Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety

by Cara Page, Erica Woodland, Aurora Levins Morales (Foreword)

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, 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:

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Justice, Activism, Disability, History, Psychology, Anthologies

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2023

Reviews

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of essays building a framework for thinking of liberation, collective care and safety, and what that means for straight and queer BIPOC people.

I enjoyed it, but I think I need to go back to it and take more care to think through a lot of the individual essays. The loan period for my audiobook was expiring and I didn't sit with each essay as much as they deserved.

Still, rushed as I was, it left me a lot to think about.

[Ariel ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text is a good place to start when learning about healing justice and movement history. About halfway through, I began to feel frustrated at the lack of practical advice offered in the book after it spent so much time deconstructing issues in the medical-industrial complex and modern activist movements. Why did the authors not offer more concrete strategies? Even the organizations and outside resources referenced provided only very general overviews of practical support and movement-building.



For example, the Healing Justice Toolkit by the Los Angeles-based group Dignity and Power Now is free to view online, but advice like "Provide Care and Support" (pg 19) without any additional information is frustratingly impractical.

I'm starting to get suspicious of books like this that say a lot without offering any practical guidance. It's like they intend to keep readers continuously seeking, never acting.



Overall, there were many good quotes and interesting topics that I'd like to research further. The "barefoot doctors" in rural China, for instance, and how studying their practices inspired Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a Black revolutionary and member of the Republic of New Afrika, to develop Lincoln Detox and the five-point ear Acudetox protocol that is now standard treatment for detox according to the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association. Despite years of studying addiction, trauma, and harm reduction, I didn't even know the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association existed. I took a lot of notes while reading and made my highlights public here.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

a gorgeous compilation of ancestral and enduring practices of freedom against the medical industrial complex and for the healing of BIPOC individuals and political formations. i have been so impressed with cara page’s research over the year and this is a critical document for folks working on reproductive justice, abolition, harm reduction, and other organizers for bodily autonomy. there is a lot here, and there were moments where i wanted the far-reaching document to linger. but in all an exciting, beautiful invitation into honoring the legacies and work of healing justice.

[Devon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who cares about community, healing, white supremacy, non-white folks, marginalized people, community (big etc) need to read this. 4.7 rounded up. I will definitely be coming back to reference this book and it’s references.

A book I didn’t realize I needed until I got it. Amazing. I love.

I’m a Black social worker abolitionist who is a therapist who does not properly do mandated reporting (I don’t want to be the flip-side or in partnership with the cops) and this SPOKE TO ME.

[Jung · Rating 5 out of 5]

[5 stars] An anthology of history, archival research, and commentary on the Healing Justice framework and its political intersections. I read this book for a work project, though likely would've picked it up at some point, given my personal and professional interests in the topic. Although it can be read cover to cover in its written order, I think beginners to the framework and its language may find it helpful to start in the Origins of Healing Justice section before coming back to Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage. I loved the chapters on Healing Justice formations in different parts of the U.S., and especially appreciated the shoutout to New Mexico's long history of Indigenous-rooted work. I would especially emphasize the centrality of medical industrial complex (MIC) abolition, which has been part of the Healing Justice framework from the beginning, since that aspect is often erased or forgotten in coopted application of language. Highly recommended to those who want to learn more about the Healing Justice framework as a politicized project rooted in Southern tradition.

Goodreads Challenge 2023: 40/52
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: about activism

[Jalisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alright so boom -
Short version you need this.
If you like adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs you'll like this.

This is not a book to rush through. It's not a book you read in isolation. It's a guide to underline, sit with, journal about, discuss with other people and then strategize about the collaborative ACTIONS you can take based on those learnings.

As someone who has worked for over a decade in organizations committed to justice, this was a much anticipated read and it did not disappoint. My highlighter worked overtime from the foreward onward. Healing Justice Lineages is an anthology full of essays, pictures, playlists, reflection exercises, recipes and strategies on the origins, frameworks, and liberatory practice of healing justice. The book brings together some of the leading voices in the field of Healing Justice including Barbara Smith, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Shira Hassan, Erica Woodland, Cara Page and more. Though firmly grounded in the soil of the south, the book journeys through New Mexico, California, New York and the Midwest gathering healing justice learning and practices.
The practice of healing justice "began as an investigation into how we can hold the traumas of deep and painful injustices and heal from them as we fight to end them." It is a "an incantation, a response to new patterns of movement and resistance; a call-and-response to our ancestors who survived colonization, slavery, and attempted genocide, healed, and transmitted a radical legacy for collective care and safety."

This is a great book to pair with Tricia Hersey's Rest is Resistance to go deeper into the practice and politics of healing and the clarity and liberation that comes from rest. In Alexis Pauline Gumbs' essay "Learning to Listen" she calls on the lineage of Harriet Tubman - "a neurodivergent leader who paused, slept and received guidance during the freedom journey so she navigated while under direct white supremacist attack. She trusted her dreams." Tying directly to the radical power of rest that Hersey invites is to, Gumbs ties a thread between the two books when she says "remember, when Harriet Tubman stopped and went to sleep in the middle of the journey because her head trauma included narcolepsy, everyone else had to stop and rest and wait and definitely. Maybe those unexpected pauses led to the eventual safe arrivals to come. What do you think will happen if you take a breath?"

It really deepened my understanding of the world around me and how I can show up better and more intentionally in my work. I highly recommend to everyone, but especially folks committed to building the infrastructure for care, safety, healing, and political liberation.

[Atava Swiecicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is important medicine for these times! Healing Justice Lineages is full prayer, history, commentary, political analysis and personal stories. In addition, the authors encourage reader engagement, by offering practices to participate in the work of healing justice.

I trained herbalists for many decades and wish I had this book to assign to my students. I think it should be required reading for all herbalists, therapists, social workers, therapists, curanderx, healers of all backgrounds and modalities, as well as folx working in the medical industrial complex.

Thank you Cara Page and Erica Woodland for offering this work to the world, so that we can be grounded in history of the healing justice movement, one guided by the legacy of Black, Indigenous & people of the global majority, as well as queer, trans, non-binary, and disabled people.

[kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

"our ancestors want us to transform oppression and eradicate it. they want us to fulfill the beautiful potential that we are born with and that almost never, or seldom, comes to full blossoming under the systems in which we live. they want us to live as the cherished babies they think we are... our ancestors want that for us. they also want us to fight. they want us to be as courageous as they were." - barbara smith, pg. 30

that's all.

[Fei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of great case studies and examples of organizations doing healing justice work across the US

[Gayatri Sethi Desi Book Aunty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Are you seeking resources to build your anti-capitalist collective healing practices?

I highly recommend this illuminating new book. It’s transformative & lends itself so well to group study!
It is a deep dive into collective healing & liberation, divested from “self help” individualism. This book is an essential healing offering.

*I am grateful to North Atlantic Books for sending me an advance copy so that I could recommend & share this new book with our communities of readers & co- learners.

[Avory Faucette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been so excited to read Healing Justice Lineages, a project I heard about last fall that finally documents the work of healing justice in a relatively comprehensive volume that practitioners can use as a jumping-off point for further exploration into this rich, multigenerational and multi-layered movement. Healing justice is a complex lens that has deeply inspired me for a number of years, but I generally have heard about it in workshops, books on more specific topics, podcast episodes, movement spaces, and so on. This new anthology makes the philosophy and the movement more generally accessible and provides both a broad history as well as provocative questions and challenges for present and future practitioners.

Though I don’t think a single definition of the term is ever given, appropriate for the collective nature of this movement, editor Cara Page and contributor Tamika Middleton describe healing justice as arising in the context of the Kindred Collective from a vision of “community-led healing practices as a political strategy that seeks to intervene and respond to collective trauma, burnout, and violence in our lives and our movements.” Healing justice is explicitly opposed to the medical-industrial complex, simultaneously holds and transforms trauma, centers BIPOC voices and experiences, and prioritizes collective care. It is rooted in history and ancestry, and the editors describe it as a community-led response, emergent process, spiritual framework, cultural strategy, and political strategy with pillars of “transformative justice, disability justice, reproductive justice, environmental justice, and harm reduction rooted in abolition and anti-capitalism.” Breaking it down further, key concepts illustrated by Claudia Lopez include Black liberation, bodily autonomy, interdependence, sacred relationship to the earth, abolition, indigenous sovereignty, religious and spiritual freedom, decolonization, Global South movements, and self-determination.

Editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland both contributed substantial chunks of their own writing to this book, but also sourced essays from a number of other movement voices. I’m reminded of other recent titles that focus on radical history praxis and contextualizing movements (Abolitionism. Feminism. Now. being one example), providing information about some of smaller local organizations and movements that might otherwise be lost to history alongside a lot of context around how themes, people, and organizations connect. Many of the essays in this collection are broad in scope to document the movement in this way, while others are narrower and provocative. I can see using the book as a reference volume or a treasure map, to guide further exploration into the specific stories cited here.

These contributions document legacies of harm and violence as well as many of the organizations, movements, and individual healers who have struggled to practice a different way of being in community context. These histories predate the use of the term healing justice, but segue into what it looked like for organizers to theorize and practice healing justice in the early 2000s, including state challenges to doing so and how this work has intersected with politics, public health, catalyst moments like Hurricane Katrina, and other forces. Contributors from specific sites of practice around the so-called United States describe how local efforts in their regions have both flourished and ran into resistance and internal challenge, while others write about a specific pillar of healing justice and their experiences in that sphere of the work.

The contributors to this volume do a lot of dense conceptual and philosophical work, challenging the reader to consider all the various ways healing justice has been co-opted, misunderstood, stolen, or countered by harmful mainstream narratives. One of the key aims of this volume is to delineate what healing justice is not, and how its radical impulse is compromised by inappropriate use of the term. These essays surface BIPOC understandings of healing, harm, and spiritual technologies while challenging the ways healing gets watered down by a consumerist culture that centers white individualism. For example, the word “healing” itself gets a challenge for its association with healthism in one essay by Shira Hassan, and several contributors question whether the current popular focus on intergenerational trauma and epigenetics is insufficiently rooted in the origins of these movements.

I was actually working on a blog post before reading this book about how I use healing justice in my work, and it was the book that encouraged me to stop using the term! While I’ve been heavily inspired by the concept, and found a lot of connections between the principles and practices of healing justice and how I write and teach, this volume makes clear that healing justice is always rooted in movement work, practiced collectively. An individual practitioner cannot be a healing justice practitioner, without being deeply connected to and accountable to broader movements. I appreciate this clarification, and how confusion has arisen in myself and others who’ve heard about the movement and extrapolated it to our own context because of our excitement about all the pieces of justice and liberation work it pulls together and how we relate ideologically to or participate individually in those movements.

While I certainly long for this kind of community practice, and hope to one day be connected to some of the groups and organizations cited in this book whose work I’ve been following for years, it’s important to be honest about where we are in the present moment. This book clearly delineates how healing justice differs from other practices, and how broadening its use waters down its effectiveness as a movement. “We need an organized base of practitioners, more practitioner networks, and more healing justice projects. What we don’t need more of are individual practitioners moving from a healing justice framework without being accountable to a base or movement.” Heard! Healing justice is a critical part of my lineage, but not a part of my practice.

Perhaps what struck me most was how many connections are made here. The editors and contributors cut broad swathes across intersecting topics, presenting rich ground for discussion—you’ll learn about how the house music scene provided an oft-overlooked spiritual space for processing queer Black grief around the AIDS epidemic, for example, and how sex workers’ movements for harm reduction were sanitized and narrowed by public health officials to the point of being unrecognizable.

One essay on history especially made my brain sing as it documented a chronology of how humanity has been criminalized through intersecting campaigns of hate that I’ve studied or personally experienced and have matched up in bits and pieces over the years, but not even thought to comprehensively map. This chronology spans from colonization to criminalizing sex work to anti-immigration to racist drug laws to Jim Crow to the Ugly Laws that criminalized disability, showing how all forms of criminalizing difference are interconnected under the umbrella of colonialism and racist capitalism. I also couldn’t help but notice how healing justice cuts across many of the challenges I remember living and advocating through, from the global gag rule and the Hyde Amendment to the evolving models of disability and community care. While healing justice itself arose out of BIPOC organizing in the South in the 2000s, these technologies and practices have been forming over centuries in resistance to criminalization of difference and wholeness.

I’d recommend this volume for anyone who uses the term healing justice, is curious about its origins, or just wants some inspiration around resisting the state, racist capitalism, and colonization. This collection will particularly appeal to healing practitioners of all kinds and to movement organizers who are looking for connections and a sense of rootedness in history. It’s also critical reading for those who may want healing justice included in their nonprofit organizations or other efforts without a deep understanding of what this term actually means, including its firmly abolitionist nature. While not all of us can claim to be practitioners of healing justice, I think we can all be inspired and challenged by it, and see the necessity of supporting these movements as they emerge and flourish.

[ARC provided through NetGalley.]

[New · Rating 3 out of 5]

finally got around to writing a review for this book! some gr8 points the book made that i wanna echo:

1. forgetting is a tool of white supremacy. this is helpful to remember in community organizing. we are not the first to encounter a given problem and come up with a solution for it; when we organize, we must draw on the wisdom of our ancestors and the generations before us. there is an uninterrupted history of resilience in our very bones (as evidenced by the fact that we are still here today) that we can draw on to organize. concretely, this looks like a) not re-inventing the wheel, b) drawing on strategies of resistance that have been used in the past, and c) learning from our ancestors' prior revolutionary work.

but i'm thinking about this idea of "forgetting as a tool of white supremacy" not only in terms organizing, but in terms of our personal lives as well. there is so little i know about my ancestors and the generations before me. because of the violence those before me faced, there is a rupture in memories and stories that have been passed down between generations. i feel weaker because of that. i feel like i'm walking around with pieces of me missing. i'm going to start doing interviews with my family members to try and learn more about my ancestors.

2. shifting from funding police and prisons to social workers and treatment facilities is an age-old strategy. history has shown this: replacing one system of violence with a seemingly more kind and "gentle" one is a pattern we have seen before. but make no mistake: those systems still target and seek to eliminate the most vulnerable. when we fall for these types of solutions, we will lose in the long run.

i think about this A LOT as a social work student. like bro. this shit is all still fake and violent. its crazy because im in class with soooo many students who dont see social work for the evil that it is and i know that they will go on to unknowingly do harm. all this shit when my classmates talk about "oh i wanna be a good social worker" like bro why would u wanna be a good social worker? that's like someone saying "oh i wanna be a good cop." no, all cops are bastards—and all social workers are bastards, too. no such thing as being the "one good apple." instead of trying to be a good social worker, u should be learning how to be a bad social worker. lmao, disrupt all this shit.

3. we must be suspicious of any practice or practitioner that encourages us to deny any part of our experience. the role of spirit and spiritual practitioners is to help us find the medicine in those parts of us that are hardest to accept and integrate.

i think about the last line a lot in terms of not denying the parts of me that are angry, ugly, and have thus been made harder to accept. no, there is medicine in suffering. there is medicine in pain. and it's unfortunate that we live in a society that preaches toxic positivity to us, making us forego and deny the other half of who we are. no bitch im in my toxic villain era and im not ashamed!!!

[Kim Freimoeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Healing Justice Lineages" is a powerful, grounding, and necessary collection that offers both vision and practice for sustaining movements, communities, and ourselves.
This collection is deeply grounded and it does not approach healing as an abstract ideal or a personal wellness trend. Instead, it situates healing justice firmly within collective struggle, lineage, and lived experience. The voices gathered here speak with clarity and care, reminding the reader that healing and justice are inseparable, and that neither can exist without accountability, rest, and relationship.
The book explores the origins of healing justice as a framework born from Black, Indigenous, queer, disabled, and abolitionist movements. It traces how care, survival, and resistance have always been intertwined, especially for communities forced to endure systemic harm. Rather than offering easy solutions, the book asks readers to sit with complexity, to understand healing as something ongoing, relational, and deeply political.
What worked exceptionally well for me was the emphasis on lineage. This is not presented as a new idea divorced from history. The contributors consistently honor elders, organizers, and cultural practices that laid the groundwork for healing justice long before the term existed. That grounding gives the book weight and integrity. It also offers practical reflections on how to build sustainable movements without replicating the very harms we are trying to dismantle.
If I have any critique, it is a minor one. Because the book is dense with ideas and voices, it requires slow, intentional reading. I read through a first pass in largely one sitting, but plan to revisit several sections in order to dig deeper. This is not a text to rush through, and readers looking for quick takeaways may feel overwhelmed. For me, that depth is largely a strength rather than a flaw.
I give "Healing Justice Lineages" 4.75 stars (rounded to 5 for Goodreads.) I recommend it to organizers, healers, activists, and anyone invested in liberation work who wants to think more deeply about care, sustainability, and collective survival. I would not recommend it to readers looking for apolitical wellness guidance or surface-level discussions of healing. This book asks for engagement, humility, and commitment, and it offers wisdom in return.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A major takeaway for me was non-judgement toward people who do things deemed unhealthy, dangerous, or irresponsible in order to survive. For me this may have come from a place of vague politeness or the thought that you don't know where a person is coming from, but this book gave me some specificity. A memorable example was of drug users who become intentionally pregnant in order to get off of years-long waitlists for rehabilitation programs. Another major takeaway for me was that there are all kinds of healing justice lineages, for example neurodivergent people can find representation in Harriet Tubman. It makes sense to me that freedom fighters and rebels against slavery would have been today understood as neurodivergent, because you would have had to have seen the world differently in order to have escaped the racist yet pervasive logic of slavery back then. Today, neurodivergent people tend to see capitalism as oppressive because they are excluded, feel like they can't keep up, and like the world was not made for them. In this way, this book helped me see the struggle for healing justice as not just someone else's fight but my own as someone with ADHD.

[Haerlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book states that our futures are tied into understanding our past: I know this is true. This book is beautifully presented as a meditation with our elders, explores what happened in past and present movements, and imagines possible futures. I would recommend this book as an example of how to engage with our lineages- learning how to heal from past transgressions, and moving forward with the lessons learned.

[Kw]

An important book, rich with ancestral wisdom. My favorite parts were Erica's chapters blending historical facts and modern analysis. I struggled with the choppy, multi-author format and the lack of specifics to illustrate how healing justice practices might unfold. Personally I'm left feeling more confused than when I started, like there's not a place for me within healing justice practice. But I respect the deep significance this book holds for others.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

nebulous much of the time, but that's okay - we don't have the answers yet and that's the point. essays are hit or miss, can be repetitive, but that's also okay - the material bears repeating and that's the point. definitely a good primer for question-asking; i look forward to completing all the workbook-type exercises throughout.

[Kellyn Dove]

This was so informative and helpful, not giving a star rating because this really is a powerful tool to help understand social justice, healing justice, community care and overall liberation. It’s a ton of information and history

Definitely want this in physical form to take notes in, will be buying

[Liz Fortier · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the chapters of this book was assigned for one of my social work graduate classes, so I decided to listen to the whole thing. I loved the perspectives, ideas, and reflections. I am planning to order my own physical copy so I can annotate and record which organizations mentioned by the authors.

[Andra Vltavín · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really lovely guide to the sources of healing justice and naming of the lineages involved. I suppose that's exactly what it said it was, but there were parts that read more like a résumé than anything, and that was unexpected. I hoped for a little more collage, poetry, and essay than I found here, but I'm profoundly grateful for the work represented here.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Healing Justice Lineages is a fascinating call to action about embracing community and survivor led care strategies. Overall, it was an interesting read. I would have liked to hear more about what implementing these strategies looks like in different communities.

[Emily St. Amant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly valuable exploration of the need for true healing within social change movements.

Just say no to toxic positivity, weaponized “self-care”, culturally appropriated healing practices, and the medical industrial complex!

[Kelly J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you for the gift of this book, beautiful inspiration and guide toward building abolitionist futures centering healing justice: “a strategy rooted in building power through transforming generational trauma by holding collective care for and with communities as part of our liberation work.”

[Ceci Zuniga · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book but I’m so mad that I don’t have my own copy and was reading it on the Barnard library copy. Likeeeee. This is not a book that should’ve been read that fast and without annotations. I definitely will need to buy my own copy so I can re read and put notes in the margins.

[Shania · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciate the knowledge, strategies and practices shared by everyone in this book on healing justice. I cannot wait to reread chapters and explore more on using healing justice as a political framework.

[Savannah Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book with lots of details.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for all who practice health and healing!

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for those committed to social Justice movements

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must read for abolitionists, healers, social workers, medical and psychological providers, and Psychedelic practitioners. A heartfelt balance between collective and reflective.

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

a map that will guide my work for the rest of my life