Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair
by Hilary Giovale (October 2024, Green Writers Press)

A review by Alexis Bunten, PhD, Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program

Becoming a Good Relative is a call for people to come together and honor each other as humans. Today, this concept is largely practiced by Indigenous communities to express our relationships with each other, land, water and the cosmos. Being a good relative is a first step to maintaining the balance in the world needed to heal Mother Earth and ourselves. For allies, being a good relative means making relationships with communities that suffer from White oppression, by listening, giving back, and maintaining connections. From the positionality of privilege, being a good relative means to undo hierarchies of White supremacy, which are largely invisible to those who benefit from it. 

The practice of being a good relative has been “lost” for many peoples (both Non-Indigenous and Indigenous) as a result of capitalism. Colonization feeds capitalism’s need for more and more “stuff” to create more and more unequal acquisition and distribution of wealth at the expense of the wellness of humanity, plants, animals, and the planet that we live upon. It requires us to disconnect with community, lose contact with the earth, and forget our past so that we can be easily manipulated to move around and toil to feed capitalism’s never-ending greed. Within this context, being a good relative means to free our minds of false narratives of othering, scarcity, and the fetishization of money. 

This beautifully written book shares Hilary Giovale’s personal journey to wholeness starting from examining her earliest encounters with Indigenous teachers through ceremony to embracing her own ancestral practices. Rather than being self-centered as memoirs often come across, Hilary humbly shares the lessons learned from many experiences and teachers over decades to learn how to be a good relative. Between these lessons, the author includes important historical and present-day facts that inform what she learned along the way. 

The author’s lyrical prose transports the reader to places and events in a compelling way. I found myself constantly wondering, “What happens next?” as I made discoveries alongside Hilary. As a White woman in America, she admits how difficult it was (and continues to be, for it is a lifelong journey) for her to understand the lived realities Indigenous Peoples she encountered near and far. 

Although primarily aimed at a White, female audience, the author’s voice is not “talking at you,” nor is it accusing. Rather, Hilary’s vulnerability invites readers in, suggesting that it is okay not to understand the devastating effects of colonization for Indigenous and African descended peoples without having been exposed to it. 

Becoming a Good Relative is organized into 3 sections, building upon a metaphor of cloth weaving together to evoke the Norns, pre-Christian goddesses that the author’s ancestors were surely familiar with, who weave the tapestry of fate. 

In part one, “Spinning the Thread,” Hilary shares the ways that she came to understand White privilege. She begins with an honest admission about how difficult, almost impossible, it is to see how White supremacy permeates throughout society. We follow along with the author as she begins to perceive how colonization, capitalism and Christianity operate hand-in-hand to bring massive wealth to some while killing others, but at the price of all. 

Part two, “Weaving,” brings the reader on the author’s four-year journey to understand the connections between her ancestors and her circumstances now. She does not shy away from directly naming the benefits and harms of settler colonization as they have affected and continue to influence across generations of all those impacted by settler colonization. We follow along with Hilary’s circuitous pathway as she goes through the process of learning reconciliation and healing across cultural divides. 

Part three, “The Fabric,” builds upon what the author learned across this lifelong journey with Indigenous cultures far away at first, and then closer and closer until she builds authentic relationships of love and care with the Tribes whose lands she and her family live on as guests. Now she was ready to take on the work of rekindling her own ancestral memories of her Celtic, Germanic and Nordic ancestors. I experienced the closing of Becoming a Good Relative as an invitation for all readers, no matter their background, to open their hearts to connecting with their ancestors, whether they are known or unknown. 

Author Hilary Giovale will lead the Bioneers Learning course Decolonizing Philanthropic Practice from January 30 to March 6, 2025. You can learn more and register for the course here. 

The author frames the book early on with a metaphor of popping the “bubbles” of ignorance that she was socialized to internalize as a White, Christian-raised woman in America, acknowledging the White supremacy institutionalized within American culture, from what we learn in church, to the educational system, the media, and from White parents and peers. 

Hilary humbly admits that though she wasn’t able to see White privilege until she began spending time in cross-cultural/racial contexts, she had always been curious about whether there is another way to see things? These “bubbles” of White privilege made her uncomfortable without exactly knowing why, drawing Hilary to a war-torn country, to Indigenous ceremonies and eventually to the spiritual practices of her ancestors. Along each step of the way, she paid attention to the lessons so generously shared by others alongside her. 

Becoming a Good Relative compliments a growing body of creative work about Whiteness and Anti-Racism such as “White Fragility” by Robin Diangelo, and “Do the Work,” by Kate Schatz and W. Kamau Bell. While the first offers practical descriptions and examples, and the second presents fun and engaging workbook activities, Becoming a Good Relative takes another approach through vulnerable memoir, research, poetry and stories. 

Hilary introduces a number of concepts she learned along the way, that most (White) Americans simply aren’t exposed to. “White Peril,” for example, is a theme that manifests in different ways throughout the book. This is the idea that White Americans descend from generations of “White on White” atrocities – slave trading, religious persecution, witch hunts, etc. To me, this is the idea that “hurt people hurt people.” No wonder settlers often participated in or at least turned a blind eye to the genocide of Indigenous Peoples across the North American continent. How can anybody begin to heal from intergenerational trauma that we all inherit to some extent without understanding the dynamic of White Peril?  

In addition to clearly laying out the “invisible structures” that maintain America’s oppressive status quo, Becoming a Good Relative offers a lot of simple and effective ways to address it. Hilary shares a technique called, “wit(h)nessing,” which she describes as “a relational, compassionate, and intuitive form of listening and observation. While wit(h)nessing, I perceive another’s story empathically, from my heart.” It is a way to warmly connect relationally, to let another person know, “I am here with you.” Rather than trying to fix a situation, which ‘guilty’ feeling White People are often wont to do when they begin to learn about colonization, wit(h)nessing prevents harm caused by well-intentioned White people early in their allyship. 

Having married into a philanthropic family, Hilary bravely addresses charitable giving as but one way to be a good ally. She admits to feeling like an imposter at first, and the suffocating nature of mainstream philanthropy, which often reproduces structures of oppression (such as by telling recipients how to spend the contribution). As she developed more cultural capital within the world of philanthropy, Hilary developed a practice she calls, “philanthropic alchemy,” a way of giving that acknowledges the harm caused by the shrapnel of capitalism. She shares several practical ways that other philanthropists (and allies in general, in my opinion) can address the messiness of relationships that must acknowledge stolen land, genocide, and ongoing oppression. These range from something as simple as inviting Black and Brown people to the table, using the phone instead of relying on email, and giving up control. 

I was lucky enough to read earlier versions of the manuscript of Becoming a Good Relative, and I enjoyed it so much that I volunteered to write this review. In writing it, I read parts of it over and in different orders. There are so many juicy nuggets throughout the text, I recommend any reader to annotate and go back to their favorite parts if they are considering reparative relationship-making, whether across racial and class divides, or with their own ancestral and future lineages. 

Being a good relative takes honesty, dedication and empathy. It can’t be done overnight. However, the concepts and ideas shared in Becoming a Good Relative can help anyone to learn how to avoid common missteps and develop good practices through developing an open mind, listening, and self-examination.