“I loved how we explored our connection with ancestors in a non-linear, intuitive way, and also a practical, truth seeking way. I wanted and needed both. Similarly, I loved how Elyshia and Hilary balanced the ritual/prayer aspects of our circle with the reparations/actions pieces. I’ve not been in a group that had both sides. This has been such a breath of fresh air.”
REKINDLING ANCESTRAL MEMORY CIRCLE 2022-23
Co-facilitated by Hilary Giovale and Elyshia Holliday
About the Circle
This is a 6-month circle for European-descended settlers in North America. We will engage with our European ancestors toward rekindling ancestral memory, mutual healing, reparations, and forgiveness. This circle will be a respectful, curious, and nurturing space for community dialogue. Participants will ritually build and tend ancestor altars, discover more about our family stories, and translate these experiences into real-world action.
Why is this circle focused on European ancestry, and how is the circle related to Nature?
Each circle will be intuitively guided and will focus on topics such as:
Community-based ancestral storytelling
Embracing earth-honoring, nonlinear, and intuitive ways of knowing
Settler colonialism and whiteness
Rekindling our ancestral blood memory
Building right relations
Making reparations
Activities we will engage in:
Finding and sharing our ancestral stories with each other
Respectfully connecting with the land where we live
Keeping an ancestor altar and dream journal
Listening to Indigenous guest speakers
Writing an ancestral apology or forgiveness prayer
Healing rituals
Each month, catalyzing resources and activities will be provided based upon our circle discussions. For a comprehensive list of resources, please visit Hilary's website.
Circle Dates and Times
We will gather via Zoom on the following Wednesdays: Oct. 26, Nov 16, Dec 7 (five-week break), Jan 11, Feb 1, Feb 22, March 15, April 5, and April 26. Additional office hours with the co-facilitators will be offered on several other dates, as well as guest speaker dates.
Our group will meet at 5-6:30 Pacific on each of these dates. Each circle will be held live using the Zoom platform. The experience of this circle is focused on in-person interactions within a respectful, conscious container. Recordings of the circles will not be made.
Please plan to join us live as often as you are able. There will also be a private thread for our group on ONE’s community platform, Mighty Networks.
Reparations
If you join the circle, we suggest a sliding scale contribution of $135-$600 (or more) for the entire six-month session. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. 100% of the contributions will be returned to the following organizations, using a reparations framework, and to our Indigenous guest speakers as honoraria.
Mama Scraps Capital Campaign: In 2019, Mama Scrap’s family re-purchased ancestral land that their third great-grandfather once owned in Mississippi. Their vision is to return to rituals and ancestral knowledge, reclaim relationship with the land in the South that was severed through servitude, rematriate the land in a way that respects Mother Earth, and provide a haven for retreat that promotes healing for black folx.
Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture is a community Indigenous-led non-profit based in the Village of Kykotsmovi, located in Northern Arizona on the Indigenous Hopi Reservation. Our mission is to create community-based solutions in order to pass knowledge to future generations and rebuild culturally sustainable and healthy communities. We initiate learning projects that engage, train, and inspire Hopi youth and community to revitalize Hopi culture, knowledge, and traditions. We support Hopi community members in developing leadership skills to strengthen local food systems and to implement sustainable ecological projects within the Hopi community. We aim to provide our community with the tools, training and practical experience needed to rebuild a vibrant community based on traditional Hopi values and worldview.
Request to Join the Circle
This class is open to members and affiliates of ONE and will be limited to 16 participants.
We ask that you tell us about yourself and why you are drawn to the circle at this time using the “Circle Request” button below. This will help us know you a little better. We will send you the registration link after we receive your circle request.
If you are not already a member of ONE you can sign up here.
The 2022 circle has been filled and is now closed. If you would like us to notify you when registration opens for the 2023 circle please use the button below.
Meet your Facilitators
Hilary Giovale is a ninth-generation American settler descended from the ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Nordic peoples of northwestern Europe. She lives at the foot of a sacred mountain, a being of kinship, that stands within the traditional homelands of Diné, Hopi, Havasupai, Hualapai, Yavapai, and Paiute Peoples, as well as several Pueblos. Her relationships with this land inform her life as a mother, dancer, community organizer, writer, and philanthropist. In 2015, Hilary became aware of her ancestors’ longstanding presence as American settlers. Since then, she has been living a process of inquiry including ancestral repair, solidarity with Indigenous-led movements, reconnection with Earth, apology, forgiveness, and reparations. She is the author of a forthcoming book that shares about this healing process. To read more about her work, please visit www.goodrelative.com.
Elyshia Holliday has over two decades of experience in community facilitation, leadership development, and deepening connections to Nature. A fourteenth-generation American settler, Elyshia descends from the Celtic, Germanic, and Nordic peoples of northwestern Europe. She draws upon these ancestral lineages to help participants reconnect with their Earth-honoring ancestors and cultivate deeper relationships with their roots through the Rekindling Ancestral Memory Circle.
Elyshia’s work includes leading an 8-year land and water restoration project in New Mexico, where she collaborated with hundreds of volunteers to revitalize the soil, heal erosion, and restore biodiversity. Her upbringing close to the land and her role as a mother to four sons inspire her dedication to fostering balance and connection in the web of life. Elyshia lives in Washington state on the ancestral lands of the Yakama people with her husband, youngest son, and their four-legged companions.
Grandmothers Circle
We are grateful for these Elders, whose expertise has informed our process. They are generously offering support and guidance for our circle this year.
Yeye Luisah Teish is internationally known as a writer, storyteller, teacher, and spiritual guidance counselor. She is the author of several books on African and African American Spiritual Culture and Myth. They include the women’s spirituality classic Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. Yeye Teish is an initiated elder (Iyanifa) in the Ifa/Orisha tradition of the West African Diaspora, and she holds a chieftaincy title (Yeye’woro) from the Fatunmise Compound in Ile Ife, Nigeria.
She is the founding mother of Ile Orunmila Oshun (The House of Destiny and Love), a member of the Global Council for Ancestor Veneration, and a member of the Mother Earth Delegation of United Indigenous Nations. She is also a devotee of Damballah Hwedo, the Haitian Rainbow Serpent, under the guidance of Moma Lola. She serves as the spiritual culture consultant to Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and the Jubilee Justice for Reparations Committee. Read more about Yeye Teish on her website.
Leny Mendoza Strobel is Kapampangan from the Central Luzon Region in the Philippines. She is currently a settler on Wappo, Mishewal OnantaTis, Southern Pomo, and Coast Miwok lands. She is a founding Elder at the Center for Babaylan Studies and is the author and editor of books and other publications on the process of decolonization and indigenization. She is a Professor Emerita of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University in Northern California. Currently, she is tending small cohorts of folks who are reckoning with the history of native genocide in California and the impact on local indigenous communities where she dwells. These cohorts are committed to working on personal and collective acts of healing and repair of relationships between indigenous peoples and settlers. She also tends to a few chickens and a garden with Cal. To connect with Leny's work, please visit her website.
Louise Dunlap is 12th generation of European descent on Turtle Island and 6th generation Californian. She was born and lives now on unceded land of the Lisjan Ohlone people where she pays an annual shuumi tax. After studying botany and medieval English literature and teaching writing in urban and environmental planning, she worked with writers in social justice groups, authored Undoing the Silence (about this work), and began journeys into the hidden history of white supremacy that would lead to a second book. In the 90s and early 2000s, she joined pilgrimages focused on the unhealed history of places her settler and enslaving ancestors had lived, including the life-changing Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage. Her new book, Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind, tells the story of her California ancestors, the land they bought in a time of genocide and the mindset they brought with them from early settlement. Looking for ways to heal their legacy, Louise finds guidance in the spiritual teachings of many traditions and has been ordained into the Order of Interbeing by Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. To learn more about Louise’s work, visit her website.
Indigenous Guest Speakers
Lyla June is an Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her dynamic, multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective and ecological healing. She blends studies in Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree, focusing on Indigenous food systems revitalization.
Alexis Bunten, (Unangan/Yup’ik) has served as a program director, media-maker, consultant and applied researcher for 20 years. Alexis’ areas of expertise include Indigenous-led economic development, organizational decolonization, and cross-cultural communications.
As an applied research consultant, Alexis uses mixed methods techniques, including ethnography, interviews, surveys, experiments, focus groups, statistical and data analysis to develop innovative solutions to organizational and economic challenges that cannot be solved through a quantitative approach alone. Alexis also works with organizations to develop leadership and entrepreneurial skills based on inherent skills and assets found in traditional and ancestral cultural values and practices.
Testimonials from Past Participants
“My experience with the Rekindling Ancestral Memory group was profound and life-changing. I loved that we were encouraged to build a relationship to our ancestral lineages through both traceable research as well as through listening to our dreams and intuitive knowing. I also appreciated the integrity of how the group was facilitated, supporting me in taking an honest look at the colonial chapters of my ancestral history. Rather than approaching this history with judgement or shame, I was supported in approaching with an intention of reckoning and healing. This process was deeply impactful. I now feel more connected to my ancestral lineages and I also feel I have tools to continue on the journey of learning and reckoning with the past — both the beauty and the suffering.”
"Being held, supported, and encouraged by this circle allowed me to feel ready to begin looking into the shadows of my family ancestry... which I've been trying to do alone for years, unsuccessfully. I needed a bigger holding to be able to begin facing the horrific truths of my family line."
"I am so moved that Elyshia and Hilary graciously offered their time, energy, expertise and care to us for 9 months! They decided to create and facilitate a circle intended for North American settlers that returned all the donations to wonderful organizations. This is powerful. We need more of this in the world."
"This circle helped me to discover the threads of ancestry that I carry within my body and spirit and how these threads are woven throughout time and space, connecting me to the entire tapestry of life. By the end of the circle, I felt more whole in knowing who I am and more agency in understanding my own part in the healing of our world."
"This group helped reignite and re-invigorate my ongoing commitment to living a life focused on actively undoing and healing the places racism and colonization live in my white body, and in the systems that run our country."
"Through digging back far enough and feeling into how my ancestors were also once deeply connected to the Earth, I've been able to soften some of the shame I've been carrying. The less shame takes up space inside me, the more room I have to be present and awake with energy to take action and make reparations in the now. I feel this shift on a visceral level."
"My awareness has expanded to see how much we all carry around with us from our family history. I am heartened to know that there are tangible avenues I can take toward healing the wounds that my ancestors inflicted and endured. I feel more connected to this path in myself and am excited to continue to let this path unfold, to listen to what needs attention and healing in my lineage."
Good Questions
Why is this Circle Focused on European Ancestry?
ONE's extended family has been a majority white community, and we long for the vibrant diversity of a healthy human ecosystem. At the same time, in order to avoid repeating the harms of our ancestors, European descended people must come together and explore our family stories honestly. We have an opportunity to open our minds and our hearts to meet the complex people from whom we descend. We do this with empathy for their lives and circumstances and with the courage to transform their legacies.
In this circle, we will explore our ancestors' stories as settlers on Indigenous land. In our experience - as well as in the collective experience - it has been helpful to begin this process within Euro-centered community spaces. This helps to eliminate projecting our ancestral traumas onto marginalized peoples. Together, we will practice becoming good relatives to diverse communities over time.
This circle is not an exclusively white space. People of partial European ancestry who are interested in exploring their settler legacies are welcome and encouraged to join us.
What Does the Circle Have to Do with Nature?
Somewhere in each of our ancestral lineages, we all descend from Earth People- those who were intricately woven into the web of life. Over time, many of our ancestors forgot this innate knowing, due to trauma, migration, war, and famine. Our legacies became empty. In this process of forgetting, we began to see Earth and all her beings as only resources. This is part of colonization. The modern environmental movement emerged from this history. It has used archaic patterns to “protect the natural world,” rather than working with nature as a loving partner.
In this circle, as we reconnect with our ancestors, we also begin to awaken the innate Earth People knowledge that lives in each of us. As we heal our pasts, we become better relatives for our human and non-human family.
As Aurora Levins Morales writes, ”The problems in our relationships with each other and with the so-called natural world are the same. If we understand ourselves as part of a living ecosystem continually being shaped by and shaping us, then everything we do has ecological implications, and every attempt to mend or protect our ecosystem is inevitably rooted in questions of social justice. For human society to be sustainable on earth, it must become inclusive, must take into account the well-being of each one of us." (From the essay "Ecology is Everything," in her book Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals)
