Gathering the Bones

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This article draws on the myth of La Loba, the Bone Gatherer, as a metaphorical framework for understanding reparative transformation in the South African National Arts Therapies Association (SANATA). Written from the perspective of a Black woman organisational development practitioner and member of the leadership of SANATA, it argues that the association, like other professional associations, finds itself in a desert shaped by the historical and unfinished realities of whiteness - a desert inhabited not only by those recovering from apartheid, but by all whose capacity to experience the full humanity of the other has been diminished by racialised conditioning. The article examines how whiteness operates as embodied habit and institutional structure, how its legacies are carried in Black bodies as traumatic memory, and why increasing representation without structural and cultural transformation reproduces rather than dismantles exclusion. The article proposes that wisdom - understood as communal, embodied and relational - is central to meaningful transformation, and that creating safe spaces for emergence requires deep listening, the honouring of embodied knowledge, and the redistribution of the labour of change. It concludes by advocating for the deliberate cultivation of strengths already present in individuals and cultures, framing the work of transformation as, ultimately, the work of coming home to what is already there.