A profound offering and call to action—collective stories, testimonials, and incantations for renewing political and spiritual liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer and Trans healing justice lineages
We reclaim the power, resilience, and innovation of our ancestors through this book. To embody their wisdom across centuries and generations is to continue their legacy of liberation and healing.
In this anthology, Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice—a political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression. They call forth the ancestral medicines and healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next.
Anti-capitalist, Black feminist, and abolitionist, Healing Justice Lineages is a profound and urgent call to embrace community and survivor-led care strategies as models that push beyond commodified self-care, the policing of the medical industrial complex, and the surveillance of the public health system. Centering disability, reproductive, environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, this collection elevates and archives an ongoing tradition of liberation and survival—one that has been largely left out of our history books, but continues to this day.
In the first section, “Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage,” Page and Woodland remember and reclaim generations-long healing justice and community care work, asking critical questions like: How did our ancestors transform trauma and violence in their liberation work? What were our ancestors reckoning with—and what did they imagine?
The next sections, “Origins of Healing Justice” and “Alchemy: Theory + Praxis,” explore regional stories of healing justice in response to the current political and cultural landscape. The last section, “Political + Spiritual Imperatives for the Future,” imagines a future rooted in lessons of the past; addresses the ways healing justice is being co-opted and commodified; and uplifts emergent work that’s building infrastructure for care, safety, healing, and political liberation.
BIO
Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker & organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has organized with LGBTQI+, Black, Indigenous & People of Color liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice and transformative justice. She is founder of Changing Frequencies, an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). She is also co-founder of the Healing Histories Project; a network of abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the medical industrial complex and harmful systems of care. We generate change through research, action and building collaborative strategies & stories with BIPOC-led communities, institutions and movements organizing for dignified collective care.
REVIEWS
“This beautiful anthology shows us a series of challenges and is a source of possibilities, and as such should be read over and over again by anyone working for and living like they love freedom.” -- Beth Richie, Activist and Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, Co-Founder of INCITE!, and co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
“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
“…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
[P] North Atlantic Books / February 07, 2023
0.8" H x 8.4" L x 6.3" W (1.05 lbs) 320 pages