JANUARY 2024 Episode of Solidarity Is This

Welcome to the Solidarity Is This Podcast, an initiative of the Building Movement Projects. I'm Adaku Utah, one of your co-hosts, and this season, we are so thrilled to examine how sites of history and memory can transform ourselves and our communities, deepen solidarity amongst us, and build towards a more just society.

This episode, we are so honored to have Cara Page. Cara is a Black, queer, feminist, cultural memory worker and organizer, and for the past 30-plus years, she has organized with LGBTQI+, Black, indigenous, and people of color liberation movements in the U.S. and Global South at the intersections of racial, gender, and economic justice, healing justice, and transformative justice. She's the founder of Changing Frequencies, an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the medical-industrial complex. She's also co-founder of the Healing Histories Projects, a network of abolitionist healers, healing practitioners, community organizers, researchers, historians, and cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the medical-industrial complex and harmful systems of care.

Cara is co-author with Erica Woodland of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, which is available now. May this episode inspire you and ignite possibility and transformation within you and your communities. [foreign language 00:01:43], Cara, I welcome you in the language of my people, Igbo people. I love getting to share a space with you. Thank you so much for your presence here on the podcast and just in so many movement ecosystems and in my life. You are such a catalyst and grounding force, and I'm so grateful that you exist in this lifetime. Welcome, welcome.

Oh, peace and light. It is gorgeous to be sharing portal space with you, my dear comrade, co-creative genius, Adaku, and to be here in this podcast. I'm deeply honored to be invited.

Thank you, love. Thank you. Your gifts to movement and our ecosystem are so many. You are a multiverse, bridge builder. You're an organizer, cultural memory worker, sound weaver, curator, teacher, and just have been such a powerful fractal of change in so many of our movements. What have been some of your key catalysts that have brought you to this path, particularly around cultural memory work?

First off, I've never been called a multiverse [inaudible 00:03:03].

You could add that to your bio.

I was like, "Let me write that down." Hey. Beautiful. I love it. And fractals, I'm here for the fractals. I would say in my work, I definitely have had so many catalyst moments and then people, so I always start with Toni Cade Bambara-

[inaudible 00:03:30].

... who I had ... Yes, who's in the ancestral realm now, but I had the opportunity to meet with her, well just to meet her and spend a day with her at an airport in Iowa. We were both stranded after attending a huge, beautiful, powerful convening on racism, classism, and white supremacy, and gender supremacy. That was in the 80s, but I had the opportunity to meet her and to understand her work as not only a political strategist, a liberatory, really a liberation theologist in many ways, I feel her books are, but also as a cultural creative, and to understand in particular The Salt Eaters as really a tomb for cultural memory and how we remember the roles of healers, salt workers, bodyworkers, water workers, cultural workers who can change time and cellular memory from trauma.

And I just thought, "Where is this? Where is the world that I can meet the salt eaters?" I just think that moment just broke me open, the book, and then to meet her and to spend the day with her, and it led me to so many other paths and people we don't have time for me to name.

Then I'll also say that it was really a political honor and struggle and transformation to work with the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment in the early 90s or mid to late 90s actually, and having the opportunity to meet a core group of feminists of color who were really holding the line and political analysis around eugenics and population control. But more importantly, holding a political-cultural narrative of where the intersection was of understanding gender and white supremacy and understanding the role of population control and eugenics still present in our carceral systems in current day and not just in the past. That group of women really leading, for me, the course of how you bring action with memory, with discourse together.

And some of those people holding that for me included Loretta Ross and Dr. Marsha Darling, so just really that moment again for me as a cultural worker rooted in performance poetry and sound healing and in Black feminist liberation politics, to have this place where those worlds intersected. I came in as an artist and cultural worker to hold the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment at this intersection of political discourse action and brought in creative cultural work there, so mainly steeped in storytelling. But that really pummeled me into a tremendous amount of powerful work as a community archivist, as a collector, as a seer, as a memory keeper inside of the multiple movements I've been a part of, including reproductive justice and healing justice, which I don't really name as a movement, but people tell me it is. But as a framework that work has shaped my cultural work, my whole being that roots in cultural memory has deeply shaped and informed the political work and healing justice.

That feels palpable for as long as I've known you, the mandate and the mantle that you've carried forth from these legacies that you're tethered to of not just holding and resuscitating cultural memory, but infusing that into the ways that we're able to act and transform our past, present, and future. So, I give you thanks for the interweaving of these paths and all of these necessary strategies to how we get free and also calling in those sacred ancestors into this circle, this conversation that is both ancient and futuristic.

This season, as you know, we're focusing on how sites of memory can become spaces for healing and interdependence and can catalyze action for justice. You are currently incubating a deeply powerful memory portal right now in Milledgeville, Georgia, honoring the sacred lives of Black ancestors who were restrained and also fiercely resisted at the Central Milledgeville Hospital. Could you share more about this, this sacred work?

Yes, thank you. I do want to bring forth this amazing team of co-creatives I'm working with, and we call ourselves Changing Frequencies, which is an abolitionist organizing project that's designing and cultivating cultural memory work as a disruptor, in particular intervening on violence inside the medical industrial complex, which is part of the whole carceral system of prisons, policing. But we felt it vital to contribute to a constellation of storytelling around the implications of harm and abuse, particularly inside of scientific racism, medical experimentation, and exploitation especially of Black folk, indigenous, people of color, queer, and trans communities, as well as disabled communities and incarcerated.

So many of our lives are so embedded in this idea of healthy, I say in quotes, or unhealthy or diseased, and it really does amplify how our bodies are perceived as dangerous or as predilections of disease and criminality. For us, Changing Frequencies is really delving into cultural memory work that wants to amplify stories of transformation or interruption of this harm and abuse in the NIC.

The particular project that you are speaking of is very dear to my heart. It comes as part of a series, really a triptych of work that I've been working on for the past seven to 10 years that comes out of a piece called Psalm for the Mismeasured, which was the first iteration where I did two different performances, one that was featured as part of a eugenics archive in relationship to the Eugenics Archives at an exhibit at NYU, curated by Professor Jack Chen. But then the second performance was with Ebony Noelle Golden and her amazing dance performance troupe out of Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, where we created a multimedia piece around eugenics and the exploitation and experimentation on Black, femme women by Dr. Marion J. Sims, and how to heal from this history of the immense violence on the backs of particularly Black, femme bodies in particular around the OBGYN industry.

The third iteration is this piece that I've been working on for the last five years, which comes out of the history of Central State Hospital, which was at one time in the 30s, 40s, 50s the largest psychiatric hospital in the world, known for its cutting-edge experimentation, which in many ways was the most exploitative of Black, indigenous, and white, rural bodies in the state of Georgia. Because inside of that institution, they were exploring, I say in quotes, new methodologies for people with mental health variations from neurodivergence, emotional, developmental, different mental issues or health concerns.

Oh, let me pause for a second. Hold on. I'm trying to say it. I'm sorry. So, a psychiatric hospital that responds to different mental health issues and disabilities. Essentially, at that time, they were still thinking about how do you fix, contain a cure. Certainly, that's very prevalent now, but they were at the cutting edge of that, creating things like electroshock and testing on many patients at this institution, in particular, Central State Hospital. But what you also saw was an experience of Black folks being told to fear the institution because, by the 60s and 70s, a lot of families were dropping off relatives and saying, "We don't know what's wrong. We want to help take care of them, but we don't know how. They have a mental illness. We're not sure what to do."

A lot of families were dropping off their relatives who had tuberculosis because, at that time in the 50s and 60s, people didn't understand it. They didn't know how to take care of their relatives, so they brought them to Central State Milledgeville Hospital. Many stories are that they never saw their family members again, that they were disappeared, that they dropped them off and went back to visit, and they couldn't find them. So, that story is so harrowing, to think about how many times we've had Black family members disappeared into the carceral system. But I had not heard that story through a particular lens of the medical industry and how psychiatric hospitals are also taking and disappearing our people.

I was actually traveling with a timeline about the medical-industrial complex, and an elder stood up in the audience and said, "Well, you need to tell stories on this timeline that are truly about our ancestors and our living relatives, and one of my relatives was disappeared at Central State Hospital," so just seeing the turmoil of not knowing for now in her family, three generations of where their relatives went, and where do we have that cultural memory where we're understanding the repercussions, the rippling effect of not being able to honor an ancestor or not even know when they're gone because they've been sucked inside of this machine and industry that's seen as care but is really still controlling and participating in harms and abuses of Black bodies, of Black people and families, and certainly, participating in, quite honestly, the incarceration and control of people with disabilities and people with mental health challenges.

I have my hand on my heart right now and just taking a breath and pouring some water as libation just to honor this-

For sure.

... legacy of multiple generations that are speaking out loud to be heard, and the medicine that also comes from the unveiling of this memory that has been tried to be buried over the last ... for a really long time. I am so grateful for your gentleness, your curiosity, and your compassion with these ancestors, and for being willing to not only wrestle with what's been done on this land but also inviting folks to be with it in a way that challenges us to hold the medical industrial complex accountable for the ways that "healthy" care is being held with our collective bodies, which is one of the things that I love so deeply about the work that you do is there's accountability so centered in it around the ways these different institutions are choosing to be in relationship with our bodies from harm.

Given how sacred this work is, how can folks be with this work with integrity? Because every time we interact with history or memory, we shape it in some way, and I'm curious how you would call folks in to this work that you're co-shaping with Changing Frequencies.

I love that question, and I also did want to name another important part of the story of really uplifting the story of Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia is Comrade Mab Segrest, one of the founders of Southerners on New Ground, who recently wrote the book, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. She went deep into, I think, about 10 years of research to uncover and discover in this book really powerful connections to this work of how we reckon with this institution as a site of violence, and then how do we interrupt and disrupt it. So, I just want to give Mab a shout-out as a political elder in the South. Yes!

Yes, yes! Good thanks. Thank you. Thank you.

Yes! And I know for me and for Changing Frequencies, what we hope is even from this, that we are creating a virtual reality project of which you know because you are a featured-

Spoiler alert.

... actor ... spoiler alert ... in this piece because we have worked together so beautifully inside of our political liberation work for going on 20 years. Come on! So, this piece, and I'm not going to give the whole story away, but it really is about ... It is called the Psalm for the MisMemoried. So again, as part of that triptych, the first two were Psalm for the Mismeasured, this idea or concept that our bodies are to be measured and fit and cured and shaped and controlled. This one, the third iteration of this creative triptych, is really to say the Psalm for the MisMemoried is what if we are misunderstood, or our memory is so entrenched in the stories that have been hidden of the violence and harm of what has happened to our communities inside of these institutions. How does that leave an imprint, a black print, a blueprint on our political, cultural, spiritual lives?

How will we reckon with holding the memory of those that have disappeared inside these systems, whether that's prison, psychiatric hospitals, detention centers, you name it? So, the idea being that you'll be able to have this immersive eight-minute experience, not to relive the horror of this hospital, but to actually honor an ancestor who's been stuck there because they have been disappeared, and their family didn't know where she was. She is misremembered, she is a mismemory right inside of this historical, but also contemporary notion of an institution that just sucks you in, and you never hear the echoes of who has been shaped and impacted by this harm. She is literally stuck in time in the 50s, and this character, another ancestor from the future who returns to find her and bring her home so she can rest. Such a simple concept of a story, but what if?

It's so profound, yeah.

What if we could return to our ancestors who have been left and mismemoried? It has been a complete honor to work with you, work with Tamika Middleton, our digital photographer and amazing editor, Philip Sanchez. We're doing this work together to build a story that we hope ripples into what are the ways we can reckon with past and present to imagine what the future is that we are trying to build.

For my other political work as a disruptor of the NIC and as an abolitionist organizer seeking to build collective care as integral to our political liberation, I wanted to create a ritual, a psalm for these ancestors that wake me up, that I wonder how many stories are untold. What are we willing to grapple with so that we can actually change the points and directions and fractals, if you will, of what's going to happen in the future to our communities and these institutions? How do we make sure we do not disappear our people again? That is the core of this work and of the work of Changing Frequencies to really understand generational trauma can only be reshaped if we can remember what that trauma has been, but also the resilience and the possibility of healing the harm, whether it's in a more esoteric way through a cultural story or literally going to find our people to take them back.

Yeah, and forward.

And forward that [inaudible 00:24:25].

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly. There's so many stories to tell here, and I will say that actually unbeknownst to me, we just found out that there are archivists in the state of Georgia fighting against the demolition of the campus of the Millingerville State Hospital. It's called multiple names, so you'll hear me say Central State Hospital. You'll hear me say Millingerville Hospital, but essentially to have archivists actually name ... We know that the history of this institution is complex, but it would be so harmful to not understand. The demolishing of this place allows us to not remember what it holds both historically and towards understanding these institutions in the future.

I just thought that's incredible that there's been families that have been fighting against the demolition of this institution, but to have archivists write us a letter to the state and say, "Please don't demolish this memory," I think I find that riveting. I've never seen anything like that, and I hope we see more of it. You know what I'm saying?

Absolutely. Absolutely. This work with you has also been an honor of mine to get to be a part of and getting a chance to be on the land they-

Yes, when we went.

We when went the ancestors were there with us.

That's right.

It was so palpable through and through from the movements that entered our bodies to how the weather shifted with us to the songs that would just pour out of us as if we were tethered and connected and such a yearning for connection through time, this resuscitation of memory that I could feel them calling forth. It makes me curious about every single person who touches this work now has this sacred responsibility of carrying the stories forward with integrity and with care so that we're not repeating the cycle of misremembering.

Yes, that's right. Yes.

We remember forward because it's a sacred thing to be able to hold and receive their stories through us. So, I'm excited and grateful that folks get to be a part of the unwinding and the retelling of these stories that need to be heard.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Look up Michelle Browder.

Exactly. Exactly.

Reclamation.

What you just talked to, yep.

That's right. Changing the narrative.

Exactly.

Turning it on its side and saying, "Oh, no, it's not about Dr. Marion Sims. It's about the mothers of gynecology.

That's right. That's right.

And Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy, get it right. Get it right.

Yes! Come On. Come on. Come on.

That's powerful. A universal shift of energy.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

That's what I hope to be contributing to that kind of work that shakes us to the core on not only are we saying the names, but how are we changing-

How are we changing ...

... the cultural narrative and memory of the truth?

Yes. Yes, and I really believe that we will not have a real shot at winning against the fascist regime until we have liberatory strategy grounded in generational healing that's grounded in cultural work and building power with our people.

Yes!

You've worked with so many different communities to do this using so many different strategies from cultural work to organizing to memory, and I'm curious what lessons you're harvesting on this side, on this side of the present moving into the future.

Right, right. I'm on tour right now with the book Healing Justice Lineages, another piece of memory and reckoning with the truth. This book, co-edited and created with Erica Woodland and with contributing writers, it's just been a beautiful project with over 100 voices to talk about how do we build collective power rooted in collective care and safety, much to what you said, that can respond to and reckon with generational trauma and violence in our lives and shift the ways we can imagine building our futures that isn't rooted solely in the trauma of slavery, in the trauma of colonization, but actually also remembers the resilience, the power, the traditions we have created for our survival, for our livelihood.

I do think being on this tour across country, well across the U.S. and also beginning to have beautiful conversations with folks in the Global South, healers, energy workers, body workers, birth workers in the face of global fascism saying, "We are here doing deep healing work that is part of the liberatory practices and traditions of our past, present, and future, and how and what will the world be for healers and health practitioners who are at the front lines, literally holding the form or taking care of our people while we continue to take the risk and sacrifice for our freedom."

We're talking like healers doing underground work with people fleeing torture and persecution from their governments. We're talking about birth workers at the front lines of the upheaval of Roe v Wade and really holding the form for life. Then the next generation of those of us who choose to have abortions or to birth children or to adopt whatever we are participating in, how we have the right and autonomy to choose the families we are creating, and birth workers are holding that line here in this country underground, above ground for our birth experiences to be safe and secure and liberatory.

So, I do think that as I'm watching things unfold, in particular, in a pre-election year that we're heading into, things can feel very daunting, overwhelming, and just damn near impossible. But as our comrade and colleague and friend, Mariame Kaba, says, "Hope is a discipline," and I still believe in our people, our liberation, our movements being able to change and push against this tidal wave of fear-based, scarcity-based horror of global fascism in this world. I despise it, but I am changed because of what I believe we could still create for our people.

I think there's still a lot of possibility to ensure the collective spiritual, physical, psychic, mental, emotional safety and care for our people. I do believe that, but it will take many of us to reshape, restrategize, reimagine how to do this work underground, above ground, outside the universe in ways that we may have not done before, we have not seen yet. At 53, I'm here for it. At 53 years old, I'm just starting to learn again. Yes.

It's such a humble and open way to be in the midst of so much contradiction that's facing our movements right now, from the fragmentation and the alienation and pessimism and deep, deep amounts of suffering, all of that dancing with the magnitude of ways that our folks are using cultural work and organizing to transform the conditions on the ground. Every day we are changing. Every day our political conditions are changing, and in that change, there is possibility-

That's right. That's right.

... in that. Yeah, and in that possibility, there is more that we can grow into and become, and really this call of what are the new ways of being, what are the strategies that we haven't tried before, calls forth just a reorganizing of even our own internal who we are as people-

That's right.

... to be able to show up to meet this moment, which is unique and similar to where we've been in the past, and it's also quite unique. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I know that people ask me, "Well, what does it look like? What does it look like on the ground?" I really have been on a little bit more of a listening tour as we've toured across the country, much in the same vein as the Zapatistas let us listen right to organizers, to cultural workers, to healers, to transformative health practitioners who don't believe in calling the police and using the hospital as an institution of criminalization, who don't believe that our traditions have to be severed from each other-

That's right.

... and that we could imagine the possibility of ancestral and medicine and traditions that have been carried on for legacies, for centuries in relationship to allopathic medicine that is relatively new in the universe of medicines.

Understanding the role of healers is political. How then do we as healers and practitioners accept that role of politicization to disrupt patterns of care that are harmful and abusive in our institutions? These are all the many fronts of struggle, if you will, of our work that I'm holding. Many people are holding. I do think, yes, I don't have a A to Z equation, but I do believe in the face of immense destruction. I'm not even talking about climate. I'm talking about I think the Earth is recycling, is collapsing and renewing in relationship, and in response-

Composting.

... to war and genocide and slavery and Capitalism. My quest is where are we having beyond the visceral day-to-day, where are we having imaginative, dreaming-our-futures conversations around care strategies that are also building power? If we're still relying on the state to define for us what is care, what is healthy, what is fit, I say in quotes, then we're still relying on an ableist, racist, gender supremacist idea of care. Let's wrestle with that, and then begin again but with knowing that we have knowledge and memory of what we have used in dire times, what our ancestors have used-

That's right.

... again and again. Some of that needs to morph, metamorphosis. Some of that needs to change. Some of that needs to be renewed, and some of it needs to be released. But let's at least have the memory of knowing what we have cultivated to get here.

Yes, yes! Yeah. We've been talking about this season just one of the insidious impacts of living in a culture that's so filled with violence is that it's the amnesia that can happen that severs us from our memory, these blueprints of survival and resistance.

That's right. That right. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

I'm thinking of formations like the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde in West Africa who fought against Portuguese colonialism and organized a whole new political infrastructure for their people-

Come on!

... during war conditions. They built hospitals. They built schools. They trained up folks to be healers and take care of their own people and established all of these institutions for democratic decision-making, and they were successful in winning a lot of the wars against the colonial empires that they were fighting against. Projects like this are dispersed in so many different places across the Global South and across the Global North that-

Absolutely.

... yeah, that transformed the politics of memory and create new cultures where our people are existing in the future.

Yes, yes. I'm thinking about Peru, the healers in Peru in the 90s who actually changed their constitution-

Their constitution!

... to preserve traditions of medicine and to honor indigenous healers who risked being persecuted for their practices and to change the constitution. Not that I'm always about promoting state documents, but that's what they needed to ensure the survival of their medicine. Whatever it looks like, to your point, yes, there are provocative, expansive, sometimes more traditional ways that we are figuring out though how to wrestle with, how we will maintain and sustain our belief systems, literal cultural-spiritual belief systems that have been persecuted, that have been tried to be disappeared or criminalized or colonized because it has been feared. So, it is literally a political strategy to sustain medicinal herbal traditions, but also to preserve and protect our healers-

That's right. That's right.

... in of itself against persecution is also liberatory practice. Yeah.

Yes, yeah.

I know you know that, but just that is the conversation-

Let the people know.

... that I want to have. This is what I want to talk about. This is what I want to see more about in our work.

I'm right there with you.

I know you are.

I'm right there with you.

Yes!

I'm right there with you, and for folks who are listening, we're inviting you in to be with us in this exploration, in this experimentation, and then in this co-building and co-creation of what we need to fortify ourselves into the future that also harnesses where we've come from in a way that's in integrity with our bodies and land.

Cara, I'm so grateful for you! This conversation has filled me up.

Always. Always.

Yeah, I'm just in awe constantly of how you show up. You do a lot, and also really, it's how you show up in the work that you do that feels like such a-

You're our gift. You're a gift to the universe, [inaudible 00:41:29], a gift.

Thank you, love.

Absolutely. Thank you for this beautiful, beautiful work. Thank you. Always.

Thank you. Thank you, and give thanks to all the ancestors that joined us for this conversation, too.

That's right. I am merely a conduit. Absolutely.

Yes.

I'll see you soon.

See you soon.

All right. Peace.

Give thanks to Cara for her brilliance, her magic, and sharing so generously about her lineage of abolition, cultural memory, and disrupting the medical industrial complex. You can check out her work at www.changingfrequencies.com, and we would love to hear from you about your own projects, projects that preserve history and memory. How are you reclaiming public sites to deepen solidarity, its interdependence, and healing?

You can connect with us and share your stories via www.solidarityis.org, where you'll find past episodes of this podcast, as well as information about how to cultivate transformative solidarity principles and stories. Please make sure to subscribe so that you know when the next episode comes out. Remember, we keep us safe. Be gentle and courageous with you and each other. Until next time.