CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. Through our programming, we strive to amplify the voices of those who have historically been under-represented. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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Cara Page: We give thanks to great spirit, creator, universe, and the infinite names we have for the divine source from which everything emerges. To the elements of earth, fire, air, and water, that nourish us and teach us about balance and equilibrium. To the blessed ancestors whose dreams and visions for our collective liberation we work to realize. To the guardians, protectors, and to the survival of our peoples. We ask for protection, clarity, courage, humility, and to remain steadfast in our commitment for total revolution. May we be willing to sacrifice, offer, and give up all that holds us back from the collective dream of our ancestors. To take this journey through time and space, to radically listen, to find our people, and commit to the work of collective liberation. To transmute fear and domination, may we come to know and remember over and over again the abundance of wisdom available to us. To realize our true destiny, our inheritance, to be in right relationship with the creative energy in everything around us to birth a new world.  

This is the invocation to our book that we're here to discuss this evening, Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety. I am Cara Page here speaking with a black, orange, purple, white quilt behind me of flowers made in central Mexico. I am wearing a dark purple sweater with long, metal copper earrings, and a brown, speckled framed pair of glasses. I have a big, loose afro with red lipstick, and it is a white wall behind my quilt. It is my great pleasure and honor to invite my co-conspirator, co-editor, and writer of the book, Erica Woodland, to introduce himself. 

Erica Woodland: Good evening, everyone. Cara, every time you read that invocation, I am so moved, and what an honor to be here with you tonight. My name is Erica Woodland. I use he, him, his pronouns. I'm currently based on Piscataway land, also known as Baltimore, Maryland. I am a Black, transmasculine person. I have long locks, and the sides of my head are shaved. I'm wearing a light gray sweater and a pink button up, and I am sitting in my office, which has gray walls. To one side, I have a wooden screen and there's a beautiful bookshelf behind me that you probably, folks who are watching the video can't see.  

We're going to open up this beautiful conversation about this forthcoming anthology, Healing Justice Lineages. Cara, as one of the co-architects, foremothers, godmothers of healing justice, and so much work that has really deeply shaped not only my development, but also the development of so many folks in our community. I want to ask you a question that really brings us to the beginning. I'd love to hear a little bit about what brings you to this work, and when you think about Healing Justice Lineages, why this and why now? 

Cara: Thank you so much. I also want to say it's an honor to be here with you this evening. 

I am here on Lenape Munsee land, in relationship to Lenape Munsee land in Brooklyn, New York, by way of my Seminole and Black and European ancestors. I want to name all the people that come behind me and with me and ask for permission from my elders and my community that have given me the gift to be a conduit of story, and hope that they give me permission and trust me to bring our stories forward in this work.  

So, it is true as a Black, queer woman at the age of 52, that in the early 2000s or before, I was deep in the lineage of the reproductive justice movement. Actually, I watched all the iterations from rights, to health, to justice in the Southeast where that political framework of reproductive justice emerged. I was just coming out of high school into, well, coming out of college. From high school onwards to the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 80s, and that was life-changing to witness that movement that resisted in particular, harm reduction and organizers on the ground, especially queer and trans and sex worker working class communities that I saw using harm reduction as a way to respond to the state's invisibility of access to care.  

Then from there forward, I started to map where the places that community-led strategies for care are deeply liberatory and abolitionist in their ideas. Not relying on state to depend on that, or depend on these ideas of care as only being something that comes from and through experts. For me, as a child survivor of family violence, as a bystander of violence from a very young age, this question of “experts” never really worked for me because it never acknowledged, I felt, the lived experience of a young Black girl growing up in New Jersey and Massachusetts, living in an interracial family and being queer, probably from birth, and trying to understand and navigate what violence looks like without putting any of my family members in prison. I knew I had a transformative edge on things, but I didn't know where to take it or where to land it. For me, this is why those things deeply shaped how I care for others and how I wanted to build collective care. How about you? 

Erica: I love that. I love that. I think the simplest answer about what brings me to this work is my mama, to be honest. You know, my family, my community, kind of growing up in the context of Baltimore City, and just seeing the legacy and impacts of colonization, the legacy and impacts of slavery, the legacy and impacts of the degradation of land and what it actually requires, in particular, of Black mothers to keep their children alive. I think a lot of what brought me into my political consciousness as a little person was just being like, some people have more and there's not really an obvious reason to me for this, and a lot of people are suffering and it's completely unnecessary. I owe so much of kind of, how I understand the world to not only my immediate family, but also all the different contexts that I got to traverse as a young person, who went to private institutions, right, went to private school, went to an Ivy League school, but also grew up in poverty. Those contradictions haunted me, and I was like, no. Not on my watch.  

Some of what really brought me into healing justice work is really thinking about the ways that trauma is caused by systems of violence and really thinking about ways to intervene on that trauma. As a young organizer in the early 2000s doing work around abolition, doing harm reduction work, and really seeing the intersections of both the prison industrial complex and the medical industrial complex, starting to grapple with what does care look like when you are working for institutions that are rooted in violence, and wanting to be in a caring profession, right? Knowing that I wanted to be of service and not being able to find the context that was aligned with my values, and so a lot of that work kind of brought me to thinking about what is the organization that needs to happen while we're caring for people, so that people can be free.  

Inside of that, seeing the ways in the early 2000s with the criminalization and surveillance around organizing itself, there was so much trauma moving through the work, so much burnout. I had my first experience of burnout at age 24, 25, and thinking about what does it mean for us to live in a world where not only can we have access to the things that we need, right, on a very basic level in terms of care, but also the right and the freedom to transform the conditions. When I think about bringing us to the book, I'm like healing justice even before I had that language was always a part of my spirit, right? One of the things that I really appreciate about your work and about the work of Kindred Collective is you all articulated a political and spiritual mandate for us. I want to hear a little bit about why this book and why now, from your perspective as one of the co-architects. 

Cara: Yes, thank you. I know I went deep into my childhood, but these things shape you, right? I felt like I had to go a little bit behind the scenes. Thank you for sharing what has shaped you and what brought you to this intersection that we're both carrying the water forward with, right? I just want to name real quick that in the early 2000s, there was such a rise of fascism, and anti-Black racism, and xenophobia and Islamophobia in this country, particularly after 9/11. Really, what we were looking at in the South in particular, when I was on the ground, getting trained up as an organizer and really returning to my ancestral lands of my people, the Seminole and Black folk in Georgia, and Florida, and North Carolina. I was understanding a particular element around trauma, generational trauma, and wanting to understand how we could, like you said, survive genocide, attempted genocide, slavery, mass imprisonment and incarceration of our people, in particular in the South. We were looking at a huge wave of anti-immigration reform, very much like what we're looking at today, right?  

History repeats itself. Everything we are responding to right now, and inside of a global pandemic was very much of what we were looking at in the early 2000s. The loss of freedom fighters, be that to the state, be that to burnout, be that to death, to suicidal ideation. There was definitely a pattern and a cycle of how organizers were experiencing the violence, the cumulative violence over decades in our community and collective lives, which is the same that we are experiencing now, right.  

As we feel the resistance around us against the uprisings of, against policing, corporations, and state violence, it is very clear that we're still very much at the nexus of understanding how generational trauma has very much impacted our lives, and how care and safety has become integral to our lives, really in the global pandemic. Understanding the huge disparities, right, of care for disabled people, for queer and trans, for incarcerated and detained people, for women, for poor folk, what we understood, and for Black, Indigenous and people of color, what we understood in that moment, or what many people understood, is what we have been living all of our lives, and to really deepen that and say in this book, hey, we are not the tragedy, we are not the crisis, we are not tragic in of ourselves. We have been raised to believe that we are less than human, that we are diseased, that we are expendable.  

That call, in the early 2000s when I started to gather story, and we started to build the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, and to name healing justice as a political, cultural, spiritual response to generational trauma, towards building power, and towards interrupting the framing of people saying that our bodies and our lives were invaluable. For me, now being 22 years later, looking at the evolution of healing justice, we are still very much in the similar place, not of critique of the system of care, nor we're very far ahead, I think, on abolition and understanding our relationship to carceral state and relying too much on institutions that have used prisons, that have used war, that have used genocide to control our bodies, and create our bodies as disease or dis-ease, but we're also in a vibrant moment of resistance. Reimagining what care and safety collectively can look like for and with each other that builds interdependence, and that is the moment we are responding to, with Healing Justice Lineages. [Erica: Yes.] 

I want to say that as for me, as a cultural worker and an organizer, I think what's very important is working with healers and health practitioners who are inside of these systems of care and that you, as a transformative therapist and harm reduction strategist and organizer, if you could speak to why this, why now for health practitioners inside of systems, carceral systems.  

Erica: I think that so many of the therapists and other kinds of practitioners that are literally tending to the emotional and spiritual well-being of our people, and are aligned with social justice want to figure out how do I contribute in a way where I don't have to give up my integrity, where I don't have to participate and be complicit with strategies that we know are rooted in violence. I've had the experience of navigating systems where I'm like, wow, the person who is creating the barriers for me might even be from my community, but because they're in this role as social worker, we're disconnected from each other. We're disconnected from each other.  

I think that one of the things I appreciate about the book and the process and just all of the people, both living and ancestors who helped to make this book possible, is that it's just such a reminder of all the different ways that we can resist, all of the different ways we can intervene. With my work with the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network, we're really thinking about what does it take to politicize practitioners, to disrupt the medical industrial complex, to create alternative systems, and really thinking about inside outside strategies. Because healing justice is gaining a lot of attention, it's becoming more popular without a text to really ground people, there's a lot of confusion.  

We've talked about that, call it shenanigans, healing justice shenanigans. You know, part of our work in the network is to really think about in this moment, we actually need a lot of interventions and those interventions are very specific to what is happening in your community. You know, there's no cookie cutter that's going to work in all situations or save us, and this book is really trying to offer lots of examples to inspire people to do what's right for them with their people in their community.  

There are political frameworks that we need to understand. There's lineage that we need to understand, and when it started and we were doing listening sessions and asking people about healing justice, a lot of people didn't know about Kindred. A lot of people did not know about your work, and I was like, but wait a minute, these folks are still out here grinding, right. Other people are kind of talking about healing justice, but not honoring where it comes from. For me, why this, why now is to really redress and repair some of that erasure and to actually redirect people towards real solutions that are going to get us free and to help folks understand the complexity and nuance of this moment. What I loved about what you shared about what Kindred was responding to is that what we're up to is building power. That's what we're up to, right. We understand that in order to do that, we have to reclaim, and also invent new strategies to transform trauma.  

If you are someone like me, who went into social work or mental health to help people with all of all of the contradictions, something like healing justice just creates so much more expansiveness to think about this work. Like, I get to be a whole person. I get to bring my practice. I get to like really draw from so many resources that we are asked to break away from in the mainstream mental health system. I think that this is just such a beautiful moment, because as we hear just more calls for abolition, we need to make sure people understand what abolition actually is. Right, because it's popular now, but in the early 2000s, when we were organizing, people literally were like, no, what are you talking about, right. It seemed unbelievable, so the fact that in my lifetime, we're having this conversation, I'm like, yes and let's make sure we're bringing the rigor and discipline, right, to really understand what you all have gifted us. You know, you all were rigorous then and you've continued to be rigorous. As someone whose work, you know, obviously has been part of H.J. for a long time, but I feel like our network is newer to the conversation. We want to make sure that we're doing our due diligence the way you all have and continue to. 

Cara: Hmm. Beautifully said, and I want to offer that this here, this partnership and comradeship to even do this book in such a way that's across spheres and false divides, right. That practitioners like therapists and social workers aren't supposed to be speaking to healers and cultural workers because they're not perceived as healers themselves. How do social workers and therapists do healing work? Then, how are healers, energy, earth, body-based practitioners seen as serious practitioners of health and care? You know what I mean? How do we break? You are so much a bridge builder for that, and I just want to name that is part of the work that we are uplifting in this book, is going across these false divides and figuring out how do we create integrative care strategies that really allow for people to honor their own spiritual and cultural traditions, alongside or within Western medicine as they need it so, but not that the construct of Western medicine becomes the only way that you can be cared for, and how limiting that has been. In some ways, has criminalized all traditions that are outside of it, right. This is powerful for us to be in relationship to each other. This isn't supposed to happen, right, but we're here for it. I'm curious how this book, or how you're thinking around healing justice in the practice of writing this book and gathering interviews and doing your political work at National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network, how that has shifted you, you know, and how as a result of writing the book, you're thinking how it has shifted you and your thinking around healing justice? 

Erica: I almost want to laugh because if you write a book about healing justice, guess what you're going to have to do folks? You're going to have to heal, right? You're going to, you're going to be asked to confront your wounding. You're going to be asked to confront your trauma and your grief and I didn't expect that. I don't know why I didn't expect that and so some of the ways that that showed up, it was really humbling and actually really beautiful because you know, in real time, I got to also share some of, some of that process with you.  

I think some of the biggest learnings for me are, are really around healthism, healthism, and the ways that ableism is still very much tied up into care systems that are outside of the medical industrial complex and so I didn't realize I was kind of attached to this belief that like anything outside of mainstream healthcare, it has to be better. Then I started to be like, actually I'm having experiences in quote, unquote alternative, you know, medicine spaces or healing spaces where I'm dealing with transphobia. I'm dealing with fat phobia. We're holding up again, one model of care and one way to be in a body and you know, those were largely unconscious because obviously we've been talking about this work for years together. 

Cara: Yes. 

Erica: Really reckoning with the wellness and the kind of alternative health industries and how they are very, very, I mean, we know this, right? [Cara: Yes.] These are things that we know, but I didn't realize that I was participating. So, because we did so much research, right, because we did so many interviews, just the conversations around what does it mean to be liberated and in a body in this particular political moment? Some of those insights really shook me in very, very good ways and I'm like, I feel sharper for it. You know, I feel sharper for it.  

I think another thing that's really been so revealing to me is I really did not understand how central harm reduction in particular, the liberatory harm reduction, shout out to Shira Hassan. I didn't know how central harm reduction was to healing justice as a framework. I said probably until a few years ago, oh, I'm new to healing justice. I'm new to healing justice and it was actually Shira who said, well, you've been doing harm reduction work for like 20 years. So I'm not sure what's happening, but I think through the development of this project, we started to reclaim parts of the framework that were separated intentionally, because it makes people uncomfortable and we can have a whole conversation about kind of like healing and our one-dimensional understanding of what that means and how that, I think takes us away from healing justice and maybe towards a self-care framework, which we're, you know, have all the critiques of. But those are some of the bigger things that shifted for me in this project. 

Cara: Yes. Speak. I mean- 

Erica: What about for you? 

Cara: Right. I was going to say, I was going to jump in and say that for one, there's something to be said for using a political framework in the early 2000s because in the South in particular, 

we were responding to a critical moment, right? Of state violence, of corporate takeover, of xenophobia. I've mentioned all the things. And then fast forward, here we are in 2022, to watch something evolve over time and in the writing of the book and interviewing people in different regions because healing justice was very place-based with a particular lens in the South. 

How do you honor traditions of care in the South that are rooted in Black radical traditions, 

in Indigenous nations, in immigrant and refugee communities that have lived there for generations but are not valued as contributing to movement through care strategies, through environmental justice strategies, through disability justice strategies and just to be clear, healing justice could not exist without the emergent strategies of disability justice, environmental justice that were building at the time, transformative justice. I'm losing my train of thought.  

Transformative justice, healing justice, excuse me, I'm trying to find the five. Harm reduction, as you mentioned, environmental justice, disability justice, transformative justice, and reproductive justice, right? Reproductive justice and disability justice were emerging movements at the early 2000s, and I was in relationship to those movements. So how we looked at healing justice was very much in relationship to you can't talk about care strategies. You can't talk about generational trauma if you're not talking about abortion, if you're not talking about forced sterilization, if you're not talking about involuntary reproductive health injustices, you can't talk about care, collective care, if you're not talking about disability justice and ableist supremacy in a culture of care that is very modeled on if you can't produce for the wealthy elite, you're already perceived as dangerous or diseased. 

So, this is all in the book, it's broken down. But for me to understand how people took healing justice and defused it, they took it out of place. It was one model. It was very much based on rooted in place, rooted in building power, rooted in understanding what does collective care look like for your community on the ground, not just based on what our experiences are and putting it on someone else's. So, the book raises up the Southeast, the Northeast, the Midwest, the Bay Area, Puerto Rico, just different spaces and places that have used healing justice as a strategy to build care, collective care, and safety work as a response to generational trauma and violence, state violence and interpersonal violence in our lives. 

The book for me, as we unpeeled and unpacked the stories of how people were using this strategy on the ground, how different it looks based on where you are, based on who your 

people are, based on what the geography is, rural, urban, what you have access to in terms 

of medicines and lands. And for us, healing justice in the South was always in relationship to land, to economies, to spiritual, cultural understandings of our people's livelihood and to our bodies and shout out to Project South and Southerners on New Ground that have always brought that analysis forward. 

We as Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, when we built and began to expand on healing justice, what it has become now is because people have built that in their respective regions using that kind of overview of what is our collective land to care for it, what does it mean to steward our relationship to lands, our spirits, our bodies and our economies. As you know, we've learned a lot hearing from different people on what that can look like and what's possible. As we hear an ambulance roll by. [both laugh] 

Erica: Right. I mean, one of the things that you've said a lot, and I so appreciate this, there are also folks who are doing work and they're not calling it healing justice and so just how important it is that some people are saying they're doing healing justice and I have questions. We don't want to get caught up around language, but we do want to anchor people in, you know, this is the original intention of this framework and this is what I was trying to respond to and I think through the process of curating this project, I think I've gotten more and more clear about the values and the political intention and my imagination has been opened around what it looks like. 

Cara: I would love to talk a little bit about care, safety, healing that are integral to political liberation because I see our time is winding down. Can we go with that? 

Erica: Of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. 

Cara: Great because I'd love to hear you talk about how care, safety, and healing strategies are interpolations in our movements. 

Erica: You know, in research, researching for this book. I'm like it’s actually a relatively recent development to have care divorced from our liberation work. Shoutout to the nonprofit industrial complex for that and you know being fully honest and serious, our people have been sitting at this intersection of care, safety, and liberation forever. 

Cara: Right. 

Erica: Um, we've been out here, and we know that if you are going to build power to confront state violence, right which ultimately means death, grief, trauma, crisis. That people need food, people need health care. People need ritual and ceremony, we need our cultural traditions and practice. People need housing. These things are very, very obvious. They were obvious to the Young Lords, the Black Panthers. Women of All Red Nations, right? So, when we think about a lot of the legendary organizing that happened in the 60’s & 70’s, that separation wasn't there, right. And the state understands that. If you are providing care for people, you're going to earn people's trust. You're gonna earn people's respect and we're gonna start to get together and be like, hey, instead of always responding to what we don't have access to, what if we actually changed the entire power structure? 

So that is deeply threatening, which is why it's no surprise that over the past five decades, things have really shifted, and we know that care still lives inside of our movements. We're not gonna erase all the care work that is just, ecosystems of care are the only reason that I'm sitting here and that we're sitting here together. We know that in order to be liberated, we have to survive and there's a lot that's at stake when our people have to be solely focused on survival, right? When especially if you're thinking about the long-term impacts of generational trauma, the state is criminalizing our responses to trauma, the ways that we wanna heal and recover from trauma.  

So, the connection is really clear. But I think that the other layer to this that you've already touched on is that criminalization, surveillance, those things are also always gonna be deployed to interrupt this care and safety that we're trying to build out. So, I think in our work at the network, we're really clear that in the current mental health system that we have, we are gonna have to figure out how do we provide care for our people? What does it look like to intervene in the medical industrial complex? When do we align with the system to move resources, to make sure our people have access to care and when do we move outside of the system to do more disruptive action? 

Cara: Yes, yes and yes. Thank you. I do want to say, just to add to that. I’ve been thinking a lot about the science and traditions of medicine. And, and really want to honor what it means to understand our relationship to traditions of medicine as communities of color. As Black folks that have been deeply enriched, our culture is enriched by our relationship to foods, to medicines, to practices like birth working, the ritual of birth work that has been passed down for centuries. Watching Indigenous, Latinx, Arab, Asian communities honor their traditions to medicine and whatever that looks like. But I think we're talking here about how there has been a disconnect on how we imagine ways to share our medicines and our traditions without co-opting with each other, without being accountable to one another, or how we are continuing to be respectful while we learn. That does not mean consumptive, but understanding the lineage of traditions because what we are also witnessing is a crisis of traditions being usurped from their lineage and origin. There's been a lot of critique of yoga. There's been a lot of critique of meditation that's being used out of context without understanding its relationship to political cultural survival strategies for the communities that it originated from as a practice. So, I wanna say healing justice, again, is not all traditions. It can't be. It's merely creating a strategy that holds a framing and a container for us to understand what is our accountability to the legacy and lineage of our traditions, or if we are learning from others, how do we not allow those traditions to be criminalized or those practitioners to be criminalized and the places they come from to be enslaved, right. So, just to offer an extension to what you're speaking to. [Erica: Mm.] And that includes honoring that we, as Black and Indigenous people, as refugee and immigrant communities, for many decades have talked about cellular memory and this idea of science speaking to epigenetics as if we weren't already talking about the relationship to slavery and genocide being passed down in our cellular memory and how we can use that experience of our bodies as we exist now in real time and what our ancestors went through, that type of violence and memory that's in us on a cellular level, and my teachers, my elders of Black and Indigenous descent that always taught me that, and now epigenetics as more a white Western model saying, look, this is true. 

Erica: We've discovered it. 

Cara: Right, we've discovered it and finding value in that. Now, we don't go into detail in that 

in the medical industrial complex in the book that we talk about. We touch on it barely, but we've got to ask the question, who is seen as telling the truth and understanding what all our scientific traditions are and how we value the origins of where they come from without bumping and erasing the truth of many of us coming into our knowledge of memory and understanding of care and medicine as very much ancestral, but comes from many lineages and lived experiences. 

Erica: Yeah. Yes.You know, Cara, you spend so much time in the history, right? [Cara: Yes.]  And these histories of violence and histories that are actually very much happening in the present. One of the things I love about the book is that the past, the present, and the future are in conversation with each other. Right? 

Cara: Yes. yes. 

Erica: That to me is so beautiful. It's just such a representation of the spiralic nature of time and how we really do have access to both what our ancestors want for us and our descendants in this present moment. So, I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, what do our people and our ancestors want to see us build in the future? 

Cara: Yes, yes, and yes.  

Erica: Where are we going? 

Cara: I know, I dream about this all the time. Do we want the sci-fi realm or the, no, let me stop. [Erica laughs] But essentially, I want to say that having done this work for some odd 22 years on healing justice, but then before that harm reduction care, liberatory work, I'm still looking for the infrastructure that values different ways of being well, or well is a tricky word. I don't want to use healthy either, but care. Let's just use it. Collective care and safety, even healing is, 

it can be very triggering for many people. But what we're asking for, despite the limitation of language, is that I want ways to take care of my people and my communities that is valued, 

that is not judged or devalued, that is not stolen for profit or co-opted. I want our medicines to exist without being taken by Big Pharma and sold back to us. I want to feel like we can understand ways to build collective strategies across spheres, like we talked about, across Western ideas of medicine. How do we value different ways of medicine and being in our bodies, our lands, our spirits, and traditions of economies that are survivor led, that are Black Indigenous people of color led, that value our abilities and genders and sexualities in ways that don't set forth a curative model of care. So that's a big ask.  

People say, what are you talking about? I say, this is possible that we could dismiss old ideas, archaic ideas of body and healthy in quotes, and really just blowing out the water and say, how do we learn differently about what it is to build care, that values the collective co-design of our lived experiences and doesn't try to create one model.  

So, for me, I need infrastructure. I need for us to have things in place that decriminalize practitioners and medicines in our communities, so that in a decade, we are not looking at the same type of struggle inside of a global pandemic. We are not looking at the grief and trauma of policing, state violence, interpersonal violence, in ways that haven't pulled forth what we're learning right now or what we're doing that isn't working. Let's not go back to the same. What do you think? I mean, I know you also think about this all the time. 

Erica: I do, I do. I think this infrastructure and the systems that it's gonna require are so important because there is infrastructure. There's ‘care’ infrastructure, right? But honestly, I think what you're speaking to is like, values aligned, politicized. 

Cara: Thank you, thank you. 

Erica: Structure that's rooted in relationships, right? That's rooted in- 

Cara: And place, and place. 

Erica: And place, and place, and context and conditions, right? 

Cara: Yes. 

Erica: So, I think one of the more humbling pieces that I've really heard you share through this project, is just like how similar the conditions are now to when H.J. was birthed and there's so much more that we need, right? 

Cara: That's right. 

Erica: I think our ancestors, they want a lot from us, right? But they gave us a lot. We've inherited so much. 

Cara: So much. 

Erica: And so, I think one of the bigger tools the bigger teachings that I feel like I've gotten 

from this project is, you know, from the elders that we interviewed in the book. 

Cara: Yes, thank you. 

Erica: Andy Palmway, Barbara Smith, Ms. Major [Cara: Yes.]  and also thinking about how central Harriet Tubman has been as an ancestral guide in this work. Really thinking about, we need to learn from what happened in the past. Well, you can't just recreate the past in the present. Like it just, it doesn't work that way and I'm really thinking about how we learn from what our elders and ancestors did and from the mistakes that they made and to actually not glorify the past. Like it was some utopia. It was not, it was very much hard times and there's also this piece around discernment, right? Being able to discern what is an intervention that's actually gonna address the problem that you're trying to deal with, right? 

Cara: Thank you. 

Erica: In this moment where they're, you know, with the just ease with which people can get access to information that might not have depth. It's this discernment piece that is gonna become more and more central. I think that our ancestors and elders and our descendants require that we re-imagine, right? What's some of what we're dealing with is a brand-new period. Some of what we're dealing with is cyclical, but it's never happened exactly this way in this time. So, there's no shortcuts. There's no easy answer. We have to grapple, we have to struggle. We have to be in big questions. We have to be willing to be wrong and be transformed, 

and be gathered to be honest, right? To be held accountable and that's not a small task. 

Cara: Agreed. And be willing to push the boundaries. We're talking so much about police reform. We're talking about abolition. Let's talk about what does it mean to abolish a medical industry that's caused harm and abuse from experimentation, from forced sterilization, from different methodologies that have put people at risk and have forced involuntary designs based on curing and fixing. So, you know it's wrestling with getting past a reformist politic and actually, like you're saying, liberatory, expansive imagination on what it is we wanna create that doesn't reuse and recycle things that were not working and won't continue to work because we're not in relationship to each other and it doesn't come out of dignity and respect for everyone. 

I do wanna offer a call to action and just this book we hope, we know is relevant. I would say it's revolutionary and just trying to remember where we're heading, what we're trying to build and what we wanna pull forward and like what you said, what we wanna learn from and the mistakes that we've made and what we wanna try that's new. So, read this with discipline, read this with rigor, this book and engage with it, struggle with it, build in the political, cultural, spiritual practices that many of the interviews that we and multiple writers, there's contributing writers, contributing artists and voices that really give us fodder and ideas for what practice can look like on the ground for collective care and safety and healing justice. 

Erica: Yes, and yes. I think the other call is we want people to be shifted and transformed by what's been inspired from the book, right? So really thinking about application, we did not embark on this project to be celebrated authors, although that would be cute. This is an offering for our community because for years and years and years, we've been having the same conversation and now we have a place that can hold at least a snapshot in time of where our thinking is in this moment, and we hope that it will change. [Cara: Yes.] I think one of the things that we wrote in the book is we need co-conspirators. We do not wanna be the heroes of healing justice. We need people to put in work and to really think about how are we assessing context and conditions? How are we assessing risk? How are we thinking about collective care and safety strategies that are outside of state for folks who are working in institutions? 

We're very clear, we need inside and outside strategy. If you're working in institutions, 

Who are you accountable to? How are you engaged in movement building work and how are you thinking about your role so that you're no longer complicit? You have to do that in the community. You have to do that in a relationship. 

Cara: Yes, and just finally wanna give a shout out to all our co-warriors that helped to pull this book together as you said earlier, and we will be doing a Healing Justice Lineages listening tour and digital archive. So please follow us on our website at healingjusticelineages.com or on social media at IG, Instagram @hjlineages. We're taking an eight city, eight-month tour I like to call it that launches in April, including Atlanta, Durham, North Carolina, Detroit, Chicago, the Bay Area, LA, Baltimore, and New York City. We know that's just a swath of the many regions and stories that are embracing this work and we're out here, invite us, bring us along. This is where we're starting the journey as we continue to share the knowledge and the memory of healing justice and collective care and safety.  

Erica: The land has been such a central feature in this book and in this project. So, I'm excited because we're going to be able to make a lot more memories with this tour coming up. 

Cara: That's right and honor the land as we go, as it's brought so much to us, of course. 

Thank you for naming that. Thank you for this beautiful conversation.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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