Excerpt from “Together at the Edge of the World: On Healing Justice”

A conversation between Cara Page, Tamika Middleton, Paulina Helm-Hernandez, and Richael Faithful

        RICHAEL:
It’s been so gorgeous to see the healing justice framework more visible. It’s been more gorgeous to see people coming back to you all and talking about the story, the journey of healing justice.
        It's been really gorgeous also to see—so many conversations kind of public, right? It’s been really great to like hear more voices.
        I want to start from this place: I can imagine that after all these years the context of healing justice has changed a lot.
        So I'm so curious from you all's perspectives what are the most important ways to think context has changed? 
        I’m also really excited to make visible some of the strategies and practices, especially the less visible or obvious ones. Which strategies do you recognize as healing justice and how is it part of your political work? Then we can just vibe from here.

        CARA:

Who wants to start on that? These are very big questions, Richael!
        I’ve been sitting with them. And here’s what I usually say…
        The collective is 15 years old,  from conception. And politically it’s been really a decade of healing justice in terms of the manifestation of the analysis and political framework.
        And the co-optation, diffusion of it, displacements of it—that it suddenly wasn't Southern, it definitely wasn’t Black, Black feminists, not rooted in Black and indigenous radical tradition, nor was it led by a multi-generational,  multiracial, intergenerational, multi-class, multi-gendered and queer and straight crew of folks—that story got lost.
        Which it usually does, right, if it’s Black and its Southern, ppphh shit already gets lost and co-opted by others. But even farther back in the design, that it was originally rooted in a disability justice, transformative justice, environmental justice, and reproductive justice frame. That we pulled from particular movements that were Southern, that have been Southern. Global South-led when I say Southern, all the way South.  Really pulling out analysis against white supremacy and globalization. So that healing justice is not care for care’s sake or healing for healing sake, but it's actually meant to build power and is integral to our political liberation.
        How do we understand the role of healers who have been criminalized, targeted, persecuted for traditions that they have been trying to carry forth? Our lineage of healers—we mean energy, earth, body, land-based traditions and birth workers who have been persecuted for their practices, targeted and criminalized and de-legitimized for their work in the Southern context as black Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), as rural and working class, that did not get pulled forth as strategies for our collective survival and liberation?
        That we were looking at the role of ableism, the role of misogyny, the role of white supremacy and capitalism, that continues to define for us that labor and the reproduction of labor never affords you the cost of being well, unless you're reproducing for the wealthy elite?
        And if you start there, then care becomes something entirely different.
        Then you don’t start from self care. You must start from understanding the impact of collective care.
        The infrastructure created during slavery, after slavery as an extension of the colonialist project, was to make sure we could not exist as a people, and that we were perceived as less than human. HJ positions an analysis that understands the role of globalization and this global economy that fuels a profit-driven idea of health. That is defined by whiteness, by cis-gendered ableism and capitalism.
       I want to say here that ‘ healthy’ is defined by a white cis, able-bodied, male, straight and Christian, and I’m gonna go here—because it's based on the Bible and ideas of Christianity. And this idea of purity, who is pure and who is sinful, as my comrade Patty Berne, a disability justice movement leader and director of Sins Invalid says, we are sinful when we are seen as diseased and disabled. And we all know Black, Indigenous and people of color people with disabilities, queer, trans gender non-conforming, working class, migrants, many of u are always are seen as less than human, as objects to be commodified or enslaved and we are always synonymous with disease, dirty and impure and we can never be healthy.
        Yet we are depending on private and public systems of care that are steeped in these archaic ideas of who is healthy and what is well. That is what got lost in the translation of healing justice was to disrupt these ideologies based on population control, eugenics & slavery.
        So when we think about strategy into the future, I also want to say it’s connected to our relationship to land, work, body and spirit. It is connected to practice and tradition and legacy of our ancestral technologies.
        And it is important to say here  that Kindred never said we were starting at the beginning. We were in the middle of a story from lineage we were bringing forth that had been persecuted, stolen, purposefully lost or erased. And we also took it very seriously to bring cultural work in the sense of memorializing, witnessing and honoring traditions like using quilting as a healing strategy. Using building altars as sacred space as a healing strategy. And some of that got erased in the telling of HJ too. The strategy became very linear instead of cyclical. And you heard the three of us, we, and there’s many more collective Kindred members, we all came in very differently rooted in place and the work of healing as a liberatory practice rooted in a Southern Black Radical & Feminist tradition.
        And this idea that health practitioners weren’t critical to this strategy got left to the wayside. It’s complicated because how many of us have black nurses, doctors, surgeons, dentists, therapists in our communities because they too believe in the survival of our people. We were not saying leave them behind. We were asking the question: “How can we work together to  not be complicit with state surveillance and violence under the guise of public health and national security? How can we not participant and be a part of systems of care that prevail in this idea of surveillance and policing black and Brown immigrant queer and trans disabled bodies because they are rooted in these ideas of  ‘healthy’ not wellness that is defined and determined by our “communities?”
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