Imagining Collective Care and Revisiting Ancestral Healing to Build Liberated Communities

This essay was written based on an online community conversation hosted by Mo Chan of FERN Collective on May 22 2020.

I’d like to acknowledge that I am tuning in from unceded Gadigal Land. I’d like to pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and extend that respect and gratitude to any First Nations people who join us this evening. This always was and always will be Aboriginal Land. As a settler, I recognise that I benefit from the continued displacement of the true custodians of this continent and commit to ongoing solidarity with First Nations people. I want to acknowledge and honour the rich storytelling traditions, spiritual practices and ancestral wisdom that has existed on this continent for 60 000 years.

I’d like to thank Mo for organising this talk and take a moment to uplift the important work that they are doing with FERN Collective. I think so much of our healing is contingent on how vulnerable we can be with each other and I think storytelling allows us to do that. 

I would also like to honour the Black, Indigenous, queer and disabled folks who have been the forerunners of collective care and mutual aid in so many different ways, teaching us how to build networks of care that will transform this world and underpin the next.
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Imagining Collective Care and Revisiting

Ancestral Healing to Build

Liberated Communities

A’isyiyah

I believe healing and justice come from the same root: love.

I always meditate on the Dr Cornel West quote where he says that ‘justice is what love looks like in public’. When we love someone truly, we hope for them to move freely in a just world, so we commit to creating those conditions for each other in social justice work.

In response to that, healing can be what love looks like in private; private being not necessarily what we do behind closed doors but rather how we engage with each other in our everyday interpersonal relations. When we love someone truly, we hope for them to live in good emotional, physical and spiritual health. We can make that a lived reality when we centre collective healing, rest, intimacy.

One of the first times I heard about healing justice as a movement was a panel discussion with community organiser, facilitator and theologian Autumn Meghan Brown where she talks about how healing intergenerational trauma for the sake of collective liberation is necessary not only for Black and Indigenous people and people of colour but for white folks too. She asserts that being so far removed from ancestral lines is in itself a traumatic experience of displacement, regardless of proximity to the coloniser. Indeed it is a deliberate tactic of the coloniser to sever these connections to lineage in order to desensitise white folks to their own actions that perpetuate harm against entire cultures and peoples.

Perhaps it is essential for people from coloniser backgrounds to re-member other parts of their histories to reconnect with their own humanity. Our histories never sit in a binary of coloniser and colonised - many of us who had ancestors who resisted colonial forces are now witnessing (and are often complicit in) present-day settler colonial violence enacted by our governments. How can we truly divest from and resist institutional and intergenerational violence and abolish the idea that we are inherently bad because of our proximity to the coloniser? Who were the freedom fighters in our lineages? What did love look like in our communities before our oppressive predecessors unleashed violence across the world? How can we unpack the feelings of shame and guilt that hinder us from real transformation?

Often we are drawn to the public, outwards work of social justice but overlook the importance of the introspective, private work of healing.

Ancestral Healing

It’s hard to know where to find guidance and therapy when the system of so-called care that posits itself as a site of healing is often a site of violence, manipulation and abuse for many of us on the margins. It then becomes important to acknowledge that colonial modalities of psychotherapy stem from sinister Anglocentric and Eurocentric roots, even if we do find spaces or tools to heal within them.

As a survivor of state violence and someone living with complex trauma - and as someone invested in healing intergenerational trauma - I have had to utilise the tools I've learned from years of undergoing western therapy to heal some parts of me. This means many of us who share these experiences have had to discern between what is helpful and what is harmful using decolonial frameworks, frequently pushing back against the parts of western therapy that contradict ancestral healing. In doing so, we challenge practices and practitioners that prioritise healing in isolation over relational healing and co-regulation in community. We challenge practices and practitioners that do not honour rage as a generative emotional response to state violence, those that dismiss our experiences of, or who advise us to adjust to, structural oppression.

The institutionalisation of racism is largely due to European self-proclaimed ‘intellectuals’ who used studies like phrenology and psychotherapy to instate discriminatory policies and to rationalise abhorrent acts of violence like genocide and enslavement. The BBC documentary Racism: A History highlights the devastating consequences of the weaponisation of these theories by the British in Tasmania and the Germans in parts of Africa.

On the island of Java, Dutch colonial psychologists came up with the theory of the ‘native mind’ to depict the indigenous population as innately irrational, whimsical, illogical and unstable. Hans Pols writes in his 2007 paper Psychological knowledge in a colonial context: “Not only were political ideas and values supporting inequality, colonialism, and imperialism implicitly incorporated into medical and psychiatric theories, but colonial physicians and psychiatrists actively mobilized psychiatric theory to justify repressive colonial policies as well.“

These ideologies were used to justify the establishment of colonial governance by depicting Indigenous Javanese as incapable of self-determination. One invasive case study conducted by Dutch psychologists analysed the Javanese while they meditated to traditional gamelan music. They were characterised in this study as pathologically imaginative and ungrounded in yet another case where the coloniser persecuted Indigenous peoples for engaging in the very ancestral practices that are the foundations of our knowledge systems. 

These are preposterous claims made against an archipelago that has long been home to a multiplicity of elaborate and highly advanced civilisations engaged in maritime trade, innovative sciences and intricate healing, fighting and musical arts. Re-membering this history as Indonesians means we may find common ground with Indigenous West Papuans who are currently under violent occupation by the Indonesian government, and with this knowledge we can move towards not only healing but collective liberation.

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Lilla Watson

Similar theories were also used to reinforce patriarchy in places like so-called Canada through the characterisation of Indigenous men as savage or barbaric in nature, purporting that white colonial maleness is innately rational. Robert Alexander Innes explores this at length in Indigenous Men and Masculinities. He writes: “Bederman marks this [racial evolutionalism] as one source of the idiom ‘boys will be boys’: the idea that boys are inclined to act in ‘wild’ ways before, as youths or men, using civilized techniques to control such inclinations. Yet this idiom is explicitly colonialist and racist, given that recapitulation theory only imagined white boys as biologically capable of developing from a primitive to a civilized state. Evolutionists framed Indigenous, Black, and other racialized male youth, and even young men of the European working-classes as possessing a recalcitrant or permanent primitive nature. In this logic, if they did try to adapt to civilizational standards, they would fail on biological grounds.“

Furthermore, the introduction of infectious disease from Europe also resulted in a decline in the physiological health of the Indigenous population in places like Java and across the Maluku Islands. There was little regard for the wellbeing of the Indigenous population until the colonisers realised that they couldn’t build a workforce of sick people so they kept them alive using the bare minimum of healthcare, keeping them on the brink of illness but ‘well enough’ to continue working. This directly correlates to present-day prison, medical and psychiatric industrial complexes that reproduce slave-like conditions for Black, Indigenous and brown people across the world. These colonial-capitalist systems work us to the bone and then invents remedies for our ailments just to keep us working for the very systems that make us sick. Ancestral healing can actively disrupt this industrialisation of health and care.

Many Indigenous cultures around the world approach medicine as an ongoing, preventative, integrated, holistic practice rather than a practice to simply find a cure when we become ill. Our healers don’t always operate in clinics - often they are right there with us in our homes and they are the ones who we have existing loving and trusting relationships with. For example, Dadirri is a contemplative listening and silent awareness practice originating from the Ngangiwumirr people of the Daly River region. It is practiced both collectively and individually under the guidance of elders as a way to share stories of pain in a nurturing space, interrupting cycles of intergenerational trauma. On Turtle Island (so-called America), clinical psychologist and intergenerational trauma worker Dr Jennifer Mullan centres decolonisation in her work through somatic experiencing, cultivating safer spaces to explore rage and uplifting traditions such as shamanism and santeria whilst dismantling systemic oppression.

Decolonising care and healing also means defending the lands that are inalienable from spirit, like the sacred trees on Djab Wurrung country and the Nambucca Forest on Gumbaynggir land. It means supporting groups like Grandmothers Against Removals resisting colonial forces that continue to inflict intergenerational violence through child removals and racist foster care systems. Decolonising care and healing means a devotion to direct action, solidarity, introspection and education. It is both private and public work.

Collective Care

“Doing mutual aid work is planting the seeds that will take root and bring the fortress down.”

Dean Spade and Roberto Sirvent

Care must be the foundation of any revolution. We tend to think of carework as informal and unstructured however in so-called Indonesia during anticolonial uprisings against the Dutch in the 1940s, carework was insurgent and tactical; women organised to transport weapons in secret, established dapur umum (public kitchens), worked as street medics using plants such as betel leaves and banana flowers to heal wounds, whilst also raising children and taking on the bulk of the housework. Women were invited by village chiefs to teach spiritual and emotional resilience and unity amongst freedom fighters. Some women, including my beloved great-grandmother, moved entire families by foot up mountains away from the epicentre of violence to keep them safe. How do we take these stories and turn them into blueprints for how we enact care now? In these stories, I see so many lessons we can learn about harm reduction, subverting surveillance and unconditional mutual aid.

“Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked from our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind.”

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work

I no longer want to champion martyrdom and self-sacrifice in our struggles for freedom. I am imagining a world where rest is sacred, where we love and rage together safely in public and in private, where our liberations are inextricably interwoven. I am dreaming up networks of care guided by ancestral wisdoms, rooted in deep trust and vulnerability.

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A’isyiyah is a Batak and Jawa mama who grew up on unceded Cabrogal Land in the southwest of so-called Sydney. They are invested and interested in building strong communities founded upon intergenerational, collective and ancestral healing. They organise in the community autonomously and with Anticolonial Asian Alliance who are a First Nations solidarity collective, and are a prison abolition and transformative justice student and dreamer.

Mo Chan is a community and event organiser, determined to create more accessible, radicalised, joyous and anti-racist spaces, particularly for Queer/Trans/Intersex/Indigenous-Gender identifying First Nation, Black, Brown, Asian, Pasifika and those who identify as People of Colour. They are a non-binary, mixed-race individual passionate about creating collective healing through story-telling and redefining narratives often erased or corrupted by colonialism and white supremacy.