Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair

by Hilary Giovale

Becoming a Good Relative weaves the author’s personal story of transformation with historical research, spiritual teachings, and an appendix of practical skills, resources, and rituals. Giovale offers warm, compassionate, and vulnerable personal stories to reveal how unlearning fragility, becoming antiracist, and repairing ancestral harm can feel. She invites readers beyond intellectual analysis into intuition, dreams, and practical rituals. These practices can transform the harms of colonialism, racial hierarchy, and economic inequity from the inside out. While written as a memoir, this book gives readers practical tools for building their own resilience and committing to reparations for the long term.

This book is for white people who are curious about moving beyond white fragility and into robust healing. It speaks to the TikTok users who have viewed videos on #decolonization 14 million times. It also addresses the philanthropic sector, which has increased its overall giving by 41% since 2019, along with regular Americans’ substantial donations, and is seeking inspiration to direct more funding to communities of Color.

Genres: Spirituality, Indigenous, Nonfiction, Self Help, Memoir, History, Social Justice

360 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

​​Hilary Giovale is a mother, writer, community organizer, and facilitator who lives on Hopi, Diné, Apache, and Havasupai land in Flagstaff, Arizona. A ninth-generation 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 Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair.

Reviews

[Whatithinkaboutthisbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Becoming a Good Relative Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing and Repair by Hilary Giovale

This is a powerful and deeply moving account of one woman’s journey toward truth, responsibility and repair. Giovale openly confronts the harm caused by her ancestors while learning how to live with conscious intention in support of healing from colonization.

With remarkable honesty and vulnerability, Giovale describes the emotional and spiritual work required to face her denial, shame and privilege and to begin decolonizing herself from unconscious racist conditioning. What makes this book especially compelling is its authenticity and vulnerability. Giovale does not present herself as having “arrived”, but rather invites readers into an ongoing process of learning, questioning, accountability and growth. It is especially powerful that she takes this journey alongside her family.

Guided by a rich and generous network of Black and Indigenous friends and mentors, Giovale explores what it means to become “a loving, steady, humble white person” in other’s spaces. She engages with Black and Indigenous communities with respect, humility and openness, modelling a way of being that centres listening, relationships and trust, including committing to an annual fasting ceremony for four years. The book is both reflective and practical, offering exercises and concrete strategies for readers who are ready to do this work.

Compelling, inspiring and grounded in lived experience this is a great read for anyone interested in examining their ancestry and learning how to show us as a responsible and committed ally.

[Thomas DeWolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these challenging times when people are so divided, when conflicts are high and rising, and some in power are trying to bury the negative history of the United States around slavery, racism, colonialism, Christian nationalism, and male and white supremacy, Becoming a Good Relative is a welcome book focused on truth-telling, healing, and work toward repair of the centuries-long damage that has impacted so many “people of culture” who don’t identify as “white.” Hilary 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. She asks us to “wake up, do our work, and learn to become good relatives from the inside out.” How do we undo harmful hierarchies, end segregation, racism, and discrimination of all kinds and work for equity? “White” people need to build the capacity for discomfort, to sit with it, and learn from it. As she writes, “For many, discomfort is a reality of daily life – not an option.” For Hilary, and for me, being uncomfortable is a choice. We have the choice to examine our history with openness and honesty and humility, to forgive our ancestors and ourselves and then work for equity and the liberation of all people. Read this book and let’s do the work. Living in these difficult days, this book is particularly important.

[Cindy Geary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilary Giovale’s book, Becoming a Good Relative, is a gift and an invitation. The gift is the story of her journey into relationship—with Indigenous, Black, and People of Color whose paths she finds herself walking along—but also the story of finding relationship with her European ancestors who come to her along other paths, sometimes unbidden. As she develops bonds of trust with the people she meets, they tell her of the embodied trauma that continues in their lives, generations since the beginning of (and never really ending) colonial land theft and genocide, she begins to understand her own ancestors’ participation in the white settler colonization project. She finds the threads of connection with her ancestors entangled with her new understanding of the social injustices in the lives of others.



Hilary’s first encounter with her European ancestors occurs during a trip to Scotland with her extended family. They visit the island of Erraid where she experiences the unnerving sensation that she has been there before. As they move on to Balquhidder, she finds her family name on the wall of a small stone church. She is drawn to climb up a hill behind the church, where she once again feels herself connected to a place she’s never been. Carrying the knowledge of this strange, physical awareness deep inside of her, she later uncovers, almost accidentally, emotionally devastating truths about a descendant of these same ancestors who immigrated to America in the 1700s, a fourth great-grandfather who enslaved people to work for him in North Carolina and Mississippi.



This is not only a story about the guilt and shame from that discovery, but also of reckoning and reconciliation. She finds the political, social, and cultural histories of this country that have been largely hidden, that caused past and current suffering of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color. Deep feelings of grief and anger arise in her. Though she might have expected blame and judgement from friends who started her on her exploration, instead she finds love and solace. They share with her ways forward into forgiveness and repair.



Key to this process was finding identity with her own ancestral relations, the relatives that she could have easily only blamed for her feelings of humiliation when learning their complicity in others’ suffering. Instead she sought out information about their lives in Europe, the trauma, especially for women, that was passed down to descendants and onto whoever was “the other,” in their new homelands. She was encouraged by Indigenous friends to learn from the cultural/spiritual traditions of her Scottish/Celtic ancestors as a way of finding love and affection and sympathy, honoring and celebrating the good that came to her from these ancestors. When Hilary felt the need for European-descended Elders to follow this path, she found Sine McKenna from whom she learned language and stories and songs. Hilary wrote, “I could sense ancestral memory reweaving within my blood and bones…some of the Gaels’ ancient cosmology was still imprinted within the old songs, blessings, and cures” (p.139).



This loving reconnection that gives her a new depth of understanding of herself does not obviate the need to apologize and make repair. Through her ever-evolving developing relationships with Indigenous, Black, and People of Color she finds ways in which present day amends can be made for unearned privilege. Sometimes this takes the form of service, such as assisting with fasting ceremonies or working in solidarity to change unfair policies, and reparation sometimes takes the form of money or land. Making repair is an ongoing practice.



The invitation of this book is made to descendants of white settlers, to join her in this work of revelation and repair, beginning from wherever we are. She provides a multitude of resources to assist in every aspect of our journey toward becoming a good relative. She introduces us to so many teachers and writers who have laid the groundwork for understanding the landscape of the past and the present, and gives due credit to the many people she knows personally who supported her along her path, including the ancestors she met along the way.



I am glad to say that I know Hilary through my participation last year in the “Rekindling Ancestral Memory Circle” co-facilitated with Elyshia Holliday, Executive Director of ONE, the organizational host. This nine-month workshop guides white settler descendants through a process similar to hers. In the workshop I learned parts of Hilary’s story, but I was eager to read the fuller story. Through the narrative generosity of this book, I came to understand how her work unfolded over time. I was reminded, through her example, that the work of social justice, of investigating the past, and working towards repair in the present are not tasks we can undertake alone. And once we set out on our journey to discover our place in all of this, we can’t know ahead of time where road will take us, only that the journey will never really end. I am grateful to Hilary for sharing all that she has learned along the way.

— o —

You can find out more about this book on Hilary’s website www.hilarygiovale.com. And you can follow Hilary on Instagram at @hilarygiovaleauthor.

[Lotte Lieb Dula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilary Giovale has written a remarkable book on the nature of repair, and how white Americans, especially white settler descendants, might approach the many facets of reparative being, working alongside, in community with, and at the direction of Indigenous and Black communities.

This book is no academic treatise: Hilary Giovale has crafted a deeply personal narrative tracing her multi-year spiritual journey as she joins with Indigenous and Black elders, seeks to embody the knowledge-ways that are gradually revealed to her, and finally leans into the wisdom of her own DNA, as she finds cultural belonging in the traditions of her ancestors. The results of these efforts inform both Hilary Giovale’s path to healing from intergenerational trauma and her commitment to engaging in reparative justice.

Hilary deftly brings together missing strands of wisdom in the book’s three sections, Spinning the Thread, Weaving, and The Fabric, inviting readers to explore their own ancestral wisdom traditions. Interwoven throughout the book, including its beginning and ending, are the words of Indigenous and Black elders, who have actively contributed to and helped birth this remarkable book.

Layered within each section, Hilary Giovale shares the process of what she calls “popping the bubbles” of white conditioned thinking, of peeling back the layers of denial, of the “delusional thinking” of the white settler ethos, the “white peril” that has caused such harm since the founding of this country. How do we retrieve our ancestral heritage and recover from spiritual orphanhood? How do we engage in radical apology and forgiveness? How do we forgive the unforgivable? And before we can truly walk the path of repair in community, how do we uncover and heal our own ancestral trauma that has sparked endless cycles of violence against Indigenous and Black communities? The three sections of the book chart Hilary Giovale’s path as she confronts the truth of her family history, works to restore and integrate ancestral connection, and then learns to transform guilt and shame into reparative action.

The 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.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much like Hilary Giovale’s journey, my experiences revealed that healing begins not only in solidarity with others but also by tracing our own ancestral roots. After the book was published, I carried it with me to Europe as a companion while seeking my earth-honoring ancestors and healing inherited trauma. This guide beautifully invites us to face our privileges, honor our settler ancestry, and build trust and heal through relationship with Indigenous relatives.

It has great citations and references to doing the work. I've referred to friends and family to read it and even wrote about it in my blog.

As a Deaf, Disabled, White settler, I never imagined that the path toward repair would lead me back to my own lineage. This book deepened every step of that journey of reconnection—inviting reflection, humility, and connection. It’s the perfect travel companion for anyone walking the path of healing, belonging, and relationship with the land and one another.

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

For descendants of European settlers, Hilary's book is like a lighthouse beacon guiding us away from the repetitive harms of settler colonialism toward the peace of right relationships. Using her own journey as a model, Hilary gifts us her story of truth, healing and repair. Although confronting the harm embedded in our ancestry is difficult and uncomfortable, Hilary offers useful advice and tools for managing this work with with tenderness and compassion.

Organized in three different parts, Hilary seamlessly weaves her story with and introduction to contemporary anti-racist thought, guidance for forgiveness and reparations, and practices for healing through rekindling ancestral memory. Since I bought this book 18 months ago, the pages have become dogeared and full of notes as I return again and again to digest the wisdom of its pages.

I would put "Becoming a Good Relative" among the top books which have influenced by thinking in the past two years, along with "Becoming Kin" by Patty Krawec, "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Sand Talk" by Tyson Yunkaporta" "An Indigenous History of the United States" by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, "Surviving Genocide" by Jeffrey Ostler, and "Caliban and the Witch" by Silvia Federici. Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and RepairBecoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and RepairHilary Giovale

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Becoming a Good Relative," author Hilary Giovale fearlessly faces tough questions centered on what it means to live justly and responsibly as a descendant of colonizers on the continent where you were born but to which you are not native.

Have you ever pondered:
Can I acknowledge that I have been the beneficiary of the often brutal history of settlement on this continent without blaming myself unfairly for things that happened sometimes hundreds of years ago?
Can I, as a white, American-born woman of mixed European descent, learn from and show respect for Indigenous cultures without appropriating those cultures for my own selfish use?
Can I deal with the unpleasant emotions these questions generate in me and those around me, with open-eyed compassion? How?

In this brave, wise, and uplifting book, Giovale shares the answers she discovered in four years of focused contemplation. Her discovery that some of her settler ancestors received grants of stolen land from the US government launched her on this journey of personal transformation. As she delved into her family history, the history of white settlement in the United States, and the history and current reality of Indigenous cultures, she fought against her own ignorance and felt and faced the shame, grief, and guilt of having benefited from what she calls White Peril.

This is an introspective and honest look inside a woman's heart. Giovale feels deeply and questions herself rigorously in the search for a just way forward. At every step in the journey, she honestly asked herself the tough questions. When she ached to apologize and ask forgiveness for the many injustices of America's colonial history, she asked herself, "How could I let go when racism, poverty, and environmental violence are hurting Indigenous and African-American communities? If I let go, would I be absolving myself of responsibility? How could I let go, with all these advantages still in my back pocket?"

Toward the end of her four-year journey, Giovale began finding ways to "decolonize" herself and take positive action, becoming a good relative in a multicultural community. She built connections with her own earth-honoring ancestors, invited her family into rituals of healing ancestral guilt and grief, and made a personal reparations plan.

This is an important book, and I feel any reader who goes on this journey with Giovale will come out changed for the better.

"This journey is about re-membering to connect rather than divide, relate rather than control, and belong rather than exploit." ~Hilary Giovale

[Deborah Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Becoming a Good Relative is a wonderful resource for activists, advocates, and all who want to rediscover the purity within, despite the wrongful actions of their ancestors and their own darkest selves. Author Hilary Giovale is committed to healing the devastation of the greed and violence of those who came before us. She goes on a sincere and arduous quest to address the harm through actions to heal, including personal reparations and changing herself. Helpful, inspiring insights and phrases appear throughout: “Instead of being debilitated or deflated by my shame, I use it to undo my own brainwashing.” There are “Guidelines for White Settlers to Engage in Respectful Cross-Cultural Learning.” She presents Practices for Neurodecolonizing, which is defined as “deleting old, ineffective brain networks that support destructive thoughts, feelings, memories and behaviors—not only those that occur for most people, but also those that are intimately connected to the past and contemporary oppressions associated with colonialism.”

In her healing journey, she also came to understand and empathize with white settlers among her own ancestry who’d participated in colonizing: “In their trauma and desperation, they probably saw whiteness as a means to earn their livelihoods and ensure their children’s survival.” She comes to an important realization about the deep tentacles of such thinking—that there is a very real possibility of being a tool of white supremacy: “If I do nothing to dismantle it, I am complicit in upholding it.”

She passes on powerful advice for our times, quoting from Edgar Villanueva’s work, on apologizing: Apologizing turns us from the inward focus of grief, outward to the Others who were harmed…Apologizing requires that white people of wealth snap out of their paralyzing white fragility and guilt, and just step up.”

The book is not a light or easy read. At times, the narration stalls, particularly when she integrates her family’s history in Scotland. Not that this isn’t an important subject to address as part of the acknowledgement that trauma in Europe hardened the hearts of those who ultimately fled to the new world—and that played out as genocide for Indigenous people and the willing brutal enslavement of Africans. But the treatment of her Scottish ancestry feels heavy handed and intrusive at times.

Overall, Giovale herself is the inspiration here, in her complete willingness to face our ugly past and its repercussions front on without defense and find what is within one woman’s ability to make amends.

[Denise Nadeau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an exhaustive compendium of the steps, directions, and possibilities white settlers can explore and engage in to begin the process of restoration of relationships with Indigenous and Black people. The book is a form of memoir in that Giovale uses her personal stories of gradual awareness of how she has internalized white dominance., while at the same time sharing her learnings from various resources and teachers. If white folks are willing to do the work of deconstructing their whiteness, Giovale offers practices, readings and rituals to support the process.

Giovani begins with discovering her whiteness, finds out her family history and involvement in the colonial enslavement project and then addresses her privilege as a settler American living in Indigenous territories. She describes in detail her four-year journey of contemplation involving ritual, ceremony and dream work, including exploring her ancestry and her Celtic roots. Throughout she shares resources and teachings from Black and Indigenous folks. She stresses the need for settlers to do their own inner work and healing if they want to be good relatives while at the same time reminding us we need to continually hear Black and Indigenous voices in order to do this in a good way.
Most useful for me are her appendices, rich with resources and suggestions for practices ranging from reflection questions, rituals and even a personal reparations plan. She provides excellent footnotes throughout and a contemporary bibliography. While most of us don’t have the time or material resources available to embark on a similar journey this book is a good resource for anyone who is looking to deconstruct their whiteness and learn “how to be a good relative.”

Denise Nadeau, author of Unsettling Spirit: A Journey into Decolonization

[Maileen Hamto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilary Giovale has devoted her life to understanding the erased history of her white ancestors and healing from the harms of whiteness. In "Becoming a Good Relative," Giovale offers her transformative journey of grappling with ancestral memory to understand her inheritance of whiteness in a colonial paradigm. Her exploration of her Scottish and Irish ancestry, seeking parallels with Indigenous perspectives that honor the land and all beings, has led her to a profound understanding of the harms of settler-colonial perspectives. Through a narrative that weaves profound realizations about cultural amnesia and socioeconomic inequities. Giovale advocates for wealth redistribution, reparations, and truth-telling as necessary steps toward change.

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. While "Becoming a Good Relative" is primarily written for white-identified readers, Giovale has essential lessons about untangling from whiteness for people of all identities. In one way or another, anyone living amid white supremacy internalizes its lessons: who and what is valued, how and why others are subjugated, and how we all are complicit in perpetuating injustice. Giovale invites readers to be more empathetic in our journeys of changing perspectives and embodying respectful relations.

[Carl Williams]

Though I read large sections of this book, and skimmed chunks of it, I cannot really claim to have read it in its entirety.

It's a first person narrative--the author's journey in exploring and coming to better understand Empire and the implicit privilege of her race in this culture; some of what ethic groups have given up of their own culure in order to "buy into" Empire; and the blind eye that the white-centered world turns to others and in someways itself. Having explored those things, the author shares some of her experience in stepping away from them. The author shares her a-ha moments, her pain, and her self-discovered.

And the book is well written and some of it is quite engaging. While some of it reflected some of my own learning and growing understandings, my own bias got in my way. I am a bit of a curmudgeon-in-training. In the show-me-don't-tell-me paradigm I like to make my own decisions about things like character. So, when you tell me that the book is humble (p xx) I raise a metaphoric eyebrow and can't help but wonder why that needs to be said and not just observed. On the other hand, the book was recommended by a good friend so it could well be my problem and not the book's issue.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Becoming a Good Relative by Hilary Giovale is a powerful and transformative work—part memoir, part manual, and wholly medicine. Giovale writes with clarity and purpose, driven by her intention to uncover the implications of her own settler-colonial ancestry. Her story is rooted in personal reckoning, yet expansive in its reach. Drawing on a wide range of resources rich in wisdom, she grounds her work in a web of voices, teachings, and historical truths too often hidden from the mainstream narrative. With compassion and fierce honesty, she shares her personal journey through the often-unseen complexities of being a white, European-descended settler on Turtle Island. Her vulnerability becomes a doorway for readers—especially those of us who share this ancestry—to confront our own inherited beliefs, unconscious assumptions, and moral responsibilities. She offers practical guidance for those waking up from the whitewashed history we were taught, and points the way toward responsible and respectful ways of engaging in healing and repair, not by bypassing the pain of history, but by walking through it with open eyes and a courageous heart.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book focuses on a white woman doing work toward becoming a good relative. She's forthright about the struggles she experiences in undoing her bias and uncentering herself in the larger conversation. She learns more about her own ancestral traditions and how to communicate with and honor her ancestors.

There were times I cringed while I was reading it, but I think the authenticity is important. I think white readers need to see the challenges and growth.

The main audience for this book is white people in the Americas, particular in the United States. This book will help them consider the impacts of their and their ancestors' actions and find ways to engage in anti-racist work. It's not meant to be read alone, in my opinion. It would be good as part of a text set with books by BIPOC, whose voices should be centered in this work.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book! All opinions are my own.