Episode 36: Breaking Down White Settler Colonialism – with author Hilary Giovale

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: I would like to begin today’s episode with a land acknowledgement. I am speaking to you today from the ancestral homelands of the Ute, Eastern Shoshone, and Timpanogos peoples. I recognize that the Ute, Eastern Shoshone, and Timpanogos cared for this land since time immemorial, and I thank them for that stewardship. I also acknowledge that this is unceded territory, which means that it was never legally given to the United States. It’s essentially stolen land. Listeners, have you heard land acknowledgements like this before? Do you know whose ancestral homeland you are on right now as you listen to this podcast? How often do you think about that? When you do think about it, what feelings come up? In today’s episode, we will be discussing the colonization of Native land and how white settlers can approach this very complicated and painful history. To guide us, we’ll be basing our conversation on the book Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair by Hilary Giovale, and I’m thrilled to have the author here to talk with us today. Welcome, Hilary! 

Hilary Giovale: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Amy. I’m so glad to be with you. 

AA: Hilary Giovale is a mother, writer and community organizer. A ninth-generation American settler, she is descended from Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and indigenous people of ancient Europe. As an act of reparation, her work is guided by intuition, love, and relationships. I love that introduction, Hilary, and I’m wondering if you can tell us about yourself a little bit more. Maybe back up to the beginning, and this time I’d actually love you to go back to the very, very beginning and tell us where your people are from. In your introduction, we talked about your European ancestry, but in the prologue you introduce yourself with where your people are from and then you trace a line from them to you, which leads to why you wrote this book.

HG: Yeah, absolutely. I am descended from Scottish Highlanders on both sides of my family, as well as people from Northern Ireland and Western Ireland. And on my mother’s line, my matrilineal line is German and Scandinavian. We don’t have any memory of those Scandinavian roots, but they show up in the very old DNA. So I really embrace all of those lineages that I come from, and then I’ve got a bunch of other smaller threads that are running through my blood, and I honor and acknowledge those too. But most of the research that I’ve been able to do is focused on the German, Scandinavian, and Celtic.

AA: Wonderful. And when did they come to the United States? What were the circumstances that brought them here? 

HG: On my father’s side, my father’s father’s line, that’s the one I know the most about. There was an ancestor who came here in 1739 and landed in what would become North Carolina, and I know a lot about his side of the family because my great-uncle did a huge research project of genealogy in the ‘90s and documented everything that he found and printed a book for the whole family. So I know the most about this ancestor. And on that side of the family, his grandson received a plantation in the will of a family friend, as far as we can tell. He inherited an enslaved man, and then he went down to Mississippi, where he received a land grant that was signed by Andrew Jackson, and he and his descendants enslaved people on that stolen land in Mississippi. So that thread, that storyline on that side of the family is the one that I have explored the most in my book, and mostly because, fortunately, my great-uncle did all that research and it was spelled out for me very clearly to just pick up the thread and start looking at it the moment I opened the book.

AA: It’s not hard to imagine how that would feel, but you grew up knowing the stories, it sounds like, or at least knew them from a younger age. I just discovered things in my own family history that I didn’t know, and it was really, really troubling and upsetting for me. How does it feel for you? 

HG: Well, actually I didn’t know until I was 40. 

AA: Okay. 

HG: I had heard primarily about my mother’s father’s side of the family, which were more recent immigrants from Northern Ireland to Canada. I was primarily identified with that story, which was a very working class, Protestant, bootstrapping story, and I had no idea that I had ancestors that had been here before that. In hindsight, I look back and I think, why didn’t I have any idea? I should have known, right? But this is part of the amnesia of whiteness, which is that we don’t even think about it. So on the last night of 2015, when I was 40, I opened this book of genealogy and found this really disturbing history of land grants and enslavement and the fact that my people were part of this colonial project. And then later I found out that on my mother’s side, some of them were here even earlier. They were here in the 1600s from Germany to Pennsylvania, and it was deeply upsetting, deeply discouraging. I went into a spiritual crisis, that’s the only way I can describe it. When I learned that, when it was just looking at me without any filter on it, you know? 

AA: Well, I’d love you to keep tracing the line from that moment to how you ended up writing this book. And we’ll talk more about the process, because it’s kind of a template for what white settlers do go through and how we can reframe everything. You don’t have to tell everything now, but how do you go from that moment to writing this book?

HG: Yeah. Well, I went into a crisis for sure. I live in northern Arizona, which is a high altitude, beautiful ponderosa pine forest next to a sacred mountain of kinship. So as soon as I found out that information, it was January, there was a lot of snow, and that winter I was going out on the land and walking in the snow and literally lying down in the snow and weeping. I didn’t know what to do. A couple of months went by of just this grief, this overwhelming grief and remorse. And then I got kind of an intuitive message to write a letter to, I think I wrote it to about 15 people, many of them are people of color, they’re Indigenous people, they’re friends of mine, and I basically felt like I had to come clean and be transparent about my ancestral baggage. And in the process of sharing that letter with people, I came into a conversation with an African American elder named Yeye Luisah Teish, and she did a divination for me in her spiritual tradition. And she heard the ancestors whispering about a book that I had written, and I hadn’t ever written the book at that point, but she said to me, “The book is already written, and you need to get out of the way.” That began this process of beginning to write. I was terrified to write this book. I didn’t think that I was qualified, and I was terrified of being exposed and talking about these things because we’re not supposed to talk about these things in white culture at all. But Yeye Teish listened to me, she helped me, she gave me some writing prompts, and she helped me get started. And then I had many, many people who helped me along the way by serving as readers and providing feedback and helping me work through these very difficult topics. 

AA: Oh, that’s wonderful. I do have to say that before the episode started, we were talking about the sense of kinship that I felt with you, reading and seeing the ethos of what was guiding this book and the questions you were asking and the way that you’re processing it. My listeners will know that’s something that I think about and do. But you said that you know quite a few people that are experiencing a similar awakening right now. Is that right? 

AA: Well, that’s been the case for a long time, actually, like in the abolitionist movement and and beyond. Although white women also, as we know, have been some of the perpetrators of the worst forms of racism and colonialism as well. Well, okay. Let’s start with the book, and you open with a land acknowledgement of your own, and I’m wondering if you’d like to read your land acknowledgement or share that and talk about that a little bit. 

HG: Here it is. This book is written at the foot of a sacred mountain, a female being of kinship that stands within the traditional homelands of Diné, Hopi, Havasupai, Walapai, Apache, Yavapai, and Paiute peoples, as well as several Pueblos. My relationship with this land and her peoples are foundational to these pages. As a ninth generation settler, I am committed to disrupting settler colonialism by acting in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty. I seek to support Indigenous people’s wellbeing and vitality of this land with my time, skills, and resources. With gratitude and respect for this land and her peoples past, present, and future, thank you. 

AA: I love your land acknowledgement, Hilary. I started with my own of where I live, and some listeners may have never heard a land acknowledgement before. Some listeners may have heard land acknowledgments a lot. They do them a lot more now at college graduations and things like that. And some people have heard them so much that they wonder if they’re performative. One of the things I loved about your land acknowledgment, Hilary, is that it wasn’t just, “I acknowledge I live on this land, and now moving along,” you talk about your responsibility and what you see as a way of making repair. You call yourself a reparationist, is that right? 

HG: Yeah, that’s right. 

AA: Can you talk about that a little bit? 

HG: Yeah. I think that land acknowledgements, you’re right, they can be performative. They are getting to the point where they have been overdone in some cases, but I still think they have a role to play, especially when we add in that commitment to action, to unlearning, to embracing different ways of being here, to reparations, to land back, to rematriation, all of these things. When those things are embedded in a land acknowledgement, meaningful action, meaningful reparative action, then they totally have a role to play, and I think they can be very valuable. Just saying, “This is whose land we’re on and thanks a lot. Bye,” that doesn’t really cut it. 

AA: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. I do think that’s really, really important, and I agree. I do think land acknowledgements are beautiful and important and they’re really good. For me, it’s a really great place to start, is to ask the question, wake yourself up to that reality, and then say, “Now what? Now what do I do?” Maybe I’ll make that my next question for you, Hilary. Let’s dig into it. And I think a lot of people, as you said, don’t want to look at it. It’s not something that we’ve talked about in white society very much at all, and just only barely starting to. And it’s painful. It’s painful, it’s challenging for people. So how do you work on these topics effectively? What are some strategies?

HG: Yeah, I think that one of the most important strategies is storytelling. And I learned that through the grace and the generosity of many of the readers that I had when this book was still a manuscript before it was published. I had many people reflect back to me that the parts of this book that are working are where you’re telling your own story, the parts that aren’t working are where you’re getting on a soapbox and providing a lecture. And we don’t need lectures. That’s not effective, it’s very shaming, it keeps us in that hyper-intellectual, patriarchal mindset. What we need is stories, stories that come from the heart and that share the truth of lived experience and that build empathy. Because the truth is that we are the children of a very violent past, very violent, very harmful. And there’s moral injury, there’s a spiritual poverty that comes along with being part of that legacy. And for anyone who begins to open their eyes and their heart to that reality, we’re going to feel pain. 

I was at a conference this weekend, a gathering of Coming to the Table, which is a group that works on repairing the legacies of slavery in this country. There were descendants of both sides of that legacy of slavery present, and I was speaking with a Black man who said, “We need y’all to understand that feeling some grief or feeling some guilt is not going to kill you. It’s okay to feel it. You need to feel it.” And I couldn’t agree more, because allowing ourselves to feel it is actually the portal into healing it and beginning to transform it. And in white culture, I feel we have built up this false narrative that we shouldn’t feel guilt, we shouldn’t feel shame, we shouldn’t feel anything uncomfortable, and that somehow it’s going to hurt us if we feel those things. But in my experience, it’s not true. 

AA: Yeah, it’s a really important part of the process. I agree with that. And also I think that on a micro level, anytime you have a conversation with an individual, and if it is in a context like you said, where it’s specifically about that history, it’s a fact of interpersonal communication that if someone shares with you their pain, that having space to sit with it and to say, “That’s real. I am grieved that this happened to you,” or “I am grieved that this happened to your people, and I accept that I am part of the community. It was my ancestors that caused it and I have benefited from it throughout my life.” To have that empathy and the willingness to sit in it, even though it’s really, really painful. I just don’t think you can bypass that. I don’t think you can shortcut it and get to any real healing. And the ancestors that did commit the actual crimes are not here now, so I feel like by proxy it is our responsibility and our opportunity to try to make that healing. I couldn’t agree more, which leads to my next question for you. You talk about the importance of doing our own racial healing, so we feel that. It can feel like despair and terrible crippling grief sometimes, and then what? How do the descendants of white settlers do our own racial healing? 

HG: Yeah. Well, one of the things that has been most important for me is the understanding that we were not always considered white. Whiteness is something that was invented in order to consolidate power and wealth and land into the hands of elite European men. There’s an appendix toward the back of my book where I shared my research on the invention of whiteness. And doing that research was so helpful for me, because I came to understand that this is a construct. It was created in the 1600s in the Colony of Virginia, and it has been building and expanding and it’s been written into law since then. And it’s not actually who we are, though. It’s kind of a paradox. On one hand, those of us who are walking around in fair-skinned bodies and identified as white, we receive all this privilege that we can’t ignore that’s shaping our reality to our advantage and to the disadvantage of everyone else. 

But at the same time, that is not actually who we are. Our ancestors were not identified that way prior to the 1600s in this country, on this continent, our ancestors came from very diverse communities with distinct folk cultures throughout Europe. Before that, they were tribal people. So learning about that and beginning to identify with those much older ancestral roots has been a really important part of my racial healing as a white person. And part of the thing about whiteness is that we’re not supposed to talk about it. We’re not supposed to admit to it. We’re just supposed to consider it normal and invisible. So I think that even by pointing at it and saying, “That’s whiteness. This is how I was socialized to behave as a white person.” Even doing that small act is an act of defiance and liberation over that system of control, and that’s a beginning act that we can take to begin our racial healing. And then it just goes on from there. 

AA: Yeah. And going on from there, you talk about specifically ancestral healing too, and it sounds like one of the things that is helpful is identifying the specificity of our ancestors. Because as you say, whiteness isn’t even really a thing. Europe is so diverse. I thought it was interesting in your bio that you mentioned Indigenous peoples of Ancient Europe. Can you talk about that, and what do you recommend to others as they’re undergoing specifically ancestral healing? 

HG: Yeah. When I got my DNA back, I found a fairly high percentage of Neanderthal ancestry, which, you know, the Neanderthals have gotten a bad rap. But when I saw that, and then I started learning more about how long they were on the continent of Europe, I mean, there are Neanderthal sites in Spain that are over 70,000 years old. Those people were even pre-Indo-European people. And that to me means they were indigenous. They were there for millennia on that continent. And then eventually, there were waves of Indo-Europeans that came in and were probably violent in some ways and began assimilating those earlier cultures within them. But all of that is part of my blueprint as I’m walking around today. And I also have Basque ancestry, which is a distinct language group that’s not an Indo-European language group, that’s another part of that indigenous European ancestry. I really feel like the more that we can embrace that our DNA actually carries that very ancient memory, the better. We need to embrace that and accept that and know that we are much older and deeper than this construct of whiteness. And I’ve done that in a variety of ways. One way is that I tend an ancestor altar at my house, and I have spent a lot of time building a relationship with them, asking them to teach me and guide me and send me dreams and help. Help because we need that help from the ancient past in order to pull forward a different kind of future.

AA: Hmm, that’s really great. You have this kind of healing through a relationship with ancient ancestors, and then you talked earlier about the pain that comes from the ancestors who came during a pretty short amount of time, just a few centuries, who came to America and committed all of these atrocious crimes against humanity and created this country on those foundations. I love that you hold space for all of it, and that there’s so much nuance in the way you view your ancestors. So, I guess, once we’ve healed in our relationship with who we are and where our people come from, how do we make reparations for the actual harms that were done? Whether we discover that our ancestors enslaved others, or that they stole land and participated in, at the very least, cultural genocide, if not actual murder genocide, what do we do with that? Maybe you could speak to the way that you have chosen to make reparations for the sins of your ancestors. 

HG: Yeah, absolutely. One thing I can share, and I’ll send it to you to include in the show notes, I have a guide to making a personal reparations plan that I use with all different kinds of groups. Some of them are cross-class groups where people don’t necessarily have a lot of money or privilege. Some of them are groups of reparative philanthropists who have a lot of wealth or they’re wealth-adjacent people and they can give a lot, but it doesn’t really matter. Regardless, anybody can work with it, and it’s really all about the recognition that we as individuals have the power to make reparations. I find that a lot of times when we talk about reparations as a political act or an act that would be enabled by our government someday, the conversation just stalls out. It’s just a debate that goes nowhere. It goes round and round in circles about, you know, “We can’t afford that” and “That isn’t legit,” and so forth. 

But for those of us who feel the call toward reparations, it’s completely accessible. It can happen through a myriad of different ways. It can happen through learning whose land you are on, finding out if that community is still there. In many cases, the Indigenous communities on this land were pushed away and relocated to other places. So finding out if they’re still there, learning about their history, finding out if there is an organization that is led by an Indigenous or Black community where you live, signing up for a monthly recurring donation, reaching out and asking, “How, if at all, can I help?” That is a question that I learned from Lyla June Johnston, who wrote the closing words in my book. She’s a Diné scholar, musician, and wonderful human being. She taught me that question that we can’t go into other communities being prescriptive and thinking we know best. We need to go with humility and be ready to hear that maybe our help isn’t needed. And then maybe it will be needed, but it’ll be needed in a way that we didn’t anticipate, you know? So I’ve been involved with an Indigenous, community-led grassroots organization here in Flagstaff for the last decade, and it’s really my great privilege to be in relationship with them and to really listen for what they’re calling for and what they’re trying to do and to get behind them. Those are some of the ways that we can all move into reparations. And even if it’s a monthly recurring donation of $10, if that’s all you can afford, to a land tax program or a Black-led organization, that’s wonderful. Because that is an act of bringing this spiritual, ethereal, ancestral healing that we’ve been talking about into action, into the material reality. And that’s what we have to do. We have to do both and. 

AA: A hundred percent. 

Another thing that you write about in making reparations and in really trying to do this healing work is the value of apology, and that’s another piece of it, right? You talked about sharing stories, being able to be there and show up for people’s stories, making reparations in a way that is led by the group of people that you’re making reparations with. And you talk about the difference between making an apology and asking forgiveness. Could you talk about that a little bit and talk about whether apologies for historic harm or are even valuable?

we as individuals have the power to make reparations

HG: Yeah. I love this question because as I’ve been going along, I’ve realized that there’s been a lot of confusing messages put around apology and forgiveness in our culture. It is often weaponized. When you think about being little kids and getting in a fight over who gets the toy, I mean, how often do you hear parents forcing their children to apologize? And that’s the wrong message, because apology is not something that should be coerced. It’s not something to make you look good. For me, it’s something that is a deep spiritual commitment to feeling the grief, feeling the remorse, and then making a commitment to stop that behavior. I have had quite a few interesting experiences with apology. In one case, I did write an ancestral apology directly to someone. He’s a friend of mine named Edgar Villanueva, who founded the Decolonizing Wealth Project. But that was the only time I’ve written an apology directly to someone, and I did that with the guidance of his book, Decolonizing Wealth. 

All the other apologies that I’ve given have been in a ritualized form, so it’s a process of writing a prayer of apology and ritually burning it. And there’s something about that that is really clean, because when you’re not giving the apology directly to a human being, you’re not putting expectations on them to have to respond, to feel really awkward, and to feel that they have to somehow forgive you. You’re taking away the aspects of that that could be performative and you are just making the apology directly from your heart to the divine. And that is a powerful act. To me it’s different from asking for forgiveness because asking someone to forgive you or asking a community to forgive you is asking them to get entangled with you in a way that they might not be ready for, and that can be another layer of harm. It can be a form of putting pressure, and in a lot of ways we don’t even need to do it. I’ve been told by many Indigenous elders, “You are already forgiven. It’s already done. You have already been forgiven on the spiritual level,” so I really don’t need to ask human beings for forgiveness because it’s really on me to do the work of apology and repair. That’s kind of how I see it. 

AA: I love that. I totally agree. And I’ll add that I’ve been taking Indigenous studies courses in my PhD program, and I recently read an article, I don’t remember the author now off the top of my head, but it’s an Indigenous scholar who says, basically, “Dear white people, I do not forgive you.” And the truth is, I agree with you that asking for forgiveness is about the person who’s saying they’re sorry. It’s about the perpetrator or the person who’s trying to make repairs. It’s not about the person who is harmed. So I really like that strategy of doing the work of healing, of doing the work, of asking forgiveness almost to the universe or to whatever we conceive of as the divine, because then no matter how the other person feels, we’re able to do the work in ourselves that we need to do without making it about us. 

Because you’re right, listeners will remember this in season one of the podcast, I was talking with a dear, dear friend of mine from college who’s Black, and I was kind of discovering for the first time in our conversation how this very close friend of mine had a completely different experience at our hugely majority white college that we went to. And she was sharing things with me that I hadn’t known, and we were talking about the history of enslavement, and I just cried and cried and cried and cried. And listening back to the episode, what happened then was she comforted me, right? She comforted me because I was the one crying. We’re close enough friends that it’s okay, it’s okay that that happened, and I know she felt loved and she could tell how much grief I was feeling. I think it meant a lot to her that I cared that much. However, the burden got placed on her to comfort me. And what I learned from that really was that the tears are appropriate, but I need to get those out by myself. And the grief and the sorrow and the big burden. It’s a big burden, and that’s on me to process through that with whomever I need to, but not with the people who were already harmed. So I appreciate you talking about that and the value of apology and asking for forgiveness, but that needs to not be an additional burden placed on that community.

HG: That’s right. And I appreciate, Amy, what you said too about the article “Dear white people, we don’t forgive you.” And that’s real. When that feeling is there, we really have to respect it. It’s a boundary. And I totally get it that not all people and not all communities are ready to forgive us. And why would they? They are still dealing with so much oppression, so much violence, a huge racial wealth gap. And it’s okay, you know, we need to accept that when that sentiment is there, we need to accept that. 

AA: A hundred percent. Yeah, I agree. On a related topic, you write a term in your book called “white peril”. What does “white peril” mean?

HG: Yeah. It’s so interesting. This is a concept that I’m starting to see being written about by more and more people, and we all have different names for it, and for me, that term came from my friend Calvin Terrell, who is a wonderful speaker and educator. And for me what that means is it is the idea that although whiteness privileges all white people to varying degrees depending on class and gender and a whole bunch of other factors, it privileges us, and at the same time, it imperils us. It takes away essential aspects of our humanity, or I guess you could say it covers them up. It obscures certain aspects of ourselves that could be fully expressed were it not for this system of white supremacy that we are living in. And throughout the book, I tell stories of my own reckoning with white peril. For example, dealing with amnesia, dealing with denial, dealing with the feeling of being a spiritual orphan, things like that. These are the aspects of whiteness that we don’t often hear discussed by white people ourselves. I think there are authors of color who have been pointing out these things about white people for a long time, but we haven’t been transparent about it ourselves as much. That’s one of the things that I tried to bring into this book, was that transparent discussion of what this is like. 

AA: I think that’s so valuable. It really is. And on this whole theme of doing that inner work, that ancestral work, that healing work. Because obviously, when we think about really overtly racist people and organizations, sometimes at the core of that are those fears, that feeling of being orphaned, that feeling of like, “Who’s my group? I don’t know who I belong to.” And then it turns, if it’s not dealt with in healthy, appropriate ways, it can turn into white nationalism and white supremacy. Because that ache to feel belonging and wholeness, if that healing isn’t done, it can turn into all kinds of dangerous things, which is why it’s perilous, right? It’s so critical to address that in healthy ways.

HG: Yeah, absolutely. I think that a big factor about whiteness, like you said, is that absence of belonging, and I think that many of us are carrying around a suspicion that is rooted in ancestral realities that maybe we don’t actually belong here.

AA: And then what do you do? And it’s extremely painful, which is why I value your work so much, because I think that’s the thing we have to confront and to admit, like you said, that it does hurt. It does. To have the whole experience that you described at the beginning of the episode when you wake up to it. Because you can live for decades, you can live a long, long time without even waking up. And you love your country and maybe you are a nature person and you love the nature where you live and you are attached to it deeply, and then you discover that your ancestors stole it, you weren’t supposed to be here, and then you can lose faith in a lot of the things that are dear to you. It is very difficult and very disorienting. I’m so grateful that your book not only points out the historical harm, but says here’s how we can heal, and here’s what to do instead of just like, “I’ve now left you in despair and I’m going to walk away.” Here’s what we can do about it. Not only to make things right with the people who are harmed, which is of course the most important, but also to heal ourselves. Okay, I have another question. This is kind of on a different topic, but this podcast obviously is called Breaking Down Patriarchy. What does this have to do with patriarchy? How does your work subvert patriarchal systems? 

HG: Well, I love the title of your podcast. 

AA: Thank you. 

HG: And I love that you focused on this particular topic. For me, when I look at history, it’s kind of like colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy are almost like three strands of a braid. You can’t have one without the other. They have all co-developed in really insidious ways. So, like I mentioned earlier, the construct of whiteness was to consolidate wealth, land, and power into the hands of white men. Women didn’t have access to that, and so it has always been this process of a patriarchal consolidation of power. Patriarchy shows up in many different ways. One of the ways that it has shown up most profoundly in my life is, being brought up in an evangelical Christian family, it was always the male pastors up in front of church giving the sermons. And it was always this outsourcing of our power and our knowing to these authority systems that were all represented by men, by white men. And part of my unlearning of that has been to begin to trust my own intuition, for one, and to begin to trust other ways of knowing. This book was highly influenced by dreams. It wouldn’t have been written without a whole bunch of dreams that I’ve had over the years. And I came to learn how to trust that as a legitimate way of knowing, which was dream divination. And dream interpretation has long been demonized. It was long demonized throughout Europe, centuries ago. But why is that? Because they were building a system of patriarchy, all steeped in religious institutions, and the collusion between religious institutions and nation states to strip this innate power and knowing from people and to outsource it elsewhere. So a lot of my process of undoing the patriarchal conditioning has been this way of relearning. Relearning to trust, learning to go out on the land and listen, learning to sit with trees and realizing that trees have an intelligence, trees have a message, and I don’t have to go and sit in a church and listen to a man to get my spiritual direction. That’s been a big part of this for me. 

AA: Yeah, that’s really powerful, and I’d love to make a connection. You’ve said all of these things during this conversation, but I kind of want to make the explicit connection. I love how you are reclaiming intuition and dreams and nature, as you said. I know there’s kind of a movement, especially among white women, as they’re waking up and they’re feeling the alienation from maybe the faith of their family that came from Europe and the patriarchal tradition, so they’re feeling alienated from that. They’re discovering that their ancestors colonized, so they’re feeling alienated from that, and they see kind of this glimmering promise of more matrifocal cultures and nature-focused cultures in Indigenous culture, or perhaps yoga or perhaps other people’s cultures that hold things like goddesses and connection to nature and more egalitarian living. Then the danger is that they start to appropriate those things, right? They start to think, “I’m drawn to drum circles” or all of these other cultures, and that is a kind of dangerous territory. So I’m just making this connection also of why it’s so important to get to know the indigenous peoples of your own ancestry to connect to that for spiritual learning. And you even mentioned asking your own ancestors to give you dreams. Can you talk about that a little bit? I know that that’s something that you’ve done so healthily and so well is to turn to appropriate sources, and maybe to other people’s cultures for inspiration, but not to appropriate them.

HG: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I can say that I wouldn’t have had the confidence to trust my own dreams and to get on this path if it hadn’t been for having many Indigenous mentors who were extremely generous and gracious and were willing to show up and help me out. And across the board, they all pointed me back to my own people. I had a 15-year path of cultural appropriation and cultural sampling as a tribal belly dance teacher, which I write about in the book. And then out of that and out of the graciousness of learning from other cultures, I did write some guidelines in the book for how to learn from other cultures in a way that is relational and respectful, reciprocal, and not extractive. So I think there is a role to play, to learn from other cultures, that can definitely serve a role. And also it’s always going to point us back to our own people. And I’ve been surprised in my own lineage how much is still there. I’ve connected with teachers who have taught me very old songs, and Irish and Gaelic, and I’ve connected with a lot of the archetypes that come from those cultures before they were colonized. Because the British government colonized Ireland, colonized Scotland, so I’m going back to those pre-colonial roots in my own lines. Again, it’s another kind of both/and. But if anyone is going to learn from another culture, it’s very important and how you do that matters a lot. Capitalism has made it way too easy for us to extract and appropriate, so we need to try to avoid that trap and do it in a different way. 

AA: I’m so, so glad you wrote about it and with such detail. And again, with such compassion for the reader and humility in yourself saying, “I made these mistakes. Here’s what I learned. Do this, not this, do this, not this.” It’s really, really helpful. A couple of the last questions I wanted to ask you, Hilary, is to tell listeners a little bit more about the mountain where you live and what the issues are there affecting that mountain. 

AA: It’s incredibly distressing. Is there any way that listeners could learn– We may have listeners who live right there really close. I know we have lots of listeners in Arizona, actually. Is there a way that they could get involved in supporting the Indigenous community and supporting the health of the land in their area?

HG: Absolutely. The company that runs the ski resort has got resorts all over the country and they incentivize people to go to the different resorts. So if anyone is listening, boycott Arizona Snowbowl, do not go up there. That’s the best thing that you can do. And also you can look up Indigenous Circle of Flagstaff. I can share their website for the show notes. You can make a monthly recurring donation to Indigenous Circle of Flagstaff to support this ongoing advocacy and the resistance of this colonial extractive mindset here on the sacred land. 

AA: That’s such a great example of something that people can actually do, take action in their own community, which I think is a really powerful thing to do. I want to draw attention to another specific action, and that is the fact that you’ve chosen to donate all of the proceeds from the sale of your book, which I think is such a beautiful choice. Can you tell us a little bit about where the donation will go?

HG: Yeah. I am dividing any income I receive in half. Half of it is going to Decolonizing Wealth Project, which is an organization that was founded by Edgar Villanueva. It is a regranting fund that’s working on a number of different initiatives around reparations and land back and the wellbeing of Indigenous and Black communities across the country. And then the other half is going to Jubilee Justice, which also does wonderful racial healing work, land-based work, supporting African American farmers in the South. Really that return to food sovereignty and building right relations with the land. So those two organizations, I’m very grateful, have agreed to accept all the income. And that’s important for me because this is walking the talk, and that’s what this book is all about. It’s about returning resources back to the communities from which they have been extracted. 

AA: Yeah. That’s fantastic, Hilary. Awesome. As we wrap up, I know you’ve given us so many wonderful ideas about things we can do to help. Is there one last action item that you’d like to share or a takeaway that you’d like listeners to bring with them as we wrap up the episode? 

HG: I want to share that a really valuable book for me has been An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. It took me quite a while to get through it because it’s very painful, but it’s necessary. It’s a good, clean, necessary pain. And another one is Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700–1100 by Max Dashu, who is an independent feminist historian. This book is one of my favorites for illuminating the pre-patriarchal European folk cultures and what was going on, what kind of practices people were doing. And a lot of those practices were documented by church officials so that they could be demonized and disparaged, and that’s how those records were kept. So that is a wonderful resource as well. I would recommend those two books. 

AA: Fabulous. Everybody knows I love a good book recommendation, so that’s great. For my last question, I’d love to know what you’re working on next, and then where can listeners find your work? If you can repeat the title of the book that we discussed today, tell us where we can find your work and tell us what we can expect next from you. 

HG: Yeah, my book is called Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair. And some of the things I’m working on are that I co-facilitate groups of European-descended settlers to work through this material over an eight- or nine-month arc. That’s one thing that I do. I also teach reparative philanthropy classes from time to time. When those are happening, I have them up on my website, which is goodrelative.com. And another thing that I am working on and really deeply caring a lot about right now is that all of the federal funding that was dedicated to researching and investigating the Native American boarding schools was recently pulled. And so I am just letting people know that that work is essential to remember what happened in the process of westward expansion in the name of Manifest Destiny. There were thousands of Indigenous children that were kidnapped and forcibly sent to these institutions as a process of cultural assimilation and genocide. And that history needs to be known, it needs to be told. Anyone who would like to support that can make a donation to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which is making an effort to raise those funds that were just pulled from the federal government. 

AA: I’m so grateful that you highlighted those things. These are things that I study actually every day, and I’m just learning now from you things that I didn’t know that I could get involved in. So yes, I echo those recommendations to listeners. Thank you so much for pointing that out to us. Hilary, I love your book, I love your work, I’m so grateful that you joined us today. Thank you so much for being here. 

HG: Well, thank you so much for having me, Amy, and I’m really excited to meet a kindred spirit.

AA: Yes, me too. Me too.

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