Healing Justice Lineages

Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety

By: Cara Page, Erica Woodland, Aurora Levins Morales - introduction

Narrated by: Sanya Simmons

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.

must read!!

this is must read that serves as a call for us to reclaim what was stolen from us- our collective power- to heal ourselves and connect to our ancestral resilience and strength.

Important book for our times

Important analysis bringing together healing justice with systems analysis, eugenics and disability justice. So needed for our times.

A must read for philanthropy!

A must read for philanthropy and everyone else committed to racial and social justice. Healing Justice gets thrown around too much in conversation by people that think they know what it is and what it looks like. Thanks for writing this book Cara and Erica.

Rich, deeply woven and critical at this moment of reckoning!

After listening to the “How to survive the end of the world,” podcast hosted by the Brown siblings where they hosted both Cara and Erika I went and quickly downloaded the book.

As an organizer that is focused on strategies for intersectional liberation this book was a balm for my soul. The acknowledgment of the past and lineages of resistance richly roots is in the principles of sankofa (it’s not a taboo to return to your past and retrieve something you have forgotten) are the pieces I find we are missing at this movement in social transformation.

The weaving of voices and sharing of critical question’s throughout the book challenge the reader to consider HOW we are incorporating holistic practices into our work and the WHY of humanizing our movements for the long haul.

I will be drawing from and recommend it to everyone that I come to work with as a level set. Feeling extremely inspired by this text in the world!

Give thanks!!!

What an amazing book. As I am starting a new position in food justice, this was suggested to me. I’m grateful that it was. I’ve been a cultural organizer and community leader for over a decade and have his book articulated what I’ve witnessed, experienced and felt when it comes to the hurt and trauma in movement spaces. Equally important it outlined examples and paths to collective restoration and healing as a practice and a necessity in justice work. Gratitude to all the contributors.