Healing Anthology

With deep gratitude to our contributing healers, we offer this online resource to those dealing with the deep wounds of trauma and history. May it help us process the hurt that has happened to us in our lifetime and/or the soul wounds that run through generations.  

 

We, a group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian colleagues working in addressing sexual violence, recognize ourselves in this work.  We, too, are the work. This work has looked like reckoning with ongoing harm to us and our families in the present and to our ancestors in the past and over centuries.  These are harms carried through generations and written in our genes.  We are re/membering* and reconnecting with the strengths, adaptations and transformations we have had to forge in the fires of violence and loss. 

 

We are also exploring the harm of having our own knowledge and healing traditions scorned or ridiculed. This is what the Kindred Southern Healing Collective names Healing Trauma. We honor and respect the healing traditions of our Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian communities.  Working directly with our healers, we aim to share these traditions in uplifting and respectful ways

 

As we began to compare notes on what we meant by “culturally-grounded” and “collective healing,” we realized how differently we understood these ideas.  We learned that some felt they knew nothing.  Some hadn’t connected their healing habits to their cultural traditions.  Some were becoming more familiar with healing practices that had been dismissed as superstitions or relegated as alternatives to modern medical practices.  We wanted to reach a shared understanding of what we were doing.  To do this, we decided to go to community.  

With valued partner, allgo, we share examples of culturally-grounded collective healing and shine a light on the vibrant community of healers in our Community Healing Series.  We invited these healers to contribute a virtual offering for those on their healing journeys. We hope you will find an offering that resonates with you.  We invite you to share these offerings with Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian communities so that it may be as collective as it is personal.

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* re/membering is a term Jeong Eun Rhee uses encompasses the double acts of remembering (recalling) and re- membering (becoming a member again). ‘Remembering’ brings the silenced history and the voice of the marginalized back to mind and ‘re-membering’ continuously affirms solidarity or belonging to the voice of the displaced.