Paulina Helm-Hernandez
Paulina Helm-Hernandez is a 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.
Excerpts from an interview conducted in February, 2013
Two Ways of Looking At Disease
I was invited to visit the Eastern Cherokee in No Carolina, who were developing a tribal diabetes program. A lot of indigenous elders who did have diabetes didn't want to go to the county clinics, it was a very uncomfortable experience for them. Part of the conference was called Healing 500 years of History' to talk about the effects of historical trauma. There are two different ways of looking at disease 1) the clinical model, ie : you have a really bad diet, you don't exercise enough, etc. or 2) the historical roots of why people of color are more susceptible to certain things. We know that to be true psychologically and politically “but there's also this very physical visceral way that we inherit oppression to our bodies. “
When a deer runs across the road when you're driving, it immediately raises your blood pressure and your sugar because that's how our body responds. People experience that level of trauma, warfare, colonization, slavery all the very real visceral things people experienced, then people weren't able to return to their own diets, they weren't able to decide what they could and couldn't eat. They were in fact cut away from their roots. Why tribal communities have such a high rate of diabetes has everything to do with colonization, with being displaced from the Southeast . .The way that we have to talk about diabetes in tribal communities .has everything to do with peoples willingness to heal. We have to have a way to talk about it among ourselves , not some way that comes from outside. It's our responsibility to make sure our children don't inherit this.
Anger and Political Action
When I was younger I was really angry. I am the daughter of farmworkers who were treated very badly. I had a real fire in the belly.
Anger outreach is a very important visceral experience that has its place, even in movements. But I'm going to be really honest. I think anger brought me into the movement but I don't know if anger could have kept me in the movement. I was very burnt out. I think my life would have turned out totally differently if I hadn't had a moment where I said to myself: "Do you want to do this or don't you want to do this? Do you want to be sort of like, "right", or do you want to be in relationship, to work with other people? Seeing everything through anger or through trauma has its own cost. I know some people who are incredibly talented political organizers and have had to take a step back at some point and say, "I have some things I need to deal with that have everything to do with my ancestors and my own spirituality and my own individual and collective trauma, and if I want to be in movement, I need to go deal with this."
Collective Responsibility
A lot of our work now is how do we support our people who are ready to make that choice, who are ready to make that happen. Because there were people who were incredibly talented organizers who were either totally burnt out or who were bringing about a particular kind of energy that was hurting our work. We have a responsibility to support each other instead of just sending people into the corner and be like, "Well, we hope they come out of that soon."
So many of us have lost folks to addiction, to suicide, to violence. So we have to have a different way of dealing with it.
All too often the ways we have dealt with our trauma has defaulted to individual approaches. which can lead to a particular lack of accountability about our behavior with each other. A lot of people are willing to acknowledge that our responses are rooted in trauma, but we're not talking about how we're wiling to transform that, what our role is as movement people who are wanting to work with other people.
It's important to deal with it collectively in an above board kind of way.
Cultural Reclamation, and Public Space
There is also the cultural reclamation aspect of historical trauma work. We are doing work in Wilmington, North Carolina to document the history of slavery, what happened to people who were able to remain in the sea islands, how they kept their cultural autonomy. What happened in Wilmington with slave rebellions: they discovered a mass grave where housing projects had been built on top of it. 'So here you have this community that doesn't talk about what actually happened, doesn't talk about the kind of level of anti-black repression, that really,when slavery happened and there were all these burial ground that were covered, it was never acknowledged. And then you have the projects that are built on top of it.
(ed. note: I was unable to find any reference to the mass grave in Wilmington on the internet. But Helm-Hernandez says these burial grounds are "something that people have talked about around here for a long time.")
Now you have a lot of African American folks that are talking about what actually happened or are just beginning to do some healing work around the fact that its predominately black folks who often times do not know the history around the burial grounds, that are not aware that the projects are built on it. But there's a lot of people who feel there's a particular kind of energy in that part of the country in that particular state, in that particular city that really speaks to the fact that like many other places in the southeast including Charleston, South Carolina that have not acknowledged the actual root of the trauma on a lot of our folks and places that we currently live in and occupy and pretend that nothing ever happened. We are looking at the kind of effect that has on communities where you are trying to address issues of public space issues of violence in community, issues of people even knowing about this history around why things are the way that they are.
In North Charleston, there are isolated impoverished communities of color. In South Charleston there is old white money. How do you have a conversation around race, around economic justice when everyone is trying to hard to cover up that all of this wealth and this infrastructure comes from slavery? Can we take some more engagement on the fact that black folks are getting pushed out of the city so that Charleston can be this glossy southern traveling spot?
We know this is really hard. We know that there has been centuries upon centuries of covering over that shit.that does not show up in our local decisions...I think the city does have an imperative to create public space and in giving the community some level of control of how the narrative of the story in Charleston gets told, how that space itself can hold some level of accountability and some level of openness around how folks want to deal with it
We really need to get to the root of why our people are really struggling and what our communities really need to go through and heal from in order to work together, in order to have more racial unity and racial harmony and racial justice in a country like the United States.
Excerpts from an interview conducted in February, 2013
Two Ways of Looking At Disease
I was invited to visit the Eastern Cherokee in No Carolina, who were developing a tribal diabetes program. A lot of indigenous elders who did have diabetes didn't want to go to the county clinics, it was a very uncomfortable experience for them. Part of the conference was called Healing 500 years of History' to talk about the effects of historical trauma. There are two different ways of looking at disease 1) the clinical model, ie : you have a really bad diet, you don't exercise enough, etc. or 2) the historical roots of why people of color are more susceptible to certain things. We know that to be true psychologically and politically “but there's also this very physical visceral way that we inherit oppression to our bodies. “
When a deer runs across the road when you're driving, it immediately raises your blood pressure and your sugar because that's how our body responds. People experience that level of trauma, warfare, colonization, slavery all the very real visceral things people experienced, then people weren't able to return to their own diets, they weren't able to decide what they could and couldn't eat. They were in fact cut away from their roots. Why tribal communities have such a high rate of diabetes has everything to do with colonization, with being displaced from the Southeast . .The way that we have to talk about diabetes in tribal communities .has everything to do with peoples willingness to heal. We have to have a way to talk about it among ourselves , not some way that comes from outside. It's our responsibility to make sure our children don't inherit this.
Anger and Political Action
When I was younger I was really angry. I am the daughter of farmworkers who were treated very badly. I had a real fire in the belly.
Anger outreach is a very important visceral experience that has its place, even in movements. But I'm going to be really honest. I think anger brought me into the movement but I don't know if anger could have kept me in the movement. I was very burnt out. I think my life would have turned out totally differently if I hadn't had a moment where I said to myself: "Do you want to do this or don't you want to do this? Do you want to be sort of like, "right", or do you want to be in relationship, to work with other people? Seeing everything through anger or through trauma has its own cost. I know some people who are incredibly talented political organizers and have had to take a step back at some point and say, "I have some things I need to deal with that have everything to do with my ancestors and my own spirituality and my own individual and collective trauma, and if I want to be in movement, I need to go deal with this."
Collective Responsibility
A lot of our work now is how do we support our people who are ready to make that choice, who are ready to make that happen. Because there were people who were incredibly talented organizers who were either totally burnt out or who were bringing about a particular kind of energy that was hurting our work. We have a responsibility to support each other instead of just sending people into the corner and be like, "Well, we hope they come out of that soon."
So many of us have lost folks to addiction, to suicide, to violence. So we have to have a different way of dealing with it.
All too often the ways we have dealt with our trauma has defaulted to individual approaches. which can lead to a particular lack of accountability about our behavior with each other. A lot of people are willing to acknowledge that our responses are rooted in trauma, but we're not talking about how we're wiling to transform that, what our role is as movement people who are wanting to work with other people.
It's important to deal with it collectively in an above board kind of way.
Cultural Reclamation, and Public Space
There is also the cultural reclamation aspect of historical trauma work. We are doing work in Wilmington, North Carolina to document the history of slavery, what happened to people who were able to remain in the sea islands, how they kept their cultural autonomy. What happened in Wilmington with slave rebellions: they discovered a mass grave where housing projects had been built on top of it. 'So here you have this community that doesn't talk about what actually happened, doesn't talk about the kind of level of anti-black repression, that really,when slavery happened and there were all these burial ground that were covered, it was never acknowledged. And then you have the projects that are built on top of it.
(ed. note: I was unable to find any reference to the mass grave in Wilmington on the internet. But Helm-Hernandez says these burial grounds are "something that people have talked about around here for a long time.")
Now you have a lot of African American folks that are talking about what actually happened or are just beginning to do some healing work around the fact that its predominately black folks who often times do not know the history around the burial grounds, that are not aware that the projects are built on it. But there's a lot of people who feel there's a particular kind of energy in that part of the country in that particular state, in that particular city that really speaks to the fact that like many other places in the southeast including Charleston, South Carolina that have not acknowledged the actual root of the trauma on a lot of our folks and places that we currently live in and occupy and pretend that nothing ever happened. We are looking at the kind of effect that has on communities where you are trying to address issues of public space issues of violence in community, issues of people even knowing about this history around why things are the way that they are.
In North Charleston, there are isolated impoverished communities of color. In South Charleston there is old white money. How do you have a conversation around race, around economic justice when everyone is trying to hard to cover up that all of this wealth and this infrastructure comes from slavery? Can we take some more engagement on the fact that black folks are getting pushed out of the city so that Charleston can be this glossy southern traveling spot?
We know this is really hard. We know that there has been centuries upon centuries of covering over that shit.that does not show up in our local decisions...I think the city does have an imperative to create public space and in giving the community some level of control of how the narrative of the story in Charleston gets told, how that space itself can hold some level of accountability and some level of openness around how folks want to deal with it
We really need to get to the root of why our people are really struggling and what our communities really need to go through and heal from in order to work together, in order to have more racial unity and racial harmony and racial justice in a country like the United States.
