Healing Across Generations at the Intersections of Memory, Care, and Justice
In this episode, Cara Page of Changing Frequencies discusses with host Adaku Utah how we reclaim ancestral wisdom for collective liberation and shape futures that center collective care and safety and build power.
“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… 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 again and again… 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.”
ABOUT THE EPISODE GUEST
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Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker & organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has organized with LGBTQI+, Black, Indigenous & People of Color liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice and transformative justice. She is founder of Changing Frequencies, an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). She is also co-founder of the Healing Histories Project; a network of abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the medical industrial complex and harmful systems of care. We generate change through research, action and building collaborative strategies & stories with BIPOC-led communities, institutions and movements organizing for dignified collective care.
As one of the architects of the healing justice political strategy, envisioned by many in the South and deeply rooted in Black Feminist traditions and Southern Black Radical Traditions, she is co-founder and core leadership team member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. She was the Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City and is a former recipient of the OSF Soros Equality Fellowship (2019-2020) and ‘Activist in Residence’ at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She was also chosen as Yerba Buena Cultural Center’s ‘YBCA100’in 2020.
Cara has organized and co-created with many political and cultural institutions & organizations nationally & internationally including Center for Documentary Studies, Third World Newsreel, Sins Invalid, Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Project South, INCITE! Women & Trans People of Color Against Violence, Bettys Daughter Arts Collaborative, and most recently the EqualHealth Campaign Against Racism, the National Queer & Trans Therapist of Color Network, Disability Project of Transgender Law Center, Astraea Lesbians for Justice Foundation and the Anti-Eugenics Project; toward building & resourcing racial, gender & healing justice strategies for our liberation, collective care & safety. Her forthcoming book, co-edited by Erica Woodland, entitled “Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care & Safety” (North Atlantic Books) will be out in February 2023.
EPISODE RESOURCES
View the transcript for this episode