Becoming a Good Relative:
Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair
By Hilary Giovale, 2024
A Review by Leny Mendoza Strobel
I offer this review in honor of and in gratitude to my Ancestors and Creator who connect me to the work of Apology, Repair, and Reparations between settlers and indigenous communities on Turtle Island.
My name is Leny Mendoza Strobel. I am Kapampangan from Central Luzon in the Philippines. I was displaced from my homeland by imperial and colonial history (Spain, U.S.) and have been a settler on Wappo, Coast Miwok, Pomo lands, also known as Sonoma County, for four decades. I have been on the journey of decolonization and reclaiming my indigenous mind since and I am learning how to fall in love more deeply with the Lands that hold and nurture me.
Hilary and I met in Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains online course where I was one of the teachers in 2017 along with Jurgen Kremer, Isoke Femi, and Eve Annecke. In 2019, Hilary asked me if I would be willing to participate in a Ceremony of Apology and Forgiveness led by Lakota Elder Basil Brave Heart… and I did.
Now I am sitting here with Hilary’s book and taking in the details of her journey as she answered the courtship song of her Indigenous Soul. As a (retired) professor of Ethnic Studies, I have read many books by white-identified authors on decolonizing Whiteness and unlearning white privilege, and the recovery of an indigenous mind. Most academic writing today always calls for the author to identify their location and positionality but most of it is done in a perfunctory manner. This book is different. Reading Hilary’s book is a refreshing deep dive into this challenging and wondrous path of healing and repair for white-identified folks.
Becoming a Good Relative is an ethnoautobiographical account of a life that has been transformed by immersion in the indigenous world view. Ethnoautobiography is a conceptual framework introduced by Jurgen Kremer, a colleague with whom I’ve team-taught Ethnic Studies courses at my university. Jurgen eventually published a textbook, Ethnoautobiography: Stories and Practices for Unlearning Whiteness, Decolonization, Uncovering Ethnicities — which Hilary also references in her book.
What is beautiful about Hilary’s book is her transparency in writing about the challenges of being on this path — the embodied aspects of the emotional, psychological, spiritual, physical, cognitive aspects of unlearning whiteness. I am moved by her careful annotations, respectful acknowledgement, and referencing all the people, non-human beings, texts, places, and events that led to transformative moments along the way. She calls it “interpersonal philanthropy” — a concept I am happy to add to my vocabulary.
The book is in three parts: “Spinning the Thread”, “Weaving” and “The Fabric”. “Spinning the Thread” recounts how her “bubble of denial” burst and revealed her “white American settler privilege” as she joined a group of travelers to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Scotland. In these travels, she began to question colonialism, white patriarchy, and the social construction of whiteness. Questioning led to an in-depth inner search into her own ancestral lineage where complicity in these projects revealed itself and called for accountability. Ethnoautobiography emphasizes the process of accounting as it reveals the shadows of the modern self’s sense of identity.
How does a white person acknowledge the participation of one’s ancestors in enslaving black peoples; in being complicit in land-taking and other imperial and colonial projects, without being stuck in guilt and shame? Go deeper and further back into the indigenous history of your ancestors. Ask them to reveal themselves in dreams and visions. Pray and make offerings to the Land and Water. Seek and be a good relative to the Place and Indigenous Peoples where you are. Make reparations — these are some of the instructions that Hilary received and details in her book. While reading, I had many teary-eyed moments of gratitude as the stories revealed the ways she surrendered to the path that called out to her soul. Going deep into the indigenous history of Europe to find her ancestors’ stories before they were wounded by the trauma of invasions and displacement; going deep into how far the church and its Doctrine of Discovery spread its imperial tentacles, and other historical events — Hilary cites the historical documents that will be helpful for the white-identified readers to pursue their own quests.
In the second part, “Weaving”, Hilary writes about the many portals that revealed more about her ancestral history and how she integrates the lessons she is learning into her present life through her dreams, through a guided fasting ceremony, in making reparations, in participating in ceremonies of apology and repair.
In drawing the smaller arcs of her life, she connects them to the bigger arcs, i.e., the metanarratives of modernity, in order to make sense of it all. She joins a growing decolonial movement of folks who are courageously facing the historical wrongs that their ancestors have participated in and making sure that the unearned privileges that have accrued from their actions will not be passed on to future generations.
In the third part of the book, “The Fabric”, Hilary reiterates the importance of rekindling ancestral memory and finding co-sojourners who, together, enliven and encourage one another to make reparations. Hilary writes:
For me, rekindling ancestral memory is like having my wise, old ancestors wrap me in a swaddling blanket while rocking, humming, and holding me tight. This process has helped soothe the agitation, cognitive dissonance, and emotional overwhelm of White Peril. It has allowed my cells to recalibrate to the reality of being loved, held, and cared for by multitudes of beings who lived here on Earth over thousands of generations.
This quote remains with me as it names the somatic and cognitive impact of White Peril and how the integration of the inner and outer dimensions of healing from the violence of coloniality/modernity is made possible. I am reminded of the term “hospicing modernity” by another scholar, Vanessa Andreotti, who also wrote a book with the same title. I feel that this is what Hilary does by writing this book.
Lyla June Johnston, Diné scholar, writes in the Closing Words of the book how we were “tricked out of paradise”. For Europeans, this trickery took thousands of years of suffering from warfare, hunger, dispossessions and displacements and the unresolved trauma of that history became a history of enslavement and conquests and genocides on this continent. In calling for a re-membering and re-connection to all that has separated us from each other, Lyla June invites the reader to remember European indigenous history and connect it to the history of indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.
Both Lyla June and Hilary draw a map for this journey that doesn’t tempt the reader to do a spiritual bypass — a common phenomenon that happens as white folks grapple with their sense of disconnection and separation. Self-help books are a dime a dozen that promise healing from trauma by all kinds of easy-to-do and quick-to-accomplish practices. This often means bypassing the shadowy parts of our personal stories that were shaped by History. Not so in this book.
Becoming a Good Relative is a work of Remembering. In the Appendices of the book, Hilary provides resources for learning European indigenous history as well as recommended practices for developing an inner soulful practice that balances the cognitive with the somatic and psychospiritual strength and courage that this work requires. A Glossary also lists concepts and terminology that shifts perspectives and paradigms.ny portals that revealed more about her ancestral history and how she integrates the lessons she is learning into her present life. Through her dreams, through a guided fasting ceremony, in making reparations, in participating in ceremonies of apology and repair.
Finally, allowing tears of Grief to flow allows the portal to repair and reparations to open.
May this book encourage you to discover the well-spring of deep healing that connects you to the River of Joy…where the Shadows no longer cast us asleep into Forgetting. May the act of Re-membering all the disconnected parts of ourselves bind us to a vision of our Indigenous Future together.
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