Kindred collective: Cara page
Cara Page, a Black Queer activist and sound healer who is currently director of the Audre Lourde Project, is also a founding member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective a project conceived by healers and organizers in the Southern United States in 2007, as a response to the crisis of trauma, violence and social conditions in that region. Kindred was organized shortly after Hurricane Katrina and set up healing salons for activists during the 2007 and 2010 social forums, offering body work and counseling. Collective members also created the recording Good Medicine, which contains interviews with healers and activists in the South.
This interview was conducted in February, 2013.
Kindred looks at collective trauma from a very political and analytical lens of being a community of healers and health practitioners, nurses, doctors, emergency folks that have a particular lens on how collectively to transform trauma in all the ways it may have happened, not as an isolated incident but as a generation upon generation upon generation of how its manifesting in our collective psyche, memory and existence.
We're helping to raise what we feel is a collective memory of the impact of generational trauma. This is work being done by many communities: Native, people of color, migrant, LGBTQ, disability communites. .
Kindred roots itself within a southern understanding of the legacy of how transgenerational trauma has been connected to an ongoing history of slavery and genocide on many peoples, and the particular way the South had left the displacement of many communities because of an economic infrastructure that was based on the slave trade economy and then pulled itself over into a testing ground for the medical/industrial complex, and the prisons that continued that slave labor economy.
HEALING AND LIBERATION
Healing generational trauma is not separate from political liberation. We are interested in investigating the role of wellness inside of a liberatory framework. Many of our cultural communities have had healers be at the center of our organizing to help sustain organizers. We are.looking at theoretical understanding of what the practices have been in creating communal infrastructure around wellness and well being, inside of Christian supremacy and white supremacy. We're talking about communities of color, working class communities. How do we remain well inside systems that do not want us to be well or already associate us to disease?
We are very aware of healing traditions that have been taken from us in some cases by other movements not using traditions that are rooted in a context or pharmaceutical companies that are selling our medicine.
We have people doing bodywork, acupuncture, massage, Reiki..They don't practice without having an understanding of the historical context of it or through ancestral legacy. We have energy practitioners working with the environment,.curanderas working with the land or earth.
This is one part of the whole universe of work that has been ongoing for centuries.” We're very clear we're not the beginning or the end. We're very excited at this new momentum of discourse of practice of understanding the importance of responding to and transforming trauma on a collective, socially conscious level.
How can we as organizers not take a look at the long term effects of generational trauma not only on our lived communities but on our movement? We need to look at how we might be disassociated if you will from our responses, since we are ourselves survivors. How do we even begin the conversation? Lets first acknowledge the awareness that there is a level of trauma in the room that we want to name as a kind of collective consciousness of all of our movement. How can we move forward to make a better world if we're not understanding the impact of long term oppression?
After Katrina
We realized with Hurricane Katrina that we didn't have a network in place so a lot of outsiders were coming in to the South offering what they could but they had no context and they weren't rooted in the southern place and traditions
What would it look like if something like Katrina were to happen again?
We're still trying to work that out. The ideal would be to have safety response teams to be able to get down on the ground, knowing where everyone is regionally, who lives closer , and always asking the people what they need. A recent example includes immigrant mobilizations in Atlanta, Georgia where we were able to hold healing salons after mobilization. Another way we put in on the ground is we worked with the southeastern amnesty office with the Troy Davis case, how we can support them in actually grieving.where organizers had been holding back and going through the process for 5 years,
Not Knowing
One of the long term impacts of collective trauma is collective dissociation..... How can we understand it is not just a physical experience but an emotional one that on a cellular level goes way back? How are we even thinking about moving that energy out of the collective body? With folks who have been assaulted, unethically tested on or been used in war..how do we even have a shared consciousness on what that is?
There is also a disconnect from memory, a disconnect from traditions that we know ourselves that we have built there in our bodies that we can remember, but we have been so far removed from the land or from the practices or our practices have been criminalized that we no longer even have a memory of what we know. you know, a memory of the memory. How do we touch what we know on an intuitive level, if we continue to get disconnected at this place from traditions that have a lot of resilience and survived a long long history of attempted genocide?
I think there's a lot of not knowing. There's a need to have these conversations.
Resilience.....
Collective resilience. I think its a great concept. I'd like to offer a working definition: Being able to transform inside of perhaps the worst conditions, but still on a cellular level being able to respond to intervene or transform what has been done to us or on us. And so as a Black Queer woman working in these movements understanding the possibility for us in the worst possible conditions to remember that we deserve dignity, honor and a way to look at how we can sustain our well being, in a society that has almost normalized our physical, emotional and spiritual degradation. That in and of itself is collective resilience.
....and Regeneration
The Kindred Collective for us is an old idea that we are trying to regenerate. We know there have been collective networks, councils, of healers and organizers working together for the collective consciousness and well being of our peoples.
Other models similar to Kindred are the Rock Dove Collective in New York, the Sage Collective in Chicago, and the disability justice work that is being done in San Francisco.
Everyone enters in very different ways but we feel the core is wanting to imagine how you intervene or transform generational trauma. It is important to look at local healing traditions in your city or your town. Who have been the healers? What can we do to lift up their legacy or create new responses?
This interview was conducted in February, 2013.
Kindred looks at collective trauma from a very political and analytical lens of being a community of healers and health practitioners, nurses, doctors, emergency folks that have a particular lens on how collectively to transform trauma in all the ways it may have happened, not as an isolated incident but as a generation upon generation upon generation of how its manifesting in our collective psyche, memory and existence.
We're helping to raise what we feel is a collective memory of the impact of generational trauma. This is work being done by many communities: Native, people of color, migrant, LGBTQ, disability communites. .
Kindred roots itself within a southern understanding of the legacy of how transgenerational trauma has been connected to an ongoing history of slavery and genocide on many peoples, and the particular way the South had left the displacement of many communities because of an economic infrastructure that was based on the slave trade economy and then pulled itself over into a testing ground for the medical/industrial complex, and the prisons that continued that slave labor economy.
HEALING AND LIBERATION
Healing generational trauma is not separate from political liberation. We are interested in investigating the role of wellness inside of a liberatory framework. Many of our cultural communities have had healers be at the center of our organizing to help sustain organizers. We are.looking at theoretical understanding of what the practices have been in creating communal infrastructure around wellness and well being, inside of Christian supremacy and white supremacy. We're talking about communities of color, working class communities. How do we remain well inside systems that do not want us to be well or already associate us to disease?
We are very aware of healing traditions that have been taken from us in some cases by other movements not using traditions that are rooted in a context or pharmaceutical companies that are selling our medicine.
We have people doing bodywork, acupuncture, massage, Reiki..They don't practice without having an understanding of the historical context of it or through ancestral legacy. We have energy practitioners working with the environment,.curanderas working with the land or earth.
This is one part of the whole universe of work that has been ongoing for centuries.” We're very clear we're not the beginning or the end. We're very excited at this new momentum of discourse of practice of understanding the importance of responding to and transforming trauma on a collective, socially conscious level.
How can we as organizers not take a look at the long term effects of generational trauma not only on our lived communities but on our movement? We need to look at how we might be disassociated if you will from our responses, since we are ourselves survivors. How do we even begin the conversation? Lets first acknowledge the awareness that there is a level of trauma in the room that we want to name as a kind of collective consciousness of all of our movement. How can we move forward to make a better world if we're not understanding the impact of long term oppression?
After Katrina
We realized with Hurricane Katrina that we didn't have a network in place so a lot of outsiders were coming in to the South offering what they could but they had no context and they weren't rooted in the southern place and traditions
What would it look like if something like Katrina were to happen again?
We're still trying to work that out. The ideal would be to have safety response teams to be able to get down on the ground, knowing where everyone is regionally, who lives closer , and always asking the people what they need. A recent example includes immigrant mobilizations in Atlanta, Georgia where we were able to hold healing salons after mobilization. Another way we put in on the ground is we worked with the southeastern amnesty office with the Troy Davis case, how we can support them in actually grieving.where organizers had been holding back and going through the process for 5 years,
Not Knowing
One of the long term impacts of collective trauma is collective dissociation..... How can we understand it is not just a physical experience but an emotional one that on a cellular level goes way back? How are we even thinking about moving that energy out of the collective body? With folks who have been assaulted, unethically tested on or been used in war..how do we even have a shared consciousness on what that is?
There is also a disconnect from memory, a disconnect from traditions that we know ourselves that we have built there in our bodies that we can remember, but we have been so far removed from the land or from the practices or our practices have been criminalized that we no longer even have a memory of what we know. you know, a memory of the memory. How do we touch what we know on an intuitive level, if we continue to get disconnected at this place from traditions that have a lot of resilience and survived a long long history of attempted genocide?
I think there's a lot of not knowing. There's a need to have these conversations.
Resilience.....
Collective resilience. I think its a great concept. I'd like to offer a working definition: Being able to transform inside of perhaps the worst conditions, but still on a cellular level being able to respond to intervene or transform what has been done to us or on us. And so as a Black Queer woman working in these movements understanding the possibility for us in the worst possible conditions to remember that we deserve dignity, honor and a way to look at how we can sustain our well being, in a society that has almost normalized our physical, emotional and spiritual degradation. That in and of itself is collective resilience.
....and Regeneration
The Kindred Collective for us is an old idea that we are trying to regenerate. We know there have been collective networks, councils, of healers and organizers working together for the collective consciousness and well being of our peoples.
Other models similar to Kindred are the Rock Dove Collective in New York, the Sage Collective in Chicago, and the disability justice work that is being done in San Francisco.
Everyone enters in very different ways but we feel the core is wanting to imagine how you intervene or transform generational trauma. It is important to look at local healing traditions in your city or your town. Who have been the healers? What can we do to lift up their legacy or create new responses?
