, 23–26, 29, 89

Mitchell, George, 33

Mitchell-Brody, Maryse, 178–179

Monroe, Shafia, 120

Moore-O’Neal, Wendi, 112, 123

Morales, Aurora Levins, xvii, 113, 187

Morris, Carolyn, 112

Morrison, Toni, 4

Morse, Michelle, 214

movement-building organizations, 254–255

Movement for Black Lives, 148

Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, 147, 171, 188, 193

movement practice, 100

movements, river metaphor for, 103, 108

Movement Strategy Center, 146

Muhammad, Tufara, 112

N

Namu Farm, 147, 188

Narragansett, 68

National Acupuncture Detoxification Association, 38

National Black Women’s Health Project, 121

Nationality Act, 68

National Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, 74

National Native American AIDS Prevention Center, 22

National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, 114, 115

National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, 140

National Queer and Trans Therapist of Color Network (NQTTCN), 148, 203, 214, 224, 228, 232–233, 235

Native American Church, 82, 258

Native Youth Sexual Health Network, 147

Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), 149

New Mexico, sites of practice in, 150–155

New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic, 124

Newton, Huey P., 38, 41

New York City, sites of practice in, 176–183

Nieves Martinez, Adela, 159, 164, 240, 244

Nipmuck, 68

Nixon, Richard, 34–35, 76

nonprofit organizations, 254–255

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 192

O

Oakland, California, 38–39, 204

Occaneechi Band, 127

Okla Hina Ikhish Holo Network of Indigenous Gardeners, People of the Sacred Medicine Trail, 148, 188, 189

O’Neal, John, 112, 115

Operation Wetback, 75

Opium Den Ordinance, 70

Other Countries, 98–99

Otisville Correctional Facility, 177

P

Page, Cara, xiii–xiv, 4–5, 14, 21–30, 56–64, 110–117, 119–131, 136, 176–183, 187–196, 210–219, 232, 251, 271–272

Page Act, 70

Palmer Raids, 73

Pandit, Eesha, 103–108, 253

Parker, Quanah, 82

Patriot Act, 49, 80, 107

Patterson, Jackie, 188, 192

Peña, Beata Tsosie, 151

Penn Center, 120

People’s Movement Assembly (PMA), 126, 129

People’s Movement Center (PMC), 148, 162–163, 165

Pérez, Carla M., 171

peyote, 78, 82, 84, 257–258

PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric), 194

philanthropy, 225–226, 253–254, 269

Pichardo, Ernesto, 83

Piepzna-Samarsinha, Leah Lakshmi, 163

Pinkerton-Uri, Connie, 76

Pocumtuck, 68

police violence, 28, 33–34, 39, 170, 173

political repression, 79–80

Poppa, Dix, 216

population control, 59, 61–63, 113

Porchia-Albert, Chanel, 240, 246

Positive Women’s Network—USA, 147

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, 113

post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS), 117

practitioners

co-optation by, 255–256

exhaustion and burnout of, 228

number needed of, 226

organizing, 220–229

political and spiritual development of, 227–228

politicized, 247

role of, 220

spiritual, 245–246

President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), 105

prison industrial complex. See also abolition movement; incarceration

criminalization and, 66, 223

medical industrial complex and, 202

violence of, 24, 220, 230, 231

Prohibition, 73

Project NIA, 147

Project Prevention, 62

Project South, 5, 112, 121, 123, 125, 160, 224, 230, 232

Psalm for the Mismeasured and Unfit, 217

psychedelics, 257–259

R

racial healing, 269

Raffo, Susan, 158–166, 211

Rainbow Coalition, 36

Rasheed, Aesha, 127, 128–129

Reagan, Ronald, 77

Reclaim Our Power, 194

The Red Deal, 141, 151

reflective practice, 155, 183

relationships, building intergenerational, 243–244

Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 78, 82

Renteria, Nanea, 82

REP (Relationships Evolving Possibilities), 148

Repair the Harm, 224, 231–235

Reproductive Health for Refugees Consortium, 105

reproductive justice, 35–36, 141–142, 154

resilience

definition of, 152

practice, 55

Richmond, California, 169–170

“risky,” redefining, 87

Rita, Hurricane, 116–117, 124

Ritchie, Andrea, 205, 206–207, 209

Rivera, Sylvia, 21, 89

Roberts, Dorothy, 113

Rock Dove Collective, 147, 178–179

Rockefeller Foundation, 60

Roe v. Wade, 3, 76, 104, 267

Root Shock, 113

Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 75

Ryan White Act, 77

RYSE Center, 147, 169–170, 175

S

Sacramento, 204

Safe OUTside the System Collective, 147

Sage Community Health Collective, 147, 159, 161–162

Sandbranch, Texas, 192

Santería, 83

Saponi Nation, 127

Saving Our Own Lives, 88

Scott, Jerome, 120

Seale, Bobby, 38

Second Generation Seeds, 148, 188

Sedition Act, 73

Sered, Danielle, 178

Sex Perversion Elimination Program, 75

Shakur, Mutulu, 37–38

Shelter, 95, 97

Sheppard-Towner Act, 74

Shut Down Irwin Campaign, 224, 230–235

Sims, J. Marion, 57, 113

Sins Invalid, 115–116, 143, 146, 168–169

SisterFire, 114

SisterLove, 22, 99, 121

SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, 121, 141

sites of practice

in California, 167–174

definition of, 137

in the Midwest, 158–166

in New Mexico, 150–155

in New York City, 176–183

timeline, 146–149

Sitting Bull, 81–82

sky, listening to, 17–18

slavery, history of, 67, 68, 69, 70

Smith, Barbara, 22, 26–29, 30

Smith, Phoenix, 243–244, 246, 247

Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, 72

Social Worker Code of Ethics, 178

sodomy laws, 67

Somé, Malidoma Patrice, 241

Southeast Social Forum, 125

Southern Birth Justice Network, 147

Southerners on New Ground (SONG), 5, 112, 121, 123, 133

South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, 230

Spanish-American War, 71

SpiritHouse, 112, 123, 127, 130, 239, 247–248

spiritual bypass, 241

spiritual performance, 240–241

spiritual practitioners, 245–246

spiritual repression, 81–83

spiritual traditions

being in right relationship to, 244

holding space for others with, 245–246

Stanford University, 57

sterilizations, forced. See eugenics

Stonewall Uprising, 21, 23, 76

storytelling practice, 133

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), 21

Streetwise and Safe, 147

Street Youth Bill of Rights, 159

Street Youth Rise Up!, 148, 159

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 79, 111

Studio 54, 94

Stuen-Parker, Jon, 92

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 260

superpredator theory, 78

Sylvia Rivera Law Project, 25

T

Taylor, Breonna, 225

Telling It Like It Fucking Is (TILIFI), 29

Tewa Women United (TWU), 151–152

Third Root Community Health Center, 147, 179–180

3rd Space, 147, 181–182

Three Strikes laws, 78

Thunderhawk, Madonna, 35

Tijerina, Roberto, 268

Topahkal Health and Healing Center, 153

Totten, Erika, 180

Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), 78, 106

Trail of Broken Treaties, 34–35

Trail of Tears, 34, 68, 82

transformative justice, 144, 173

Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), 25, 146

Transgender Law Center, 25

Trans Justice, 25

TransLatin@ Coalition, 25

TransLifeline, 148

Trans Queer Pueblo, 25, 148

trauma

-centered practice, reclaiming, 87–88

childhood, 260–261

colonial constructs of, 259–261

community-led interventions on generational, 115–116

definition of, 8–9

historical, 114–115

-informed care, 259–261

interrupting generational, 112–114

overuse of term, 9

post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS), 117

projection of, 221

transforming collective, 126–127

Treaty of Paris, 71

Trump, Donald, 107

Tubman, Harriet, x, 15–19, 120, 180, 265, 272

Tubman House, 51, 54

Turner, Carlton, 112

Turner, Eva Renise, 180

23andMe, 267

U

ugly laws, 70

Underground Railroad, 15, 18, 191, 265, 274

United Nations, 141

United Prisoners Labor Union, 50

Urgent Action Fund (UAF), 130

Us Helping Us, 99

US Social Forum, 125, 126, 129, 158, 160, 161, 164, 212

Utah, Adaku, 163, 176–183, 231

V

vagrancy laws, 70

Valenti, Rita, 56, 213

Vasquez, Tré, 188, 189, 190, 193–194, 196, 198–200

Verdin, Monique, 188, 189–190, 191, 195

Vidal, Augustina, 204–205, 206

Vieques, Puerto Rico, 141

Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), 78

Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, 78

Vision Change Win, 148

visioning practice, 165–166

Voodoo, 83

W

Wall, Sean Saifa, 216

Wampanoag, 68

War on Drugs, 76, 77, 105, 142, 201

Warren County, North Carolina, 141

Washington, Harriet A., 113

water, listening to, 18–19, 189

Watkins, Mama Nayo, 112, 120

“We,” 198–200

Weill Cornell Medicine, 216

wellness, 90, 93

Wick, Alex, 25

Wilson, James Q., 77

Wilson, Nia, 239, 245

Wisotsky, Rebecca, 182

Women of All Red Nations (W.A.R.N.), 33, 35–36

Women’s Coalition of Safety, 27

Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Food Sovereignty Program, 149, 188

Women’s Project, 121

Women with a Vision (WWAV), 22, 89–90, 99

Woodland, Erica, xii–xiii, 5–6, 14, 32–40, 43–54, 66–83, 136, 167–174, 201–209, 220–235, 237–247, 251–263

Wooten, Dawn, 63, 230, 266

World Social Forum, 5, 125

World Trade Organization, 192

Wounded Knee, 33, 35, 82

Wovoka, 81

Y

Young, Phyllis, 35

Young Lords, 23, 33, 36–38, 80, 89

Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP), 105, 115, 146, 159–160

Young Women United, 146, 154

Youth Healing Justice Network, 163

About the Editors

PHOTO BY Margarita Corporan 2021

CARA PAGE is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker and organizer. For the past thirty-plus years, she has organized with LGBTSTQI and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color liberation movements in the US and Global South at the intersections of racial, gender, and economic justice, healing justice, and transformative justice. She is Founder of Changing Frequencies, a Black Queer Feminist–led, abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt the harms and experimentation of the medical industrial complex toward organizing transformative and healing futures.

Cara is one of the architects of the healing justice political strategy, envisioned by many in the South and deeply rooted in Black feminist traditions and Southern Black radical traditions. She is Co-Founder of the Healing Histories Project and core Leadership Team Member/Co-Founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. She is also the former Executive Director of The Audre Lorde Project and former National Coordinator of the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment. She is a former recipient of the OSF Soros Equality Fellowship (2019–2020) and an Activist in Residence at the Barnard Research Center for Women.

PHOTO BY Texas Isaiah

ERICA WOODLAND, LCSW, is a Black Queer Trans masculine facilitator, consultant, psychotherapist, and healing justice practitioner who has worked at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, Trans and Queer justice and liberation for more than twenty years. He has extensive experience working with youth, People of Color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities across the United States. Erica is the 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. In 2017 he was the recipient of the Ford Public Voices Fellowship and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leaders Fellowship.

Contributor Bios

Adaku Utah, hailing from Nigeria, is an Igbo Queer teacher, organizer, healer, and ritual artist committed to cultivating movements that are strategic, sustainable, and mutually nourishing. For over twenty years, their work has centered in movements for radical social change with a focus on gender, reproductive, race, youth, and healing justice. They are the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Harriet’s Apothecary, a healing collective led by Black Cis Women, Queer and Trans healers, artists, and organizers committed to living out Harriet Tubman’s legacy of centering healing, wellness, and safety as movement-building strategies to deconstruct legacies of trauma and galvanize communities to shape generative transformation. They are also the organizing director at the National Network of Abortion Funds, where they build and mobilize the left-flank organizing power and movement-building efforts with seventy-plus member organizations, individual members, and network leaders across the country and world.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. Alexis is the author of the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial poem “dark energy for Harriet Tubman” (commissioned by Janell Hobson for Ms. Magazine). She manages the Combahee Throughline Portal, connecting Harriet Tubman’s Combahee uprising to contemporary Black feminism, and was a Co-Facilitator of the Combahee Pilgrimage on the 150th anniversary of the uprising. Alexis is also the author of several books, most recently Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals and Dub: Finding Ceremony. She was a 2020–2021 National Humanities Center Fellow and is a current National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Her biography, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, is forthcoming. She is Co-Founder of Mobile Homecoming Trust in Durham, North Carolina.

Amir Khadar (they/them) is a Sierra Leonean–American artist, designer, craftsperson, and educator from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their art has extensively and intentionally been used in liberatory movement spaces to imagine post-liberation worlds. Conceptually, mysticism, the gender expanse, beautiful things, and ancestral practices have always been grounding ideas in their work. Their primary disciplines are digital art and fiber, but they are constantly growing and establishing connections to new disciplines. Amir is currently a student at Swarthmore College working toward a bachelor of arts in Black Studies.

Aurora Levins Morales is a writer, an artist, a historian, a teacher, and a mentor. She is also an activist, a healer, and a revolutionary. She tells stories with medicinal powers. Herbalists who collect wild plants to make medicine call it wildcrafting. She wildcrafts the details of the world, of history, of people’s lives, and concentrates them through art in order to shift consciousness, to change how we think about ourselves, each other, and the world. The stories we tell about our lives shape what we’re able to imagine, and what we can imagine determines what we can do. Her job is to change the stories we tell and help us imagine a world where greed has no power, the Earth is cherished, and all people get to live safe and satisfying lives. Because once we truly imagine it, the pull to create it becomes irresistible.

Claudia Lopez is a visual facilitator and strategic illustrator for social justice organizations that seek to create a world where we all thrive. Her work is anchored in making knowledge, ideas, and content more accessible to support the collective understanding needed to move us toward meaningful and transformative change. Claudia has been supporting social justice and feminist movements that work at the intersections of race, gender, and antiviolence for the past seven years. She works with humility and care, attending to diversity and differences of race, gender, ability, language, and power in ways that seek to disrupt dominant or oppressive narratives, and support a more equitable world. Originally from Mexico, she is based in Brooklyn, New York. You can find more about her and her work at www.ontherightmind.com.

Eesha Pandit is Co-Founder of the Center for Advancing Innovative Policy (CAIP) where she works with grassroots organizations and movement strategists to develop intersectional approaches to policy change. She has led policy, program, and communications work to help shape movements for human rights, racial justice, reproductive justice, and ending gender-based violence. Eesha holds expertise and experience in hard policy analysis and the organizing and coalition-building required to effect policy change. She is a member of the Crunk Feminist Collective and Co-Founder of South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU). She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the University of Chicago.

Francisca Porchas Coronado is a Mexican immigrant, Chicana, feminist, and anti-racist organizer with almost twenty years of experience in social justice movements. Francisca has worked on issues of civil rights, environmental and climate justice, criminalization, and immigration at the intersection of race and class at a local and national level. As former Organizing Director of Puente Human Rights Movement in Phoenix, Arizona, she has been one of the leading voices against deportations in the country. She is the Founder and Director of the Latinx Therapists Action Network, a healing justice project and network of Latinx mental health practitioners centering the healing of migrant communities impacted by the detention and deportation system. She has been initiated into the ancient Indigenous West African tradition of IFA for over a decade and is currently a priestess in training.

Kenyon Farrow is a writer, editor, and strategist whose work has long focused on public health and infectious disease with a focus on racial, gender, and economic justice. He is the Managing Director of Advocacy and Organizing with PrEP4All, a national organization dedicated to ensuring all communities have access to biomedical prevention tools for HIV and other infectious diseases.

Kenyon is also a prolific essayist and author. He is the co-editor of the book Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, and his work has also appeared in many anthologies, including For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America, Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call, and the new anthology Abolition for the People. His work has also appeared in the Atlantic, OUT, BET.com, the Columbus Dispatch, TheGrio, Colorlines, Logo, Rewire News, HuffPost, and the American Prospect.

Lisa Factora-Borchers is a Filipinx American writer, activist, and publisher at Guernica magazine. She is the editor of Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence and has worked in editorial capacities at the Rumpus, Bitch Media, Catapult, make/shift, and Literary Mama magazines.

Lisa was recognized by Rewire News as one of the five revolutionary Asian American activists leading the fight for reproductive freedom. A board member for Ohio Progressive Asian Women’s Leadership (OPAWL), Lisa co-founded Feminist Grounding, a program for AAPI folx to share narratives about identity and liberation. Lisa also founded The End Writers Collective, a decolonizing-in-practice community space for BIPOC writers.

Lisa received a BA in English from Xavier University, a joint master’s degree in counseling psychology and pastoral ministry from Boston College, and an MFA in literary nonfiction creative writing from Columbia University. She leads workshops centralizing political consciousness, spirituality, and sustainable, everyday activism.

Margarita Corporan is a New York City professional photographer and content producer working across the genres of marketing and brand strategy photography. Born in Washington, DC, to Peruvian and Dominican parents, Margarita spent a majority of her youth between Lima, Peru, and DC. Developing her eye as a documentary photographer, Margarita quickly learned to see her environment as framed stories.

Margarita graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York and immediately applied herself to various roles in the photography industry, eventually landing a role as photo editor at such publications as People, Marie Claire, Us Weekly, People En Español, and Parade. After more than ten years, Margarita stepped out of the editorial role and resumed her place behind the camera by establishing her experiential and marketing photography business. Her clients have included Google/YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, BMW, and Mastercard, as well as a variety of advertising and nonprofit organizations.

Shira Hassan is the Founder of Just Practice, a capacity-building project for organizations and community members, activists, and leaders working at the intersection of transformative justice, harm reduction, and collective liberation. She is the former Executive Director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement-building project led by and for young People of Color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. A lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, Shira is the author of Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction and along with Mariame Kaba is the co-author of Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators.

Susan Raffo (she/her) is a writer, cultural worker, and bodyworker living in Mnisota Makoce in the city of Minneapolis. Raffo was part of the People’s Movement Center (closed 2019) and has spent the last twelve years working with Cara Page on the Healing Histories Project, an abolitionist and anti-eugenics project working in solidarity with health and healing practitioners/workers by holding with dignity and respect the lives and communities they care for and by disrupting abuses of the state. Raffo is also a core group member of REP, a network of dedicated abolitionists showing up to support others in moments of crisis or urgency, with care and respect for the full dignity and autonomy of those in crisis. She is Co-Founder and Co-Coordinator of the Healing Histories Project. Raffo is the author of Queerly Classed (1997), Restricted Access (1999), and Liberated to the Bone (AK Press: 2022). You can find her at www.susanraffo.com.

Tamika Middleton is the Managing Director of the Women’s March. She is an organizer, doula, midwifery apprentice, writer, and unschooling mama who is passionate about and active in struggles that affect Black women’s lives. Tamika has organized for abolition, reproductive justice, and for domestic workers’ rights. She is a Consultant with Winds of Change Consulting and a Founding Member of the Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid (MAMA) Fund and JUSTGeorgia. She serves as a Community Advisory Board Member of Critical Resistance, a Leadership Team Member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, and as Treasurer of the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy.

Tré Vasquez is an organizer, artist, visionary, poet, and comedian of mixed Indigenous and European lineage. Raised by working-class parents in Southern Arizona, his culture, along with growing up systems-impacted as a Trans youth, is at the heart of his commitment to collective liberation and healing work for people and the planet. He comes from a background of fifteen years in community organizing around transformative justice, youth organizing, and climate justice. He has toured nationally multiple times performing art, poetry, music, and comedy as medicine for the people with projects like Mangos with Chili and the SWAS Tour 2003. Tré loves his family, working with horses, making people laugh, cooking his grandma’s recipes, and growing food.