On Healing Justice Lineages

Black Queer Feminists Cara Page and Erica Woodland’s work focuses on political and spiritual liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer and Trans healing justice lineages. Their work guides individuals through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice—a political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes in the generational trauma caused by systemic violence and oppression. In their work and writing Cara and Erica call forth the ancestral medicines and healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next. 

Recently they collaborated as editors on the anthology Healing Justice Lineages, 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, the anthology both elevates and archives an ongoing tradition of liberation and survival—one that has been largely left out of our history books yet continues to this day. 
 
Join Cara and Erica in a conversation that 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.

 

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. 

 
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