Healing Histories Project

Stories of Care and Control: A Timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex is live!

This timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) is a map that tells a story about the shifting patterns of care and control that make up this thing we call healthcare: as systems, as structures, and belief systems. This website features curated stories and limeline that take into specific topics about the MIC. We share with you the framework that built this timeline and the theory of change that defines Healing Histories Project’s work. 

Here are links to the pages to help guide you:

Enjoy! Share widely! Let us know what you think.  

In Solidarity, 

Healing Histories Project Team

Update on COVID timeline

When we first began to work on this COVID timeline, we were early in the pandemic. We wanted to build something tracking the terrifying and unsurprising evidence that shows the continued shaping of healthcare by racism and white supremacy, ableism, and more. 

We gathered the stories and then, when we were ready, we merged the content we had gathered, the stories of real people that is called data, onto the timeline software and put it up on the website. By the time we did this, we already had too much information.

Our goal had been to keep updating this timeline of COVID so that folks could see what is happening as we live it. We are currently previewing digital sources that are more user-friendly for large political timelines such as this one. In the meantime, we will continue to gather data so that we can come back with a bigger and better timeline that shows the breadth of impact on our communities.

We hope that you and yours stay safe, protected and powerful during these times. We hope to launch the  next iteration in Summer/Early Fall. Thank you for your patience and stay tuned!! 

Staying connected while we change

Cara Page, Anjali Taneja and Susan Raffo

Deepest Gratitude to Our Community As HHP Shifts, Expands and Grows

Eleven years ago, the three of us came together to study, learn, research and dream across spheres and practices of medicine, healing and justice to vision new formations of collective care and safety.  We have worked together and independent of each other in our commitment to social justice, change and abolition. 

As you know, all of our lives have shifted in response to COVID-19 and the Uprisings. Anjali’s work as the Executive Director of Casa de Salud, an innovative integrative primary care clinic and advocacy center – integrating traditional healing, healthcare, workforce development, harm reduction, and community organizing – has grown significantly during the pandemic. Casa de Salud continues to gain more national attention as it continues to serve as an anti-racist, creative model of community-based healing and healthcare that works to build power with community.

The pandemic has also prompted a need to revive CureThis, an online network that existed from 2007-2013 to connect health workers and healers and community members around surviving, thriving, and transforming the medical industrial complex in their settings. Because of these pulls towards Casa de Salud’s growth and towards the redevelopment of CureThis, Anjali has decided she needs to shift off of the growing Healing Histories Project, while incredibly excited about its growth and success and next steps.

We want to lift up the work and legacy of Anjali as part of our trio as she charts her path to build new models of care – and build networks to connect folks around the country doing the same. She has brought so much innovation, wit, digital savvy and a medicinal/healer mind and deep political practice to our partnership and this work with us. We will truly miss her even as we are thrilled about where she is heading and the path that is unfolding her work and vision.

We know our work will always intertwine and Anjali’s work will continue to inform and shape the Healing Histories Project. If you don’t already follow the work of Casa de Salud, please do so (web/fb/twitter/instagram). If you want to hear more from Anjali on her work, check out her website, connect with her on twitter or instagram, check out her interview on the How to Survive the End of the World podcast, and her book chapter about transforming opioid addictions care in New Mexico through autonomy, civic engagement, and integrative healing. If you’re interested in learning more about the CureThis network in development, please also check out CureThis’s twitter account and sign up for updates at the email there.

We will forever be the trio that built the Healing Histories Project. With this change, Cara and Susan are expanding the team as the three of us have always hoped to do. We are excited to welcome two new people to the team to help us deepen and widen the breadth of this critical work. 

We welcome Luce Capco Lincoln as our Communications Strategist to help us share stories of the Medical Industrial Complex and to help us build (and release) our full 500+ years of timeline history.

Photo credit: Marin Watts

Currently located on lenapehoking, Luce is excited to bring his many years of experience as a cultural worker, filmmaker, political educator and media nerd to Healing Histories Project. Most recently, Luce spent 8 years at Global Action Project working to create social justice films and popular education curriculum to uplift and organize trans, non-binary, queer, immigrant youth and young adults. When not thinking about timelines as a movement tool, Luce collaborates with BIPOC artists to create work that highlights intersectional solidarity, community resilience and a liberated future for all.

We also welcome tae min suh to help us clean and categorize the timeline’s data.

tae min suh is excited to be working with the HHP and digging into its data! They are on lenapehoking and organize within queer/trans communities and with various anti-violence projects. They are building out their community safety/self defense practices which increasingly includes their grappling with the medical industrial complex.We have learned so much over the last year about the kinds of technology and stories needed to hold the amount of data we have gathered in a timeline format. With Luce and tae min on board, we’ll be releasing ongoing updates as we grow closer to the completion of the timeline. 

With gratitude, 

Cara and Susan

Dismantling Eugenics: welcome to the Anti-Eugenics Project

Logo from Second International Congree

For the last year, the Healing Histories Project has been working in partnership with the Grassroots Organizer Working Group of the Anti-Eugenics Project to co-organize and curate a free six-day virtual public event, Dismantling Eugenics: Legacies, Reckonings & Futures.   100 years after the Second International Eugenics Congress, held in 1921, a collaboration of grassroots organizers, researchers, philanthropists, academic activists, artists & cultural workers are confronting and transforming this historical event by creating a virtual gathering that counters this event, held at the American Museum of Natural History. By centering those communities most impacted by eugenics in programming, cultural work and more we will be working towards building solutions that transform the eugenic foundations of dispossession, enslavement, racial capitalism and white supremacy. This Congress solidified eugenics as a state-sponsored practice and furthered the politics of exclusion that continues to shape our society today. 

It matters to bring forward truth-telling about eugenics in 2021 because of all the way these harms and abuses still exist for many of our communities. Eugenicist logic still defines and impacts many of the forms of oppression and supremacy embedded in these pandemic and political times. Anti-eugenics is an intersectional term for anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, decolonization, anti-ageism, and anti-capitalism. An anti-eugenics approach says that every individual and collective body has the right to determine for ourselves what being in relationship to land, body and spirit can feel and look like. . An anti-eugenics approach is an approach that honors both individual and collective sovereignty, rooted in harm-reduction and radical consent, and looks at supporting and building collective safety and wellbeing as an emergent or evolutionary relational process rather than a diagnostic goal.

Healing Histories Project’s COVID timeline was put together – and continues to be updated – to trace how these eugenicist logics have defined what care does and doesn’t look like for communities impacted by COVID. The timeline shows how the official response to the pandemic too often depends on a eugenics logic that monetizes and capitalizes on our survival or death. There are many many examples of this including how various states make access to necessary medical supplies based upon the money and social status that a care facility has or makes over-run care facilities responsible for finding their own supplies or doing without, in kind of Trumpian survival of the fittest scenario.  It’s the eugenic inheritance of generations of inadequate care and the stress of racial violence that allows for Black folks to die at greater numbers than any other community in the US. Or the  eugenicist logic that has medical directors tell staff in Christian hospitals that they can act from their anti-gay beliefs when providing COVID care, as happened in April 2020.

The Healing Histories Project has been part of visioning what this six day event will look like with HHP folks helping to curate programming, to craft the conference’s values statement, identify potential speakers and presenters, and help design a Movement Strategies Session on Eugenics that will bring together a small number of people involved in this work to co-design, dream and strategize together. 

There is no such thing as a “normal” body, there are only bodies that shift and change in response to experiences and time. Every one of us has been shaped by  and continues to be shaped by eugenicist ideologies. These ideologies are already impacting how we pivot towards addressing climate change; including how and when conversations about population control and resource control emerge and who is seen as needing to change and who defines that change. At its base, eugenic violence always confuses care with control and centers punishment as the response to disease rather than valuing all life, whether at its most vulnerable or its most fierce. Eugenic logic sets up a criteria for determining which bodies are expendable and which should be protected, who gets to have care and who does not, and who is vilified for their pain or vulnerabilities and who is allowed to be safe.    

A collective uprooting is necessary; a collective transformation and dismantling. Please come and join us in September.  It is free! Pre-Registration for the Dismantling Eugenics Virtual Convening will start in early September. Please come and learn alongside us. And please demand, in the smallest and the biggest of ways, a collective commitment to safety and wellness that centers around radical consent and our collective right to experience and name the glory of our own life in our own ways on our own terms.

Refusing to forget the children

This chart (created by Laura Ulrich) was last updated July 22 and only shows the federally recognized schools in Canada and not the schools in the US. At the time we are writing this, over 2,000 children’s bodies have been found on the grounds of residential and boarding schools in Canada and the US. By the time you read this, there will be more. Many more.

Before we move into this piece, we wanted to pause here and honor, along with you, the lives of those children. Every Native/First Nations person you know or have read about is either a survivor of these schools, or the child or the grandchild of a survivor. Every single one. By 1926, 83% of Native children were attending boarding schools in the US. The schools began to formally close in the 1960s and early 1970s. This is not history. This is our lifetime, your lifetime. The two of us writing this piece were alive as the boarding schools began to close. Children taken away, stolen, from families, from culture, from tribe and kin. Children who were stolen and disappeared. Their bodies are being reclaimed and honored. Before moving on to the rest of this piece, pause here. Pause. May we never treat the stories of these children as only information but instead, remember them throughout this conversation as living vibrant beings, as our relatives. 

*****

According to the Boarding School Healing Project, beginning with the Indian Civilization Act Fund of March 3, 1819 and the Peace Policy of 1869,  the United States, in concert with and at the urging of several denominations of the Christian Church, adopted an Indian Boarding School Policy. This policy intended to wage cultural genocide through the removal and reprogramming of American Indian and Alaska Native children to systemically continue the destruction of Native cultures and communities. Residential schools in Canada began at around the same time, with the first established in 1830 in Ontario by the Anglican Church. The stated purpose of these schools was simple:  “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Attendance was mandatory. No one knows exactly how many children were forcibly or sometimes voluntarily removed from their homes, their families, their tribes, their communities. The rules were strict: no expression of any aspect of tribal culture and identity. This means not speaking your own language including using your own name. It includes not going back home during holidays or when someone you love has died or because you were tired and sad and just wanted to be home again. The curriculum of the schools focused on Christian indoctrination, on reading, writing and speaking English, on something called citizenship training which included learning (and assimilating into) the American political system, Greek and Roman histories of democracy; American farming techniques and the importance of striving to own private property, and Christian monogamous family structures including gender and sexual behavior. Falling within all of these were forced teachings on Euro-Christian ideas of self-control, self-denial, discipline, and order. Children were forced to cut their hair, to wear school uniforms, to learn how to cook and eat European/white foods and to use European/white eating and cooking protocols. School by school, there were hundreds of other protocols, all designed to force Native children to “be civilized.” 

Recent online reflections from elders in conversation with Remembering the Children, a project focused on unearthing the truth behind the Rapid City Indian School, remembered the many children who died because they grew ill from diseases they had no natural immunity for or who were killed as a result of beatings and abuse or who tried to run away and were hit by trains or violent weather. They shared stories of children who died because they were starving from the lack of food and, in trying to cook for themselves, died from stoves exploding or water pots boiling over; their small child bodies not able to lift a pan of boiling water safely

Eugenics emerged as a “scientific” belief system alongside the growing popularity of the theory of evolution. Eugenics is based on the idea that if you can control reproduction in order to increase the number of positive factors in a population you can then decrease the negative. Everything about ideas of positive versus negative were – and are – embedded with racism and xenophobia, ableism gender essentialism, Christian supremacy, and more. “Positive” means as-close-as-possible to a Christian, able-bodied, thin, white, male, straight ideal. Eugenics practices include forced sterilization or the prevention of some bodies from reproducing, the institutionalization of categories of people to prevent them from “mingling” with the general population such as through psychiatric institutions and prisons, medical experimentation focused on changing aspects of a person’s physical, mental or emotional state of being to align with the “ideal” standard (often done without consent), and more. 

The majority of people targeted by state-sanctioned eugenics practices include those living with a range of types of disabilities, those perceived to be queer or sexually promiscuous or in bodies that do not meet the standard, people of color, indigenous people, Black people, poor people, people living with addictions, and people perceived to exhibit “criminal” behavior. These standards of what is “positive” and what is “negative” came to Turtle Island (North America) along with the settlers. Some of the earliest laws in the British colonies focused on capital offenses, or those acts seen to disrupt the Puritan social order. These early colonial laws included sex crimes, adultry, drunken-ness,  sodomy and buggery, criminal behavor, illiteray, “heathenism” and “mental unfitness.” While posing as science, eugenics frameworks were focused primarily on forcing people and communities to fit these early Puritan ideals.

The creation of boarding schools was and is an example of this same strategy. In this case, taking children and force-teaching them to become individuals who are different and separated from their histories, their cultures, their families and communities. Boarding school policies are all about asserting an “ideal” way of being human and, literally, attempting to kill the Indian to save the man. What was hailed as attending to life as sacred in the Christian framework expressed a violent contradiction as children, once they were considered ready,  were often stolen and adopted into white families without any chance to return home and without any communication with their families and kin about their final whereabouts. For many families, for many kin, the discovery of the bodies of those children who were buried with ceremony or care at boarding school campuses is the first time finding out if their children are dead or had been adopted out into the white world. As western medical science progressed, it expanded its strategy to continue the destruction of indigenous culture and community: in the 1960s and 70s the United States Indian Health Service forcibly sterilized thousands of Native women. 

For over 500 years, medicine as a tool of colonization, of violence, has emerged alongside, and sometimes overtaking, the truth of care work. The language of the schools used the language of health and wellness to justify their existence. This thinking is part of what shaped the white Christian saviorism that these schools depended on:

The work of the school, then, is to build up from the beginning “the whole child,” to expiate the sins of the past by heroic work in the present. Free gymnastic exercises and breathing exercises, introduced into the classroom work, would be very helpful to these students to relieve the tortured muscles unaccustomed to long sitting, to expand the poorly developed chests and to form a habit of quick obedience. From a teacher’s standpoint it might seem a doubtful expenditure of time to introduce a ten minute exercise between recitations, but the drill would be very beneficial, and progressively so, as the students advanced in years, and became able to take more complicated exercises. This would, in a measure, take the place of a military drill, where that is impractical, though I believe that something like a military inspection is always possible and always healthful and should be recommended both for MORAL AND PHYSICAL REASONS.

Martha Waldron, “The Indian in Relation to Health,” read at the Convention of Indian Educational Associations, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1896.

.It was not until 1978 with the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act that Native American parents gained the legal right to deny their children’s placement in off-reservation schools.

How old are you? How old are your parents, your grandparents? Who of your people were children in 1978? Who were already adults? None of this is just information. We want to pause here, again, to remember and hold those who did not survive these things, those who did survive this, and their descendants. And to listen as they continue to fight back, to mourn and to remember.

Welcome to our Digital Narratives for Abolition (DNA) blog!

We are Cara Page, Susan Raffo and Anjali Taneja, who first met as organizers and practitioners in 2009, working to build collective care and safety at the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010 and beyond.  We continue to collaborate to elevate and amplify a vision for collective care and safety while integrating models of wellness that seek to transform and intervene on medical violence (eg. scientific racism) and societal abuses of our private and public healthcare. As healers, medical practitioners, organizers, media makers, and cultural and memory workers, we wanted to show how, from the beginnings of the institution of colonization & slavery, the state has systematically determined who is “normal,”, “healthy,” “diseased,” and “dangerous” as a way of determining access to its rights and benefits. 

Here in Digital Narratives for Abolition (DNA) we will offer short reflections about different moments in time (past, present and future) to build a digital narrative for abolition towards transforming the medical industrial complex. We will explore what can be dismantled, to interrupt or end exploitation and experimentation by the medical industrial complex* and what can be conjured and imagined to center collective care, healing, & safety within our communities. In other words, sign up for the blog posts. We won’t overwhelm your inbox! 

We would love your support to maintain DNA & the cultural & political education tools we will be producing. 

You can make a one off donation, an offering expressing gratitude for how you have used this timeline and a recognition of the labor that has produced this work. If possible, we ask everyone who is using this timeline for any personal or work-based learning to make a donation if possible.

You can also support us in a more steady way through Patreon. This means that you will be supporting our work in a monthly way. Folks who join us through Patreon will also get monthly updates, sometimes general updates on how the timeline is progressing, and sometimes historical reflections or stories, material that comes from the timeline itself. Some of those will only be for patrons and some will be posted first through Patreon before then being shared publicly. You can also make a tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, Casa de Salud.

If you intend to use this timeline and curriculum and you are able to, we ask that you consider making a donation to support our labor and love.  We have a vision to grow this and, as you are able, we need your support to do that.

If you are a large organization, including nonprofit organizations, schools and universities, public healthcare or social service site, or private corporation or healthcare facility, we ask you to consider donating between $500 and $2000 for use of this timeline and curriculum.

GIVING OPTIONS:

Working Definitions:  We wanted to define what we mean by a few different terms:

  • Abolition: demanding the end of prisons, policing and surveillance as an extension of violence and colonization. 
  • Healing Justice: HJ was created to intervene on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression; policing and violence by recovering, remembering ancestral/medicine and/or building new traditions that center our psychic/

emotional/physical/mental/spiritual & environmental well-being for our collective liberation.

  • Medical Industrial Complex:  
  1. Relies on wealthy, white, cis, heterosexual, able bodied, male, and Christian ideals of whose body is healthy and whose is diseased; whose is pure and whose is sinful.*   (*from Patty Berne, Founder/Artistic Director of Sins Invalid)
  2. Prescribes who is expendable and who is deserving of access to quality & dignified spiritual, emotional, physical, psychic, environmental and mental care and who cannot.
  3. Determines whose body is criminalized and pathologized based on what is beauty and desire; and what bodies are fit and unfit to survive; and who should exist for the purpose of labor and production.
  4. As an extension of state control and violence it uses institutions as a platform for surveillance, policing and erasure of those seen as expendable, uncured, ‘unfit’, and ‘abnormal’.
  5. Relies on doctrines of fear, curative models and disease based capitalism to enforce and militarize global response of care under the false guise of  global security; and criminalizes practitioners and traditions outside of western based militarized models of care.
  • Generational/Historical Trauma 
    • Passing on the memory of an emotional/physical would of traumatic incident to each generation on a cellular level and passing on generational grief if unhealed*
    • One of the long-term impacts of generational trauma is collective disassociation or a loss of memory.
    • Generational trauma can mean that those impacted by this trauma don’t remember what it was like to not live under constant stress and surveillance. 

*Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart

  • How Generational Trauma can show up: The below comes from our own reflections on the different ways in which generational trauma shows up in or is held by individual and collective bodies. 

Cellular/Genetic (epigenetics):  

  • Generational trauma is not genetic destiny. Instead, our bodies hold the memories of past traumas as a quicker response to conditions that mirror our histories. This means that our bodies, at the genetic and cellular level, are primed to respond or not respond to the conditions surrounding us in the present moment. Generational trauma at this level is a kind of biological expectation of harmful or stressful situations with the response to those situations already ready to go. While this is a useful survival strategy, it also keeps the body in high readiness or activation, which saps at the body’s resilience. 

Cultural/Collective Trauma

  • What are the stories your people tell, or don’t tell, about what you can expect from life and the world around you and how you will survive what happens? What did you learn, directly and indirectly, when you were small about how your community gets through? John Mohawk, Haudenosaunee, writes that “culture is a community’s collective agreement on the best way to survive.” Some of those collective agreements might include how someone remains strong and clear about their beauty and power in the face of systemic oppression. Others might include agreements on hiding, on defying, on appeasing. And finally, other examples include how community and kin groups operate around you: do people take care of each other, compete with each other, ignore each other? Do you assume that your kin members will die young or live to old age? Are children treated tenderly or raised to be tough in order to survive?  How you were raised to experience and understand safety, belonging, and power both with people like you and people not like you will tell you something about how your community holds and resists cultural and collective trauma. 

Systemic Oppression 

  • Generational trauma also shows up in how systems and institutions have been created and then maintained. This is particularly true when those systems and institutions prevent, either directly or indirectly, the healing and integration of historical wounds such as white supremacy, gender supremacies, ableism, wealth hoarding and other wounds. The prison industrial complex and the medical industrial complex carry forward the shape of generational trauma by what is asserted as normal and what is defined as abnormal or criminal. 
  • Transformative Justice builds strategies to prevent, interrupt and transform harm and violence through accountability processes that do not seek to punish and outcast those who have caused the harm.  ‘An overarching framework that believes we cannot end violence with violence’ Mariame Kaba

We also believe that this work is and has to be deeply personal. It is grounded in relationships. Particularly when working with histories, it is easy to get lost in the content as though it were just information. For that reason, we also want to take a moment to tell you why each of us, individually, is in this work. In particular, the histories that inform our present and which then inspire and incite our futures. 

Cara Page:  As a Black woman of mixed ancestry, as a daughter, and great granddaughter of Black Seminole people, Black Southern migrant sharecroppers, and European immigrants, raised by folk & jazz musicians, artists, organizers and scholars.  As a survivor of family violence, I believed early on in healing from family cycles of violence to build our collective survival. I am a Black Queer feminist rooted in the incantations of Black feminism, southern Black radical traditions and movements that have shaped me in the service of the work for liberation and transformation for Black, People of Color & Indigenous communities globally. 

I was born into the Medical Industrial Complex when I was birthed at the Salvation Army Hospital in Philadelphia, PA in 1970, where the nurses forced my mother, who was in post-partum distress, and was instructed to put me up for adoption immediately because it was the 70’s and she shouldn’t raise a Black child. We were separated at birth and then when she realized she was heavily sedated and was coerced to sign the adoptive papers she fought to get me back from the adoptive parents a week later. My journey with eugenics and purity of race begins there, as many of our lives do at birth, when we are tagged and sorted based on gender, race, class, ability, migrant status, etc. I would learn later, the language for this and understand these were the machinations of white supremacy, population control, the eugenic ideas of beauty, status, purity of blood and ‘normalcy’.

I was changed by the feminist poetry and writings in the 80’s of Sonia Sanchez, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Essex Hemphill, Gloria Anzaldua, Chrystos, Cherrie Moraga, Barbara Smith, Toi Derricote, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker  an so many others.  And birthed by the reproductive rights, health and justice movements, racial justice and Black radical traditions of the South that would guide me several years later towards healing justice. 

I went on a journey in the late 90’s to the early 2000’s to begin to discover how practices and traditions of healing and transformation from generational trauma was integral to resistance.  I would explore the question of; how have we held the loss and grief of our movements & freedom fighters as part of our organizing including: the Black Power Movements, the Zapatistas, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement and Boarding School Healing Project, Asian & Chicano Student movements and other political traditions. I began asking the questions: How can we resolve immense pain and loss inside of our resistance movements and how can this inform and shape how we intentionally build our collective survival and resiliency in relationship burnout, policing, massive incarceration, displacement of our traditions and the killing of our lands and communities?; How do we heal and transform from interpersonal violence, child sexual abuse, communal volence, systemic oppression, colonization and slavery as Communities of Color, Black people, Queer & Trans, women, as survivors in our lives and movements? I would come to use the phrase ‘healing justice’ at an abolitionist meeting on fighting eugenics within private prisons and ask the question, ‘how is healing inherently a part of justice within our movements and our struggle for political liberation’?  

This would become the foundation for the conception of ‘healing justice’ as a political strategy and lead to the conception of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective in Atlanta, GA in 2005. In 2006, Kindred Collective was co-founded by a multi-racial, intergenerational, Black feminist led, collective of southern based energy/earth/body based healers, health practitioners, birth workers and organizers that began with creating sacred memorials to freedom fighters at the Southern Regional Social Forum in Durham, NC. We would build out the concept of healing justice in a southern context, and become co-architects of a national healing justice strategy with comrades across movements in the US & Global South.  We would join feminist human rights defenders and practitioners/healers in the Global South towards building collective care and safety at the intersections of fighting against capitalism and fascism, and fighting for LGBTQGNCI liberation, economic justice, racial justice, and transformative justice towards elevating a cultural, spiritual and survival based economy that centers traditions that ensure the collective survival and thriving of our people.  Much of the lineage of this work has become the root of my new cultural organizing project, Changing Frequencies, a cultural/memory project creating political and memory archives, installations and actions to discover, confront and transform generational trauma from the exploitation and experimentation of the Medical Industrial Complex. I am a co-partner of the Healing Histories Project towards building new futures that center our collective well being & safety. 

Susan Raffo: Born in the early 1960s, I come from lines where my ancestors chose or were forced to leave behind culture and tradition in order to keep their children safe. Most of those lines are various flavors of European and Christian and some of those lines are native to Turtle Island. Across my lines, I am either the third or fourth or fifth generation of this leaving-behind-other-cultural-ways of attending to collective safety and wellness in order to focus on the individualizing and privatization of whiteness. I honor the request that I have received from two different elders that I not let the genocide win but to also claim all of my lines and all of my experiences so I name and slowly learn to honor my Wabenaki and Anishinaabeg lines while not pretending to be more than I am: a light-skinned woman raised to experience the world as a white woman. I honor all of the places my people come from, including Germany and Italy, and know that many do not have the benefit of naming the places where their people were before.  I feel deeply that my purpose is to work to ensure that no one has to leave their people, their land, their culture in order to keep their children and elders safe. 

I was raised by a mother with physical impairments as the result of a car accident that happened to our family when I was 6, resulting in the loss of our father and brother. The particular set of my mother’s injuries and then the various medical interventions means that her body doesn’t fit the standard medical profile for how a body is “supposed” to be. From when I was small, I listened and sometimes saw doctor after doctor who did not listen to what she knew about her own body, instead minimizing her own knowledge for what they believed which often, along the way, caused her more pain. 

I came out in the late 1980s as a lesbian first, then a dyke and then queer and I answer to all of those names. I came out and was mentored by radical lesbian feminists who were building separate healthcare and childcare and food and family systems. My earliest politicization was in the women’s anti-imperial movements of 1980s England and was deeply impacted by work that built connections and relationships across British imperialism and the institutionalization of racism and white supremacy. I spent significant time at Greenham Common where I witnessed and benefitted from physical and mental healthcare structures and practices that were woven in to a long term occupation site.  

In the early 2000s, I started to turn more fully towards becoming a practitioner, studying craniosacral therapy from many different craniosacral schools, Global Somatics (a descendant of Body Mind Centering), and different approaches to working with how trauma is held in the body, including becoming a NARM-informed practitioner. It was meeting the work of Kindred Healing Justice Collective that helped me believe that it is possible to weave organizing and healing together. It reminds me of my earliest Marxist training: that the means of production can not be separated from the product that is produced. The same thing holds true for how we hold and work with trauma: the impact of doing the work of change can not be separated from the impact of the work of making change.

I live on the unceded traditional homelands of the Dakota people – in Minneapolis. After George Floyd was murdered, I became part of REP (Relationships Evolving Possibilities), a project that stems from Black love and liberation, with a vision that all communities thrive when our needs are met.  REP is grounded in the belief that as a community we have the ability and capacity to love and protect each other without giving our agency to systems that were built to destroy, consume, or commodify us.REP is an engagement strategy that facilitates the formation of localized pods for mutual aid and reinforces transformative crisis support within community networks. 

Anjali Taneja: Building systems of care and healing, pushing up against the conventional healthcare system in the United States, are both my survival strategy and my passion.

I am a second generation Indian-American, born to Indian immigrants in New Jersey. I grew up with a tension between norms and dreams, between tradition and modern, and between necessity and urgency. I’ve been a generalist since a very early age, always exploring the intersections of culture, politics, health, global forces, economics, and more. My curiosity led me to pursue a college major in International Relations and consider working in international diplomacy, before I realized the work was here. Afterwards I moved to New York City to pursue my Masters in Public Health and to pull late nights DJing at clubs as a resident DJ at MUTINY. Both of these expanded my imagination greatly.

Soon after, I started on my medical school journey, a tough awakening about what conventional western medicine training and practice truly embodied. I felt so different from others around me, and had come from an environment of expansive thinking and dreaming, to one of rote learning, problematic norms and cultures, and a sense that my fellow students and I were disconnected from the history of the medical field in America, or even in Newark, New Jersey — where the university hospital itself was a site of racial tensions. I immersed myself as much as possible in the community in Newark, trying to learn about political and health forces, and campaigned for Cory Booker, who successfully won his bid for Mayor of the city.

Serving in the hospital in medical school was eye opening and rewarding, but also brutal. Every cell in my body felt like it rejected what I often witnessed daily — whether racism, the extreme medicalization of social issues, or the sense that our work ended in the hospital ward. I survived medical school part through my small friend crew and through my involvement in the American Medical Student Association and my year as a full-time Jack Rutledge Fellow at the organization, organizing medical students around the country and doing both grassroots engagement work and policymaking work. And upon graduating from medical school, I was a founding board member of the National Physicians Alliance.

After medical school my journey took me westward, and I pursued family medicine residency and fellowship training at a county hospital in Los Angeles. My fellow resident physicians were social justice-oriented, looked beyond the walls of the hospital despite our 80 hour work weeks *in* it, and inspired me. My time working at Homeless Healthcare LA, at a drop-in syringe exchange in Skid Row, and my rotations in Chiapas, Mexico and rural Tanzania (and experiences at the World Social Forum in Nairobi) informed and shaped me.

I struggled with the sense that many ideal minded physicians would go on to practice a form of medicine in the US that was different from what they dreamt of. I witnessed a number of my colleagues settle into jobs that required them to compartmentalize dreams and work, often tolerating systems full of burnout culture, RVUs and “productivity” incentives — or that gobbled them up into large hospital and healthcare systems or even exhausting environments in sometimes federally qualified health clinics. 

In my search for something different, I was following the work of Casa de Salud in Albuquerque, since its inception as the Topakhal clinic, and felt this would be where I could help build a system that lifted up intersections of caring, healing, healthcare, anti-racist medicine, and organizing to build power with community. I moved to Albuquerque and worked as a family physician, organizer, and program developer at Casa de Salud — and also started working emergency medicine shifts at a rural hospital in the Navajo Nation. I served for 3 years in this role, before moving out of state, but returned in 2015 to lead the organization as its second Executive Director, and the ability to vision and implement high quality care, integrative healing with numerous healing modalities alongside western/conventional medicine, and organizing and advocacy to build power with our community, has been rejuvenating.

Early on in my time with Casa de Salud, in 2009 and 2010, I met Cara Page and Susan Raffo, my co partners in this Healing Histories Project work and much else — through national organizing work for the the US Social Forum’s healing justice work and healing/medical response, in Detroit. I knew then that my work would become bridge work between healers and healthcare providers, towards collective liberation.

For 2 years I also served as the medical director for the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center’s Jail Narcotics Treatment Program, providing methadone treatment for incarcerated people with opioid addictions. My advocacy around preserving the program when a warden wanted to unilaterally and abruptly stop providing treatment in the jail led to me being escorted out of the jail as well as a community advocacy response that resulted in strengthening treatment in the jail. I’ve also learned so much through my fellowship with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, and the critical nudge I received from the international Creating Health Collaborative, where I shared visions for healthcare and healing with a team of innovators around the world.

I know what is possible, and I’m so passionate about supporting healthcare workers and healers in imagining and building. This leads me to CureThis, which I founded with others more than a decade ago. CureThis was (and will be again!) an online platform for healthcare workers and healers who are looking to build new models of care. CureThis sunsetted after 6 years, but will be revived this year, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, while the world is hungry for new models of care.

I am incredibly moved and excited about this work here, with our Healing Histories Project. To my fellow healthcare workers, I see you, we will together remember the history we weren’t taught in our training, and we will use this knowledge to transform our systems of care.