Skip to main content
Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety

Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety

Current price: $19.95
Publication Date: February 7th, 2023
Publisher:
North Atlantic Books
ISBN:
9781623177140
Pages:
320
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Description

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.

About the Author

CARA PAGE (she/her/hers) is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker, curator, abolitionist, and organizer. For 30 years, she has organized with LGBTSQGNCI, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color liberation movements. Page leads Changing Frequencies, an organizing project building power within communities to confront, heal, and transform generational trauma. She is co-founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. She is a former recipient of the OSF Soros Equality Fellowship and ‘Activist in Residence’ at the Barnard Research Center for Women. ERICA WOODLAND (he/him/his) is a black queer/genderqueer facilitator, consultant, and healing practitioner. He is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker working at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, trans, and queer justice. Woodland is Founding Director of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network, a healing justice organization committed to transforming mental health for queer and trans people of color.

Praise for Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety

“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

“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 Equal Health and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School

...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

...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.... 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