The Quest to “bring our people home”: A Conversation with Cara Page
Cara Page (she, her, hers) is a Black, Queer artist, organizer, and cultural worker whose people came from the Southern US and all along the Eastern seaboard. Co-creator of the Kindred Southern Justice Collective, founder of the Changing Frequencies organizing project, and former BCRW Activist in Residence, Cara has dedicated most of her life to the interruption of the medical industrial complex alongside communities most affected. By utilizing memory work, she has become instrumental to building a political strategy (some may call a movement) of collective care that seeks to address cycles of generational trauma. In June 2023, Cara sat down with BCRW research assistant Ashe Lewis (BC ’24) to discuss Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, a new anthology she co-edited that discusses the origins of and methods associated with harnessing healing justice. Conceived by the Kindred Collective in its early inception and rooted in a Black feminist political liberatory frame, the strategy refers to care geared towards liberation, abolition, and power building so that, in Cara’s words, “we can bring our people home” to a transformative place of safety and empowerment. In this interview, Cara discusses the major themes of the book, her applications of healing justice and its context in the political moment of the early 2000s, how the white supremacist tactic of forgetting harms individuals and collectives, and how liberatory methods create interpersonal connections by way of land, work, body and spirit.
Ashe Lewis: I had a chance to read Healing Justice Lineages. I thought it was stunning. In its beautiful articulation of essays and conversations, the book traces a clear lineage of healing throughout time calling upon a range of contributors from different backgrounds. I like that it’s digestible, provides informative historical context, and gives insight on what the drive towards healing justice is for the future.
Cara Page: Oh, that’s great. That was the purpose.
AL: You and Erica Woodland, with whom you co-edited the anthology, begin the reader’s journey by naming target audiences under the section “Who Should Read This Book?” There, you make a point to include a plethora of marginalized groups. Can you tell me about your work within these communities that predated and inspired the anthology?
CP: I am the co-architect and founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, which is based in the Southeast, in Atlanta, Georgia and conceived in 2005. It is a Black, feminist-led, Southern, LBGTQI and allies, multiracial and intergenerational network of abolitionist healers, health practitioners, cultural workers and birth workers seeking to interrupt generational trauma and systemic oppression. As I was beginning to do interviews and gather stories of the role of healing as integral to political liberation, particularly in Southern movements, I was meeting with elders in the Civil Rights movement, Black Nationalist movement, and immigrant justice movements. I was also looking at the arc of where healing and care strategies were a part of Asian and Latinx student movements, in addition to different LGBTQ, POC, Indigenous, and Two-Spirit movements in the US. These are ways that folks, despite chaos, fascism, state violence, and the execution of movement builders, were taking care of themselves and each other while being physically, emotionally, and environmentally attacked.
AL: I know you also do a great deal of work surrounding the medical industrial complex. Could you explain the concept and how that focus has influenced the premise of healing justice?
CP: When Kindred started we were inviting abolitionist practitioners of health who were trying not to perpetuate the abuses embedded in the medical-industrial complex as an extension of slavery, state violence, and colonization. The onset of public health came out of a eugenics lens that sought to define who is better and who is less than, who is human and who is less than human. The bodies of Black, Queer, Trans, disabled, incarcerated, migrant and sex working individuals—anyone who was on the margins—was deemed less than human or expendable. If we weren’t taking care of white, wealthy, elite, heterosexual Christians, we were their disease and burden.
Of course, this is a global phenomenon. I by no means mean to misdirect it as being solely US-based but, when we [the Kindred Collective] formed healing justice, we were responding to a particular moment of racial violence and rising fascism in the early 2000s, post 9/11 in the Southeast. Healing justice is about making healing the gaze or lens through which we do our liberatory work to build racial, environmental, disability and reproductive justice.
AL: From my understanding, central to healing justice is dismantling the medical industrial complex’s categorization, right?
CP: Yes, healing justice is geared towards tearing down systems of care that penalize us, criminalize our bodies, and continue to parse people out based on identity.
AL: Where does Healing Justice Lineages fall in your history of organizing?
CP: The book is a conversation about that moment in the 2000s and all the things we drew from to find where healing, care and safety are essential for political liberation. We looked to healers, curanderas, root workers, and cultural workers because we know they, or we, have been holding these traditions and sitting at the table of resistance. The book includes interviews with over a hundred people and there are multiple writers discussing how healing justice speaks to this political moment based on the conditions we’re surviving in.
AL: That’s beautiful. You and the rest of the book’s contributors are doing a lot of important work. You talk about how you’ve learned from advocacy circles in the South as well as student organizing groups. How can you see healing justice (a political strategy) being applied to those of us outside of these centers of organization? Just in everyday life.
CP: What we mean by healing justice is an answer to the question, “How are we interrupting generational harm?” We didn’t ask that question inside of organizational formations. We actually did it inside of movements in larger communities. That was our focus because we felt that if we were not looking at place or the context and conditions of the Southern lived experience, then we would not understand the political and spiritual imperative to interrupt generational trauma based on the region we were living in. For us it was about where that sits: inside of community, inside of praxis.
Healing justice is not based on organizations. It’s based on who we know, what our knowledge of care is, and what our discipline and rigor are around understanding medicines that have been passed on by generations. It’s understanding the relationships we can cultivate to land and Earth medicine outside of these structures of big pharma that co-opt our medicines and traditions.
AL: Could you give me an example of an application of healing justice here in New York?
CP: In the context of New York, healing justice is also an understanding of the mechanisms we’re building to create care and safety strategies in real time when we’re actually fighting for freedom. One example is during the Eric Garner uprisings when our communities were protesting his assassination by the NYPD. At that time, I was the Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project. We had already been exploring how to create modalities that are usually falsely divided. We investigated combining allopathic medicine [treatment of symptoms, or Western medicine] and other medicinal traditions to assess care for Black, Indigenous, Two Spirit, Intersex, People of Color, Queer, Trans, and Gender Nonconforming bodies. We invited abolitionist healers and health practitioners who wanted to think about that.
One of the things that came out of it was a mobile wellness team model where we would have a healer and a nurse or a doctor from our own community moving in the street during the action in partnership with the community security and safety teams. We were establishing that we are on the front lines as fighters and as healers taking care of our people. Because not everyone knows how to respond to injuries during marches and rallies, or de-escalate trauma from police brutality, counter demonstrators, and so on and so forth, we need our people who have these specialized skills. That to me is a real tactical way to think about healing justice: addressing what care is, what it looks like on the ground, and who we can employ to hold the safety of our people.
AL: Looking at a more recent crisis, how do you think about healing justice in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic?
CP: With COVID, no matter what country you were in, you depended on the government to define what was safety, wellness, and care. These definitions reflected the ableist “fix and cure” models that preside in this world. Looking at the pandemic, we see a fascinating microcosm of what healing justice is talking about. Healing justice asks, What we are going to do when the next pandemic comes and how we will set up infrastructure so that we do not have to rely exclusively on traditional vaccinations. I say this with the utmost care and knowledge that vaccinations are very contentious because we’re living in a society that has forced vaccinations on Black and Brown people. And some of us are at heightened or high risk of illness and death because of environmental toxins and other issues, and therefore need vaccinations to live. So I am by no means aligning with the anti-vax analysis. Instead, healing justice allows us to understand the complexities, use a disability justice frame, and support our autonomy to choose what we need, account for physical risk, and refuse control or exploitation by the state or institution enforcing care.
AL: So you’ve given a few definitions of healing justice. One of its functions is to address collective trauma from colonization, displacement, and coloniality, which brings me to thinking about memory. In the book, Erica refers to forgetting as a tool of white supremacy. Can you explain how harnessing memory can be a form of resistance and healing?
CP: Absolutely. Ever since I co-created healing justice, I’ve talked about memory work as a care strategy. It’s understanding that part of the colonialist project is to disremember. Colonization disconnects us from our ancestors and causes a disremembrance of traditions and survival strategies that have allowed us to survive throughout attempted genocide and slavery.
Remembering is a powerful tool of medicine. I feel the state and white supremacy have denied us the memory of knowing how our people, Black people, were lynched and chased. Our people are still being lynched and chased. When I talk about remembering, I’m also talking about a deep bone, gene, cultural remembrance of slavery, literally understanding, in our bones, that we are carrying forth the memory, energy, and vibration of what our ancestors experienced.
How then does that connection fuel our accountability to our ancestors and our desire to explore what we are building to heal? Not only to build power, yes, and liberation, and to transcend the bone blood memory of harm to our ancestors. Certainly, there’s memory of resistance, too. How then do we remember and pull forward those traditions that have helped preserve our faith, spirit, and ways of being? To me, that’s memory work. Some scientists call it epigenetics. I won’t call it that because the term diffuses what has been a spiritual practice for many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color folk. Calling it epigenetics puts a scientific, binary limitation on it. It’s not just science, it’s also spirit.
AL: I feel that very powerfully. That there are some things, like sounds, smells, or texts, that bring us back to a moment where we feel enveloped in the struggles and resultant resistance of those who came before us.
CP: Yes, yes. It brings us back to their power and their medicine. Some people mention that our ancestors were abusive too. Some of them caused harm. So not everything’s going to be pulled forward. And even within what is pulled forward, not everything is for everybody. We all know our kin have not always been safe toward us. As a survivor of violence in my family, I know there’s been child sexual abuse and sexual violence. While my family tries to transcend that history, I look to what we can remember about cycles of violence, how patterns have persevered, and how they have been broken.
Erica and I came together with a very aligned understanding of two elements that deeply inspired us to write this book. First is the dilemma of white supremacy culture and its history of completely extracting spiritual practices from other traditions that aren’t European. White supremacy coopts our traditions, reproduces them out of context, and forcibly removes the teachers, understandings of the traditions, and where they come from. This has resulted in a dangerous weaponizing of care, self-care in particular, where people take a part of a practice out of context, claim to be renewed, and then have the nerve to become a practitioner outside of being accountable to a place, its teachers, and its community. All without a cultural or political understanding of who died for that tradition to exist or who’s dying because of displacement and extraction that will not allow the tradition to survive rooted in community. Practice requires on going discipline and rigor. But white supremacy will never ask for permission. It just takes. It disappears what it takes or morphs it into its own.
The other piece that Erica and I wanted to highlight in the book is the responsibility of People of Color to other People of Color from different diasporas. The US is tricky. We have come in many different ways including Indigenous communities who come from generations of this land, voluntary migration, forced migration, slavery, or exploitation. We need to understand what our relationship is to the cooptation of each other’s respective traditions. Among People of Color there are also instances where practitioners don’t look at the context, where the traditions come from, and who the teachers are. That just opens more wounds and creates more fires that are deeply irresponsible to our livelihood. We need to reground, recheck, and reset the truth of traditions.
AL: I think this is why Healing Justice Lineages is so meaningful to me. It’s an addition to the archive that is dedicated to the origination of practice.
CP: Yes.
AL: How do you remain committed to continuously learning?
CP: I just don’t see how you can’t. I’m fifty-three years old and I’m learning. Learning doesn’t stop. Right now, I’m learning how to do a virtual reality film to tell the story of a site of harm by the medical-industrial complex because I wanted to understand another medium. What it is for me is not just commitment. It’s actually using a medium to transform historical harms on a cellular level. I want to be able to expand my relationship to the universe through this storytelling that will change you and change our collective path toward healing and liberation. This is why I love Alexis Gumbs’ piece for the opening of Healing Justice Lineages, “learning to listen.” I’ll never know Harriet Tubman, yet I know many a Harriet Tubman.
What if the justice inside of our healing is not about our abilities, not about our agency, not even about our actions? What if the capacity, choice, and movement are only stars, and behind it is the dark energy of everything. The cause of all. The sky. Remember, when Harriet Tubman stopped and went to sleep in the middle of the journey because her head trauma induced narcolepsy, everyone else had to stop and rest and wait indefinitely. Maybe those unexpected pauses led to the eventual safe arrivals to come. What do you think will happen if you take a breath? Are there moments where your need to control how change happens leads you to reproduce what you know? Where are the areas where you can let go and trust something bigger (be that community, nature, or divinity). What do you believe in? What do you believe will exist because of your breathing? What do you believe will exist after your breathing stops?
From “Sky” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Healing Justice Lineages
CP: There are so many Harriet Tubmans floating around in the universe that I’ll never see or know. But I know that striving to learn means opening our minds, our hearts, and our spirits to understand vibrationally how we might be changed by others. And the cycle of knowing, exploring, and pursuing something greater than ourselves repeats.
AL: Yeah. I think a commitment to learning requires humility.
CP: Humility is key. And grace.
AL: Thinking about this chapter by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, she reflects on Harriet Tubman’s functions as a healer through the elements of fire, sky, water, and earth. What was the purpose of involving the elements in the book? What is the relevance of the natural world to liberation?
CP: We very intentionally used the elements throughout the book. We were looking at time, which we feel is cyclical, but we definitely had to show the arc of past, present, and future. We understand our relationship to the elements in a very symbiotic way where each element can reflect our need and desires to be in relation to each other. Liberation is hard. There’s so much struggle. There’s so much pain and grief. But there’s also joy, pleasure, excitement, and power.
Because we strongly believe in astrology and love a constellation, we also include the elements to draw attention to our transience. The elements allow us to imagine if we were water, earth, or fire and recognize how those things move our beings. I know that some people just can’t even understand this, but I don’t think it’s to be understood. It’s to be felt. It’s to be experienced.
AL: I’m wrapping my mind around it, embodying the elements.
CP: Yeah, I know. But think about what the fire of this interview is. What was the fire that moved you out of the book and made you think, “I’m going to interview this person?” What is the water that cools you down to understand this political moment? We can use the elements as a filter, as a gaze into our spirits to illuminate where we are, where our imagination is, and what we are experiencing right now in this dangerously violent time.
AL: That’s a great way to think through a thought process, to break it down into elements. It feels humanizing to think of it that way.
CP: You really have to be willing to open up a little bit.
AL: I’m lingering on your point about how we can’t dictate the terms of someone else’s healing. Is it possible to create a framework of liberation that is singular?
CP: Oh, listen, I pass that to you. The next generation. I live in the collective.
Image credit: Margarita Corporan