Healing Justice
Healing Justice is a framework that recognizes the impact of trauma and violence on individuals and communities.
Healing justice names collective processes that can help heal and transform these forces, and how we can bring them into our personal practice and organizations we are a part of. In a system and society that actively targets Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies with violence, oppression and terror, it is critical to build organizations that fight for and achieve justice for all people.
ICA’s Healing Justice Pathway is our newest pathway towards collective liberation. After experiencing a devastating collapse after two decades of frontline community organizing, one of ICA’s co-founders Melina Laboucan-Massimo realized that we need trauma informed ways of organizing in our movements spaces, otherwise we are re-creating systems of harm in the way we organize by rewarding hyper-productivity and harmful practices of triggering generational trauma resulting in burn out culture. We hope that by bringing Healing Justice to our organization, staff, and the wider movement, we can re-centre communities that are already experiencing multiple layers of trauma from systemic colonial impact to ensure that their well-being is also taken care of in our movement spaces, instead of consistently being sacrificed.
Healing is climate justice.
Indigenous Climate Action is seeking to transform extractivism in all aspects of what we do - both in our climate justice work fighting the extraction of fossil fuels, and in fighting extraction of the very spirit of Indigenous Peoples. We seek to understand and build new ways of being that bring about restorative decolonial practices and tools that strengthen the health of our bodies and whole selves. We know this is a crucial foundation for Indigenous Peoples to thrive in a just climate future.
In Indigenous communities, the intersection of environmental racism where homelands are destroyed, the trauma of social inequality and violence, and the constant need to assert basic rights in an unwelcoming society leads to a variety of overlapping mental and physical health challenges for many. On top of this, the culture of extraction that defines capitalism is a layer that seeps into every aspect of life - extraction on the land, akin to extraction of time, stories, knowledge, and energy - extraction as a mindset and way of being.
Healing is justice.
Healing Justice Panel
In this panel from June 2021, we hear from Arlana Redsky, Hannah Méndez, Meda DeWitt, Margi Dashevsky, and ICA’s Director of Healing Justice Melina Laboucan-Massimo
as they offered stories about their interactions with healing.
