“Reading Hilary’s book is a refreshing deep dive into this challenging and wondrous path of healing and repair for white-identified folks... 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, and cognitive aspects of unlearning whiteness.” Leny Mendoza Strobel
“For Hilary Giovale these have included learning, “wit(h)nessing” and then truth-telling about racial and colonial violence; building a ceremonial relationship with the natural world; reclaiming European ancestral songs and languages; feeding and forgiving the ancestors; and giving generously of her love, labor and money in the spirit of gratitude and repair.” Morgan Curtis
Online four sessions Thursdays 4-5:30 pm PST,
February 20, March 6, March 20, April 3, 2025
Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel will join us February 20, Morgan Curtis will join us March 6, Hilary Giovale will join us March 20 and Grandmother Ejna Fleury will join us April 3.
We will hear personal insights from our speakers on the provocative themes of this ground-breaking book. We will have the opportunity to question the speakers and discuss our reactions in small groups and to share with the full group.
February 20, March 6, March 20, April 3, 2025
Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel will join us February 20, Morgan Curtis will join us March 6, Hilary Giovale will join us March 20 and Grandmother Ejna Fleury will join us April 3.
BUY YOUR BOOK!
Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair
Hilary Giovale is a mother, writer, and community organizer who holds a Master’s Degree in Good and Sustainable Communities. Descended from the Celtic,Germanic,Nordic, and Indigenous peoples of Ancient Europe, she is a ninth-generation American settler. For most of her life these origins were obscured by whiteness.After learning more about her ancestors’ history, Hilary began emerging from a fog of amnesia, denial, and fragmentation. For the first time, she could see a painful reality: her family’s occupation of this land has harmed Indigenous and African peoples, cultures, lands, and lifeways. With this realization, her life changed. All the income I receive from book sales is being returned to the Decolonizing Wealth Project and Jubilee Justice.
Conversation with Oglála Lakȟóta Elder Basil Brave Heart: Part 1 - Bioneers
“. . . Becoming a Good Relative is an ethnoautobiographical account of a life that has been transformed by immersion in the Indigenous worldview. 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, and cognitive aspects of unlearning whiteness. I am moved by her careful annotations, respectful acknowledgment, and referencing all the people, non-human beings, texts, places, and events that led to transformative moments along the way.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.”
—Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel is Kapampangan from the Philippines and has lived on Wappo, Coast Miwok, and Southern Pomo lands for four decades. She is Professor Emerita of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University. She is the author of books and other publications on the process of decolonization and indigenization. She is a Founding Elder at the Center for Babaylan Studies. Find her at lenystrobel.com
Decolonization as a Spiritual Path (#2 edited)- Leny Strobel, Center of Babaylan Studies - version 2
“Audre Lorde said the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Becoming a Good Relative is an invitation for those of us born and raised in the master’s house to walk out the door, take a long, slow breath, humbly listen to the people and lands outside, and let our hearts break open with their stories of what we and our ancestors have done. As we unravel the untruths we’ve been taught about our nation’s history, we will find tools of liberation we never could have imagined from inside…Her story is an invitation to join her. She’s holding the door open for all of us.”
Morgan Curtis Guided by the call to transmute the legacy of her colonizing and enslaving ancestors, Morgan Curtis is a facilitator, writer, money coach, organizer and mother. She supports her fellow people with wealth and class privilege to move towards redistribution, atonement, and repair of ancestral harms. Her own commitments include redistributing 100% of the $600k she inherited and 50% of her income to primarily Black- and Indigenous-led social movements and land projects. Her story and work have been covered by The Guardian, The Financial Times, and El País, and she’s been a podcast guest on For The Wild and NPR’s This is Uncomfortable, amongst others. Morgan is a member-leader with Resource Generation, and calls Canticle Farm, a multi-racial, cross-class intentional community, home. She has a Masters from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied the spiritual dimension of the reparations work required of white descendants of colonizers and enslavers. Her chapbook Decolonial Dames of America was published in 2023, and other recent writing has appeared in Faith & Leadership and The Harvard Crimson.
Indigenous and Irish Catholic Grandmothers and friends
Kunsi/Abuela Ejna Jean Fleury My mission and purpose is in sacred service to humankind in “…a re-consecration of our place in the holiness of existence,” as Martin Shaw so succinctly and eloquently states. This would include humanity’s collective recognition that we have always been holy and to live in that accord with humankind, beloved Earth, and the Cosmos.
Molly McGettigan Arthur Molly is a native San Franciscan. She is a lay sister associate with the Society of the Sacred Heart and is a great, great granddaughter of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Californio Patron”, and General Patrick Edward Connor, “Father of Mining” of Utah. She works on projects of reparation with Indigenous people because of her brutal colonist/conqueror ancestral lineage and violent Catholic spiritual legacy; she calls this Decolonizing our Hearts. She curates Waking Up to Our Own History and EcoBirth-Women for Earth & Birth and Women's Collective Matrix|
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Kunsi/Abuela Ejna Jean Fleury
and Molly McGettigan Arthur
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