Description:
A heartfelt invitation to embrace discomfort, repair harm, and reweave our connections to land, ancestors, and one another.
Brief description: Hilary Giovale is a community organizer, facilitator, and writer who lives on Hopi, Diné, Apache, and Havasupai land in Flagstaff, Arizona. As a white American settler, she is descended from Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and Indigenous peoples of Ancient Europe. Hilary seeks to follow Indigenous and Black leadership in support of human rights, environmental justice, and equitable futures. As an active reparationist, her work is guided by intuition, love, and relationships. She divests from whiteness and bridges divides with truth, healing, apology, and forgiveness. She is the author of the award-winning book Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair. Learn more about her work at goodrelative.com.
Review Quotes:
"In a world built on and still profiting from slavery of our past and present, historical and ongoing genocide, as well as other forms of incomprehensible settler violence, Hilary offers the most sane advice -to lean into that which gives life: community, our planet, and the ways of being interconnected. The sharing of Hilary's journey is beautiful and sorely overdue. The world needs, now more than ever, to know what it means to be a good relative."
- Dr. David Ragland, Co-Founder and Co-ED, The Truth Telling Project; Director, Grassroots Reparations Campaign; Lecturer on Reparations as Spiritual Practice, Harvard Divinity School
"In a moment so overwhelmed by distrust, lies, and separations, where do we even begin to locate truth, healing, and repair? For the white-bodied descendants of European settlers, how do we move through the denial, guilt, ignorance, and shame that comes with reckoning with both historic and current day harms? In Becoming a Good Relative, Hilary Giovale guides us with vivid detail and sensory experience through her journey of slowing down, listening deeply, and attuning to interconnected relationship with ancestral wisdom, place, and being. She invites us to accompany her in acknowledging the harms of white supremacist colonial violence and committing to paths of apology, repair, and healing so that we may all live into right relationship."
- Dr. Amanda K Gross, Author of White Women, Get Ready: How Healing Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome Leads to Anti-Racist Change, Winner of a 2024 Nautilus
Book Awards for Social Justice & Social Change
"This book is essentially a spiral-shaped map with many paths and layers of meaning. Whether you are attracted by the lyrical quality of her writing, or the deeply personal heart-work Hilary Giovale undertakes, this book invites thorough reading and rereading as new understanding unfolds, takes root, and expands. At its core, Becoming a Good Relative invites us into wholeness through the rekindling of ancestral memory and encourages us to walk the path of repair from a place of kindness, abundance, and strength, our woundedness healed."
- Lotte Lieb Dula, Reparations Advocate and Co-Founder, Reparations4Slavery (reparations4slavery.com)
"...a welcome book focused on truth-telling, healing, and work toward repair of the centuries-long damage that has impacted so many. Giovale asks herself, and her readers, especially those of us who identify as "white" to honestly contemplate our nation's and our own families' histories."
- Thomas Norman DeWolf, Author of Inheriting the Trade and past Director of Coming to the Table (comingtothetable.org)
"This is a book for learning to know your ancestors beyond DNA... It is a book for people struggling with their whiteness, for those who want to be better philanthropists, and for those who like a good story. I also recommend Becoming a Good Relative for inspiration in these difficult times."
-Michele Sands, Friends Journal
"What makes Giovale's narrative particularly exceptional is the emphasis on humility. She shares her mistakes and how she has humbly made amends, a process that involves listening to Indigenous people, admitting missteps when interacting with cultures not her own, and asking for grace from the people she has unknowingly harmed."
-Dr. Maileen Hamto, Tulsa Book Review