Today marks Juneteenth – June 19th, 1865 – when Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas, announcing that enslaved people in the South were free.
This came TWO AND A HALF YEARS after the Emancipation Proclamation, a delay that reveals how liberation announcements and lived liberation are often worlds apart.
For over 250 years, MILLIONS of African people and their descendants endured the violence of slavery.
Families, communities & cultures torn apart, languages suppressed, bodies brutalized…
The trauma was individual, generational, and spiritual.
Juneteenth brought profound joy and began another long struggle.
Freedom from legal bondage didn’t mean freedom from Jim Crow, lynching, mass incarceration, or the ongoing systemic violence against Black Americans and BIPOC communities.
Black & brown communities are being disproportionately affected by the new Rump immigration policies, with immigrants facing detention and dehumanization.
Those who are raising their voices against genocide and dehumanization are being affected the most.
As grievers & grief tenders, we know healing happens not by bypassing pain but by creating space to feel it fully.
The same applies to collective healing.
The grief here is vast: those who died in bondage, families separated, languages lost, dreams suppressed across generations, ongoing extreme violence & genocide.
This grief lives in bodies, families, communities – moving through generations like underground rivers.
Like all grief, it asks not to be fixed but witnessed and held with reverence.
We who tend grief have particular medicine to offer.
We can create brave spaces for processing collective trauma, educate ourselves about racism’s ongoing impacts, support BIPOC-led healing initiatives, and recognize that individual healing and collective liberation are intimately connected.
This Juneteenth, may we honour both celebration and sorrow.
May we remember that healing is resistance, and commit to the patient work of creating a world where all beings can thrive.
I’m deeply grateful that our BIPOC scholarship fund has been so successful this year!
Thanks to many of you who have donated, we have more people of colour in our trainings and programs this year than ever before, which brings such richness to all involved.
Those in our Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training will be bringing the skills they learn into their communities, and so the ripples will go out far and wide.
The ancestors who dreamed of freedom are dreaming still, through you and me. Happy Juneteenth!
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