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

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 Ericas collective wisdom. At a moment when the worlds flesh is seared with pain, we can turn to this collection for intellectual, historical, and political balmguiding 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.

Dna-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 youll learn something new, be affirmed, unsettled, and inspired to ask new questions, scribble notes, and certainly keep reading. I didnt 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 escalatewar, 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.

We give thanks to the lands that have held us while writing this book. To Harriet Tubmans birthplace in Dorchester County on Marylands 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 couldnt 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, Tr Vasquez, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. We absolutely couldnt 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, Tr 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-ONeal, 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-Iiguez, Carla M. Prez, Angela Aguilar, Ayo Clemons, Alejandra Tobar Alatriz, Eiko Mizushima, Griffin Jeffries, Owlabi Aboyade, Tanuja Jagernauth, Stacy Erenberg, Sylvia Ledesma, Lorraine Cordova, and Denicia Cadena.