False Memories: Trauma and Liberation Aurora Levins Morales is a scholar activist who is engaged in social movements against

racialized, gendered and class oppression. She was born in Brooklyn to a Puerto Rican mother and a Ukrainian father. She was the youngest member of the Chicago Womens liberation union, also an active member of the movement against the war in Vietnam, while also being a part of womens consciousness raising groups that were fighting for and imagining womens liberation. She was an active member of U.S. women of color writers movement that sought to focus on intersectionality of race, gender and classed oppression experienced by people of color in the U.S. She is one of the contributors to the important anthology called This bridge called my back. Her main areas of research are feminism; multiple identity (Puerto Rican, Jewish, North American), immigrant experience, Jewish radicalism and history, Puerto Rican history, and the importance of collective memory, of history and art, in resisting oppression and creating social change.1 In the chapter from her book Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity (1998) she is focusing on how people in power who are the oppressors use their power to define, name and tell stories about the oppressed, in a way that they are responsible for their own oppression. So poverty is blamed on the poor rather than system that the rich and greedy people have put in place to maintain their own power and privilege, and since the powerful and greedy are usually in control of the information they make it so that stories and information is passed around that makes the connection between the power, greed and poverty very unclear so that poor people as one example feel responsible for their own conditions rather than the oppressive system. She writes about slavery and how the Europeans justified it as something that was good and necessary for Black people to justify the complete theft of Black peoples labor and freedom to maintain their own privilege and power. These deep injustices and historical trauma need to told and re-told not in stories that Europeans have written to justify their gruesome behavior but by the survivors of these inhuman systems of degradation. These stories of trauma need to be spoken in front of witnesses within movements of resistance. It part of the task to bring about radical change is to face how the oppression have affected our lives and the devastation and trauma it has wrought. We gather and retell the stories of our side of history, free of the self-serving rationalizations of the looters2 Natalie Diaz The poems we read today were by Natalie Diaz. She was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. Diaz lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works with the last speakers of Mojave and directs a language revitalization program.3 Her poetry is intense and raw filled with experiences of poverty, violence, and oppression of settler colonial culture and resistance and survival.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Levins_Morales Morales, Aurora. Medicine stories: History, culture, and the politics of integrity. South End Press, 1998. 3 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/natalie-diaz
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