Emily Race-Newmark: [00:00:00] Welcome to This is How We Care, a podcast where we look at what it means to embody care, not as an individual practice, but a collective one, and to see what kind of world emerges from this place.

Thank you for being here. I am your host, Emily Race.

Today's conversation is with Hilary Giovale about becoming a good relative, which is the title of her upcoming book. Hilary is a reparationist and we'll be speaking a lot about the different forms that that takes for her, which offers a lot of inspiration for what it might look like to walk our own path of reparations.

In this conversation, we're gonna speak a lot about whiteness, the cultures that have assimilated into whiteness, the various emotions that this identity can hold, perhaps guilt, shame, deflection, numbness, disorientation and confusion, just to name a few.

This is also a conversation about rekindling ancestral memory, to use the name of another one of Hillary's offerings, and what it may look like for those of [00:01:00] us who have assimilated into whiteness to follow a path leading us back to a time of our own indigeneity.

And ultimately, this is a conversation about returning to the sacred order, as Hillary puts it, for our planet and for the generations that will follow our own. 

Hilary Giovale: We are out of alignment right now and we are out of order. There's been a tremendous disruption that's taken place on Turtle Island.

 So to me, it's a return to the sacred natural order. We need that. Because our water is in danger. Our climate is going off the rails. There's so much happening. The deforestation and the mass extinction. There's just crisis everywhere you look. I really feel like the only way we're going to have a chance is if we return to the ways of knowing that are intrinsically linked to the well being of the land. 

There are [00:02:00] traditional communities who still know how to do those things. I think at one point in time, all of our people knew those ways. We all had original instructions. We all knew how to live in a balanced way, but some of us forgot.

 I want to surrender my life and my being and my ability to exist on this land to the original knowledge of this land. 

Emily Race-Newmark: You just heard from Hillary Giovale, who's a mother, writer, and community organizer, living with the inquiry, "how can I become a good relative?" Which we'll be exploring deeper in this conversation today. We originally recorded this together in August of 2023.

Hilary Giovale: I'm 48 now, and it's almost like the life that I had when I was 38 and younger and the life that I had from that point on are two different lives. I was brought up middle class. I was brought up with [00:03:00] family stories that our ancestors had come from Northern Ireland and that they had been very poor and devout people.

I grew up, obviously, white, but not really understanding what that meant. I grew up in segregation from communities of color. Didn't have any relationships, didn't understand any of the issues that are affecting those communities. I thought that colonization was something that happened a long time ago, had no bearing on today, and no bearing on me. So I grew up in this bubble that persisted well into my 30s.

When I was about 38, I began building relationships with indigenous peoples. I live on land that is Diné, Hopi, Havasupai, Apache, Pueblo land next to a mountain of kinship and this mountain is revered by 13 nations of this region. I live very close to the Navajo Reservation, to the Hopi [00:04:00] land, surrounded by indigenous people in the community here. Finally, I began in the process of those relationships to hear stories I had never heard before.

 One day, I was sitting with my friend Marie. Marie is a Diné elder. She lives on her ancestral land near Big Mountain. She raises sheep in the tradition that was given to her by her grandmothers for many generations. 

We were working on curriculum for a workshop that we were co teaching, using her cultural knowledge of the four directions and the teachings of the mountains that come from her culture, combined with my practices that I understood and knew as a dance teacher.

 As we were doing that, she started telling me this story about the Navajo Long Walk, which was a forced migration when the Diné people were marched at gunpoint off their [00:05:00] land. Beginning in 1864 until 1868 ; their crops, homes, sheep were all burned before they left. They were sent to a concentration camp at Fort Sumner, and there they suffered tremendously, and it took four years of a lot of death, a lot of rape, a lot of suffering, until finally they were able to negotiate a treaty and come back home. But by then, of course, their homeland had been shrunk by the United States government taking their land.

I was shocked, devastated. I felt like a huge weight was sitting on my chest and all of a sudden it hit me that this land where I had lived at that point for 20 years without understanding, is her land. It's her ancestral land.  

That story that Marie told me [00:06:00] was one of many interactions that opened a portal to me learning the information that my ancestors on my father's side had immigrated from Scotland in 1739 to North Carolina.

There, they began receiving land grants, enslaving people in Mississippi, and embarked on their path of being settler colonizers on Turtle Island.,

I had never been aware of that history in my family. There was something about learning that history that made it personal. That was like, " Oh, I can't just turn a blind eye to this anymore ."

It was the realization that on that side of the family, I was a ninth generation settler. I later found out on other lines of my family, I'm a 12th generation settler, and that no [00:07:00] one was talking about it. It had been completely silenced. It was forgotten. It was swept under the rug. 

I just realized that the time has now come after all of these generations to begin talking about it and I wanted to be part of the solution by sharing that story. I began by sharing that story with my children, my husband, and my parents. We've been through a lot of healing together as a family by developing the skills to look at this and to talk about this together.

Emily Race-Newmark: What was that like to surface this story and how did that process actually take place? 

Hilary Giovale: It was painful. I read that in the book of family genealogy on the last night of 2015. And so the next morning, it's the new year, right? I sit down with my parents and my kids at breakfast and I asked my parents, "Did you know about this?" And it was this vague [00:08:00] "I don't know, did we? Maybe, but that's what people did back then." 

It was that kind of response. 

It took me some time to work through that and understand it. Now, I have so much compassion for my family and my grandparents and their parents and the people who came before, because I understand that for whatever reason, the time was not right for them to begin looking at this. 

I also understand that many of our people who immigrated from Europe came here with a ton of trauma. There was so much war in Europe. There was so much hunger. People were being pushed off their land. People were being forcibly separated from their culture and language. That had been going on for centuries.

 So now I have much more compassion, but it took me a few years to get there. I was angry for a while. It was hard for me [00:09:00] to accept that this is part of my identity. That this is part of my family's identity. 

This is part of the identity of many white people, most of us, but it's part of our story. But because the way that whiteness trains and conditions us. We almost never discuss it. So as I started discussing it with people in my circles, I realized, "Oh, this is a huge taboo. This is a rule that we are not supposed to break."

Totally. And we could probably spend the whole podcast talking about the emotions surrounding that and unpacking that and you mentioned anger, for example, did you experience or did your family experience aspects of the shame or the guilt? 'Cause that's something I've gone through time and time again and I feel like that's such a tricky one to navigate. So I'm curious how you would speak to that part of experience? 

Oh yeah, so much shame. So much guilt. I was very, very lucky because I had friends who became mentors to me, [00:10:00] who gave me tools to help me deal with that. One of them was Yeye Luisah Teish. She's a high priestess and an African American elder and she talked to me very soon after I made that discovery and I followed the instructions in her book, Jambalaya to do a spiritual cleaning of my house and to make an ancestor alter. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Mm 

Hilary Giovale: That ancestor altar helped me cope with the grief, the shame, the blockage, the feeling of being stuck, the confusion. 

I also relied a lot on the land here. I was out in the woods that winter, many times a week, just wailing and sobbing in the snow. I would put my snow pants on and I would go lie down and put my whole body down on the ground. Those kind of embodied practices, ritual practices, were the only way I could cope with that [00:11:00] material because it's too heavy.

Emily Race-Newmark: It's so big for one person to metabolize. 

I appreciate you giving us a peek to what that might look like. 'Cause I think, for myself too, that can be a place where I've stopped or some people may stop. It's, "Ooh, that feeling, I don't know what to do with it. I don't know how to work with this." Thank you for those examples.

 Now I know you've written a book that will be coming out soon, you do some workshops, and work with groups, and I'm curious in your own words, how you would define how this now comes alive for you? 

Hilary Giovale: I define myself as a reparationist, because I'm committed to a life of reparations. And that takes a whole bunch of different forms. 

The title of my book is Becoming a Good Relative. I picked up that language from sitting in indigenous community spaces over time. The language of being a relative, acting as a good relative, we're all related, all of our relations, that type of language I picked up in those spaces and it wasn't until I got to the point of [00:12:00] having readers on my book manuscript, there were some women of color who told me, we think this should be the title.

The reason the title is Becoming a Good Relative is that it's not finished. And it's never going to be finished. It's a process. It's a practice. There's no formula for becoming a good relative. It's very much based on a person's heart, the conditions they have in their life, their strengths, their talents, their interests. But it's something that springs up authentically from inside, for each person. It's also going to take a different form for each one of us, and it's going to change over time.

For white people, I think it looks a lot like learning how to listen, learning how to slow down, learning how to tend to relationship, and learning how to respond to what's being asked of us. It's also [00:13:00] based in learning the history of this country.

Emily Race-Newmark: The real history.

Hilary Giovale: The real history of this country, the real history of our ancestors, and allowing ourselves to be moved and changed from within because we've all been indoctrinated with a myth that's very toxic. For me, that gets into the question of how to build good relations that you mentioned earlier. 

Emily Race-Newmark: You mentioned that you're a reparationist. I would love to hear from you, your definition of what reparations look like.

And maybe this is on the individual level versus systemic level, but we can speak to all of 

Hilary Giovale: For sure. Yeah, on the systemic level, reparations are needed within our federal state governments as well as our institutions. There's a bill called HR 40 that needs advocacy to be passed in Congress. 

At the same time, those systems are really big and they're really hard to move. I started focusing on what can I do. I happen [00:14:00] to find myself in this lifetime in the position of being able to participate with philanthropy. So I began moving resources. That's a big part of what I do with my reparations is I move resources to indigenous and black communities, and especially with organizations and projects that are led by those communities.

 There are a ton of things that can be done that I do and everyone can do that don't even involve money. That gets into understanding what the issues are in your local community. What's happening within those communities that need support? Who are the movement leaders who live near you? What are the organizations? Do they need someone to come and cook a meal for the meeting? Do they need someone to take notes? Or start a petition? Or start a carpool to pick people up? To me, some of those action-oriented pieces that don't involve [00:15:00] money are actually some of the most healing and some of the most instructive. 

I just credit so much of what I've learned and received with just sitting in those kinds of spaces. Trying to show up in a humble way and say, "Can I wash the dishes for you? Or can I pick up the stuff at the store? Or can I take the trash out?" Like that. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to have a super sophisticated analysis. It's just about showing up.

Emily Race-Newmark: Right. Yes. It's back to being in relationship, right? Not just on the surface. 

Talk to us about the work that you're doing, like the Decolonizing Wealth Project, flow funding, Rekindling Ancestral Memory. I'm just throwing out those names What can you tell us about that work? 

Hilary Giovale: We're about to begin our fourth year of Rekindling Ancestral Memory. This is a circle that I co facilitate with Elyshia Holliday, good friend of mine, and we work with ancestor altars. We work with storytelling. We do ritual around apology and [00:16:00] forgiveness. And then we make reparations plans. 

 We try to build in a ton of support throughout that. It's all about support. I think a lot of times the call for white people to do better is needed. At times it's also been accompanied by a lot of shaming and blaming, and that's not going to get us there, you know? 

Emily Race-Newmark: I've even seen that from white people to other white people.

Hilary Giovale: Yeah Yeah, I think we're actually the worst.

Emily Race-Newmark: Totally. 

Hilary Giovale: We treat each other horribly. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. 

Hilary Giovale: And that goes back to our history. have a history that is centuries long of throwing each other under the bus, and goes back to the burning times. To all kinds of things that happened in history. We've developed that pattern. 

I'm always trying to think about like, how can we undo that? How can we learn a different way? Where we can learn to trust each other, support each other, hold each other accountable with love etcetera.

Emily Race-Newmark: [00:17:00] Wow.

Hilary Giovale: So that's Rekindling Ancestral Memory. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you for co creating that and offering that. What could you tell us about flow funding?

Hilary Giovale: Yeah, so flow funding is one style of philanthropy. There are many styles that are emerging to begin to share not only resources but decision-making power. 

 A flow fund that I'm involved with is called the Indigenous Women's Flow Fund and it's organized by the Kindle Project. There's a cohort of five indigenous, flow-funding women and then there's a cohort of donors.

The donors give the resources into the flow fund and then the indigenous women make all the decisions with how it's given. It's based on trust. It's based on the knowing that they know what's best within those communities. They're embracing their traditional role as givers, and as keepers, as good relatives within their communities. 

And the donors, we have our programming that we do [00:18:00] together, but we're stepping back from that position of authority, of decision making, of deciding how things are going to go, and how reporting goes and all of that. And it's really beautiful. It's really healing for me.

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. What's so interesting as I hear you say that is, I'm like, "What? You mean that's not how it's been done forever?" I'm actually shocked to know that the decision making would not be in the hands and voices of those who are most impacted by those decisions. Can you just give me, and maybe any other listener who's new to the philanthropy space and the understanding, how are decisions typically made historically? 

Hilary Giovale: I would definitely refer people to Decolonizing Wealth Project, an organization that was founded by Edgar Villanueva based on his book, Decolonizing Wealth. Edgar speaks to this so well but it's an old boys club. It's a bunch of people gatekeeping and hoarding and directing funds [00:19:00] solely to white-led institutions that are mostly for upper class people like symphonies and museums and things like that.

Meanwhile, there are communities who don't have heat in the winter and don't have food on the table and they're being completely ignored. Just a lot of hoarding. Hoarding of power.

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, thank you for grounding in what that has looked like and now could look like through flow funding as a model. 

Let's hear about your vision for the world. What would you love to see if you could wave a magic wand? 

Hilary Giovale: Oh, my magic wand it has to do with land back and rematriation. When I think about my experiences with indigenous communities over the years, fighting so hard for their sacred spaces. The mountain where I live is a sacred site that's currently being desecrated by a ski resort that makes artificial snow out of reclaimed sewage water and puts it up there... 

Emily Race-Newmark: Woah. 

Hilary Giovale: [00:20:00] ...for profit. Yeah, and that's happening everywhere. 

I was in a place called Payahuunadü a couple weeks ago in the Eastern Sierras where a city of Los Angeles has been extracting water for a long time and is creating a desert in what used to be a lush valley. All of these spaces and these issues and they're going on all over the country, right? 

When I sit in those spaces and when I listen to indigenous peoples, especially the elders, talking about why we need to save these spaces, what their oral histories are in relation to those spaces, what their stories are about those spaces, how they feel about it, what their prayers are. When I listen to those things I think, we just need to return this land. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Right. 

Hilary Giovale: Anything else that we could do is just going to be a bandaid.

Emily Race-Newmark: I am totally with you personally on that. What's your vision of how we would give land back? Like what would that even look like?

Hilary Giovale: It's happening all over the place [00:21:00] already. There are some, like parcels of land that have been held in families that are now instead of being passed to their heirs, they're being given to indigenous projects or communities. 

There's some indigenous communities that are raising a lot of money and buying huge parcels of land back. 

There's a movement toward co management of federal lands that are national parks. . There are partnerships. My husband and I are in a partnership with an indigenous friend to buy a piece of land that she is in charge of. She's taking care of it and that's happened together. It's a partnership. It takes many different forms and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years there's like a huge book published with all these case studies. 

Emily Race-Newmark: I wanna see a land back map. Is there like a land back map that we can see?

Hilary Giovale: Yeah, totally. I know. It's exciting because every case requires different legal strategies, financial strategies, relational strategies, agreements. Different ways of doing things, but it's happening all over the [00:22:00] place. 

I want to live in a country, where that's the case. Because I would feel safer. 

Emily Race-Newmark: The question that arose as you were speaking to the contrast. This sacred mountain that is being turned into some profit machine, the way in which profit is driving these harmful actions. I'm curious, what's your vision for how we might relate to wealth, money, capital, profit? 

Hilary Giovale: Yeah, I hope that capitalism is going to phase out and go away. I actually don't see how it can continue.

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. 

Hilary Giovale: But, while it's still here, there's a lot that can be done to redistribute the capital that's being accumulated in various places. When I look around at what's going on globally, it's an ethical imperative to redistribute. There is no other option. 

With the mountain here, I've been in many meetings and done a lot of work to support the indigenous communities' leadership of [00:23:00] dealing with that situation. And we keep having the same conversations with the people in power. We keep running into the same rationalizations and excuses and I think someday, those are gonna fade out. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Give us more insight to what those rationalizations are so I don't make assumptions. What are some of the things that we keep bumping up against collectively or in this situation?

" We're only using a small percentage of the mountain. you have the rest of it, so it's fine". Actually, the federal government has the rest of it. 

Hilary Giovale: " We need it. Our town needs it, for our economic well being." 

"Our economy is based on this and is supported by this".

There's just the simple thing of " you can't curtail my right to recreation. I have a right to recreate,"

Emily Race-Newmark: what are some responses to that that maybe have been successful, if any?

Hilary Giovale: I saw a successful moment one time when I was part of a gathering that took place on the mountain [00:24:00] and it was a mixture of indigenous folks and white settlers, some of whom have worked at that ski resort or have skied there. 

It looks like a heart awakening. That's what it looks like. It's, " Oh, you're telling me that she's your grandmother. Oh my gosh, I never knew that I could be hurting your grandmother by taking my kids skiing." 

 It's very tender. It takes a lot of time together to come to that kind of realization. 

And then, just as often, I've seen the wall go up, the resistance. 

Emily Race-Newmark: To just summarize, you're referring to the relationality once again, like if we can actually be together, take the time to understand one another, see one another as other human beings that we are connected, then from that place kind of heart opening is possible. 

And so, What is your vision for how we might be in relationship with one another, for someone of settler colonial ancestry to be in relationship with someone [00:25:00] from an indigenous ancestry?

Hilary Giovale: I think what it looks like is for me to be willing to take the time to hear things that are really hard.

 I've made a practice when I hear those things of saying, "Okay, I'm going to take that in. I'm going to sit with that. I'm not going to have a big reaction all over you, and I'm not going to argue with you. I'm not going to, have an emotional breakdown with you. I'm not going to tell you that it's not my fault. I'm just going to take it in. I'm going to sit with it. And then I'm going to go and do my own work." 

And that looks like sitting with my ancestor altar, writing, crying in the snow, doing something with my body or my hands, breath work, ritual. And [00:26:00] when you repeat that over and over, a different type of relationship starts to become possible. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Mm. 

Hilary Giovale: It's kinship. We actually become like family. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Right. So many important things in what you said, but being responsible for the ways in which you need to process what's coming for you, which is also extremely valid, right? It's like, acknowledging like, "I need to process this, but there's a way in which I can do that that honors your experience and respects this relationship that I care about between the two of us." 

You mentioned the wall coming up in many situations where we're confronting these hard things, how can we be in relationship really with the wall when it comes up?

 I think that's a really good question and you actually just answered it really well. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Okay. 

Hilary Giovale: Because it is about making a relationship with the wall. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Sure. 

Hilary Giovale: You know what I mean? And saying, "Oh yeah, there you are. I see you. You don't want me to feel this. You don't want me to engage with this. Thank you. I see you." 

 There's [00:27:00] an elder that I've done a lot of work with his name is Basil Braveheart. He's an Oglala Lakota elder. I'm going to read a quote from him right here. "Forgiveness is taking ownership of your shadow and willingly seeing what you don't want to see." 

When I willingly see that wall and go, "Oh yeah, there I am being guarded again and obtuse again and resistant again." then it starts to lose the power over you. And then to forgive and say, there's a reason I have that wall. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Yes.

Hilary Giovale: Because it hasn't felt safe until now.

Emily Race-Newmark: Can you speak more to that lack of safety feeling?

Hilary Giovale: Yeah, like I can share a story about that. 

I took some Irish music song classes with a woman in Ireland and she told us that, she has a lot of students that are part of the Irish diaspora that's spread all over the world after the potato famine who are now coming back to learn these [00:28:00] ancestral songs in Irish and learn the old stories and the old ways.

I don't know how many generations it's been since that now, maybe five or six generations, that happened in the mid 1800s. So she said, "It hasn't been safe until now for our people to return to their heritage, to their language, to their culture, because that trauma was so great. 

It was so tremendous that we shut down. And the Irish assimilated into whiteness. We all just think of ourselves as white now, but we used to be despised." The lucky few who survived that famine and survived the ships that made it over here and survived the tenements, they were clinging to whatever they could in order to survive. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Mm. I'm just thinking about assimilation itself as a process and just connecting that thought to this perceived [00:29:00] sense of safety across many different cultures.

Hilary Giovale: Yeah. And we've been safe for a long time now. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Right. 

Hilary Giovale: Right? But sometimes it doesn't feel that way. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Totally. 

Hilary Giovale: It's easy to get connected to that worry or that fear, I think, and forget that it's really okay now. We're strong enough now and we can do it. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Right. Right. How might we in your vision be in relationship with our own ancestral pathways? What does that look like? 

Hilary Giovale: Oh yeah. This is one of my most favorite topics.

 One thing is to build an ancestor altar. It can be very simple. You can follow the directions in Jambalaya by Yeye Teish, if you want. Right now, I put a cloth down, handle, bowl of water. I don't use any photographs. But I call on the ancestors from a long time ago. 

The ones that left the paintings in the caves and the stone art and carvings [00:30:00] on the rocks and things like that. Those artifacts that remain, they indicate that it was a time before patriarchy. You know what I mean? Maybe even a time before war, like a very long time ago. 

A time of relationship and time of being indigenous. 

I also keep track of all of my dreams. I keep a journal by my bed and write down everything that happens. And that is an incredible practice because what I've seen over time is that the dreams are communications from the ancestors a lot of times. They're showing symbols and animals and storylines and they're showing memory.

I've also done a bunch of reading, and I've got a lot of sources that are on my website that I have found to be helpful, but It's not like reading with a linear mind. It's like [00:31:00] reading with a very soft, open mind and an intuitive mind to pick up on what is resonant here. 

I have a number of books that I just adore because they, this sounds funny, but I adore them because they put me to sleep because I read like a page or two and the ancestral memory is, it starts stirring and it makes me very sleepy. And it makes me feel very peaceful and then I just go to sleep.

Emily Race-Newmark: Can I just pause there? It almost feels like you're being called into this space, it's the in between, the space that's between now and that ancestral world. Is that like accurate to say? 

Hilary Giovale: Yeah, I think so. It's a very in between space and there's something magical about it. And for me, that sensation of ancestral memory, deep time memory, that tells me like, on a cellular level, this concept of [00:32:00] whiteness that got engineered and written into law, is not actually who you are.

Emily Race-Newmark: Mmm. 

Hilary Giovale: On one hand, it is because that's how I physically, and I certainly benefit every possible privilege of whiteness. And on the other hand, at the same time, paradoxically, that's not who I am. 

Emily Race-Newmark: You've spoken about your Irish ancestors and the traumatic ties. I can see almost a parallel to what colonization actually did here in Turtle Island. 

There's this stripping away of what's true and of the cultural memory. But then what about on the other side of your family line? The colonizers? You said they came from Scotland. How are you in relationship with that side? And is there also indigenous roots there that you've discovered? 

Hilary Giovale: Oh, yeah. Mm hmm. It's true there. I learned this summer that King James in 1616 outlawed the Gaelic language in Scotland of the Scottish Highlanders. And that's my people. I have Scottish Highlanders [00:33:00] on both sides of my family. So he outlawed the language. He sent the sons of the chieftains away to boarding school in England where they were required to learn English and they were forcibly assimilated into anglophone culture. 

And then later on, people were actually required to pay to have English only schools in their communities. That happened in 1616. My ancestral discovery journey began in 2016. That's 400 years. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Wow. 

Hilary Giovale: I didn't even know that my people once spoke Gaelic. I didn't know that they were shamed. They were called barbarians and they were thought to be dirty and uncivilized and not even worth human compassion. They were pushed off their land, their land was taken. When I see this now, I'm like, "Oh, this is a play book." 

Emily Race-Newmark: Totally.

Hilary Giovale: [00:34:00] So that's been very healing for me to recognize we weren't always just perpetrators.

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, I guess what I'm processing right now, is that contradiction that can exist within us. And it's around us. It's almost like the vision really is about being able to hold all of these seemingly contrasting pieces and to maybe just hold space for the fact that they actually are related.

Hilary Giovale: Yeah. that's so true. 

Emily Race-Newmark: You may not be able to answer this, but I'm just naturally curious. It's not like we can all return to where we originally came from because now so many of us come from so many different places. But what's then the vision for how we coexist in the United States on Turtle Island. What does that look like? 

Hilary Giovale: Yeah. Oh my gosh. The vision that's been developing for me is learning how to belong.

Emily Race-Newmark: Hmm.

Hilary Giovale: In my relationships with native people here, they don't want us to leave. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Hmm. 

Hilary Giovale: That's not the ask. Some do. Some do. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Right. Right. 

Hilary Giovale: The circles that I'm in, [00:35:00] that hasn't been the ask. The ask has been: learn how to belong, learn how to become a good relative, learn how to be in reciprocity, learn how to be the right-size human-being, not too big, not too little. Learn how to share. That's what's being asked for that I hear. Again, I'm overwhelmed by the grace of that because that's a very unlikely conclusion to this whole project that's happened. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Right.

Hilary Giovale: I've heard it over and over. The trust and the grace and the forgiveness that's been shown to me makes me want to step up to that and say, "Yes."

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. I mean, you're speaking to that theme that I keep hearing around, what moves within us that moves us forward into that action and I'm so interested in that. You said it's going to look different for everyone, but what's an invitation for how we find what is speaking to us to move into change? 

Hilary Giovale: For me, I received a teaching [00:36:00] from a Tewa elder named Kathy Sanchez with Tewa Women United, she taught me that all change happens from the inside out. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Mm. 

Hilary Giovale: She taught me to speak to the water, to bless myself with water. The water holds the memory of all of our ancestors. So listen. Listen for what they're saying to you. And I found that to be true. We're not going to do it up here. You know? It's not a research project. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. 

Hilary Giovale: It's allowing ourselves to be moved in a way that is connected, that's grounded, and that honors all the generations before. 

You can't do this by yourself. I ask my ancestors for help all the time. 

We've got to learn a different way, different methodologies. And I'm sure there are many more than the ones that I've said.

Emily Race-Newmark: When you mentioned connecting to the water, connecting to the earth, it's like [00:37:00] we can listen from any place. We could listen to what's going on on the internet and in the news feeds. But like where you're really being intentional about like, who are we listening to? What are we listening to? Where are we listening from? Those kinds of things I'm hearing from you.

Hilary Giovale: Yeah, that's true. 

Emily Race-Newmark: So as we start to close out here, I'd love to just have you touch on what we might expect from your book coming out, Becoming a Good Relative. What are some ways that book might serve as a resource or we could interact with it?

Hilary Giovale: Everything that I've been sharing today ties back to that book and it just has more stories and more examples and also has a lot of practical solutions for how to do things. And all of the income that I receive from that book is going back to reparations. 

Even buying a copy of that book can be a reparative action because I'm not going to receive any income from it. My, my prayer is that it can help contribute to our healing, you know? 

Emily Race-Newmark: Is there a specific group that you're working with ?

Hilary Giovale: I am going to give all the income I receive to the [00:38:00] Decolonizing Wealth Project. And I'm going to share that information with them for accountability. Because we've all seen like the greenwashing that happens and all the trying to look good. 

Emily Race-Newmark: I feel that. So thank you so much. I can't wait to receive a copy of that book and to dive into it myself. 

 I know you offered so many different entry points for people, but let's explicitly look at if folks were to pause this podcast right now and take an action, what would that be?

Hilary Giovale: My request would be to go find a land tax program and give monthly to land tax. Even if there isn't one where you live, there are a bunch all over the country, and I have a collection of them on my website. There's also one I know of in Canada. Just start your monthly donation right now. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Tell us more about what that does or how that would contribute.

Hilary Giovale: Land tax programs are, they're all set up a little bit differently, but the basic idea is that [00:39:00] you are paying rent to live where you live, or you're supporting that in another place if you don't live there. You're paying rent to the indigenous community, and you're acknowledging that they're the original stewards of the land, and you're acting in reciprocity. You are becoming part of the ecosystem and not just an invasive species. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Yes, very visceral. Thank you. Yeah, I love that that exists and it feels like such an easy way to start embodying what that looks like to be in a reciprocal relationship. 

Hilary Giovale: Yeah. 

Emily Race-Newmark: Well, Hillary, I cannot thank you enough again for just your vulnerability, your authenticity, the stories that you've shared for us to get this visceral sense that I was certainly was left with in terms of what could be possible. And what we've inherited, and what we're left with right now to be working with and transforming. 

So thank you for who you're being, the model that you are, and the ways that you continue to learn. 

Hilary Giovale: Thank you, Emily, for who you're being and how you're learning and [00:40:00] all that you're doing and all the conversations you're starting and the skillful way that you facilitate and your amazing questions. Thank you.

Emily Race-Newmark: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to stay connected with Hilary, you can go visit her website at goodrelative.com or follow her on Instagram @HilaryGiovaleAuthor. Both of these are linked over in the show notes at thisishowwecare.com. 

You can also check out a link to either pre-order or order, depending on when you listen to this, a copy of Hillary's book "Becoming A Good Relative". 

And while you're at our website, please consider signing up for our newsletter to receive weekly prompts and practices from each of our guests with the intention of bringing deeper reflection and playful experimentation of these ideas into your life.

If you think the messages from this conversation will speak to someone that you care about, please share this episode with them. This is just one of the many ways that you can help us co create a world of embodied collective care.

This episode was produced by me, Emily Race, co produced by Kimberly [00:41:00] Anne, with final editing by Andrew Salamone, and music by Eric Weisberg.