Dreams as a Way of Life - Becoming a Good Relative with author Hilary Giovale

Our Trauma Culture has spread across the globe with terrifying speed and ghastly efficiency.  But the tide is turning and people of good heart in many nations are beginning to understand that what we need now is a move towards a 21st Century Initiation Culture. The language is often different, but at heart, this is where we need to go.

Our guest this week, Hilary Giovale, is a mother, writer, facilitator and community organiser who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.  As an active reparationist, she seeks to follow Indigenous and Black leadership in support of human rights, environmental justice, and equitable futures.  She is the author of the award-winning book Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair.

Descended from the Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and Indigenous peoples of Ancient Europe, she is a ninth-generation American settler.  For most of her life these origins were obscured by whiteness.  After learning more about her ancestors’ history, Hilary began emerging from a fog of amnesia, denial, and fragmentation.  For the first time, she could see a painful reality: her family’s occupation of this land has harmed Indigenous and African peoples, cultures, lands, and lifeways.  This realisation changed her life and part of this change was writing this moving, deeply important book.  Supported by local First Peoples, she undertook four years of fasting ceremonies, and began to engage differently, more deeply and with a new, raw authenticity with those whose ancestors had been most damaged by the Trauma Culture's colonisation of the land.

Her book is essential reading for anyone in white culture, wherever we live in the world. It's a raw, unflinching step into discomfort, but it's also a deeply moving memoir of Hilary's journey inward, to dreams, to genuine visionary connection with the land, to the power of heartfelt apology to heal at least some of the generational horror of the Trauma Culture. 

So, you'll definitely want to read this. If you're in North America, you can get hard copies easily. If you're elsewhere, you may only be able to get an e-book, but either way, Hilary returns all income she receives from book sales to Decolonizing Wealth Project and Jubilee Justice.  

Hilary's website: https://www.goodrelative.com
Becoming a Good Relative https://www.goodrelative.com/book
E-book here: on Barnes and Noble  and on Kobo

Guide to Making a Personal Reparations Plan https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G-ufl_8ixdquMGrDziiBUBAANYKXrN7eHtjiE5aKTfw/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.1kvofvfw6wns


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Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose - and now it's collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy?

What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?

What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life - so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?

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